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1973 Arab-Israeli War

2026-09-12T16:43:30Z

AngTeh: 1973 Arab-Israeli War page created

{{Infobox military conflict|conflict=1973 Arab-Israeli War|date=6 October 1973 – 25 October 1973 2 weeks and 5 days)|result=Complicated|place=[[Africa]], the Middle East|territory=• Egyptian forces liberate 1200 sq km of territory around the East of the Sinai Peninsula • Israeli forces occupy 1600 sq km west of the Suez Canal and 500 sq km of the Syrian Bashan region of the Golan Heights|image=|image_size=}}

Library:Localizing Power in Post Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asian Perspective

2026-08-04T14:42:55Z

AngTeh:

{{Library work|title=Localizing Power in Post Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asian Perspective|image=Localizing_power.jpg|thumb]]|author=Vedi R. Hadiz|publisher=Standford University Press|published_date=January, 26, 2010|type=Book|source=Anna's Archive|pdf=https://annas-archive.gl/md5/1f21e343eb53857f29b21cc7c9f60581}}

== Introduction ==

=== Localization and Globalization ===
Two simultaneously occurring processes—economic globalisation on the one hand, and the localisation of power on the other—feature prominently today in debates about development issues (Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist 2004: 2). The first, not surprisingly, focuses predominantly on pressures for an ever-closer integration of national economies with global markets; the other is about rising demands within the geo-bodies of nation-states for increased local autonomy in the socio-political, economic and cultural fields in the face of the same economic globalising impulses. These debates are also reflective of real tensions and contradictions that have emerged in the actual experiences of simultaneously localising and globalising societies—of the kind that this book is concerned with especially in relation to post-authoritarian Indonesia.

It is suggested here that all the profound social, political and cultural transformations ultimately intertwined with the processes of economic globalisation have only come to reinforce one seemingly paradoxical point: issues of local power matter greatly in a globalised world (see Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist 2004). Not in the least, they matter in forging and mediating the conditions under which economic globalisation is experienced and made sense of by citizenries at sub-national levels of governance. Conversely, they also help in shaping local and national responses to seemingly relentless structural pressures that have to do with integration into the world economy, which may vary from embracement to resistance. As Kerkvliet and Mojares put it (1991: 11), 'Local communities are not only "affected" by broad national and world developments, they are continually being reconstituted by them.' But it is not a simple, one way process: 'extralocal systems' are unavoidably defined, too, 'through the overall configuration of local realities'. It is contended here that such 'local realities' cannot be understood in the majority of cases without taking into account the fundamental nature of concrete and tangible contests over power and resources. These can involve local, national and even international-based social forces and interests.

Thus contests over local power—which may take place through a range of vehicles and whose variety of expressions may be deeply influenced by what is locally available materially, culturally and ideologically—have taken on a new significance as the social transformations associated with capitalist development and integration into the world economy proceed. The dynamics of local power are understood, however, in radically dissimilar ways by different scholars, depending on their theoretical standpoints, political agendas and social values. The intellectually predominant neo-liberal view on what is often referred to rather expediently as the 'local/global nexus' is, not surprisingly, most powerfully articulated by international development organisations like the World Bank, along with most governments of the advanced, industrialised North, and the international media. It is well-encapsulated, too, in a range of scholarly works, such as the 'Democracy and Local Governance Research Program' undertaken in the late 1990s by the University of Pennsylvania; this study was carried out on the basis of a 'grand hypothesis' that 'globalization would give impetus to local democratic institutions, values, and practices'. It was also undertaken in the belief that globalisation invariably 'expands alternatives' and increases 'freedom of choice to entrapped locals', and 'stimulates local democratization' (Teune 2004).

It is useful to note, however, that growing interest in 'the local' has grown partly as doubts have surfaced about the social, political and economic ramifications of the march of economic globalisation. Thus the simultaneous and interconnected processes of globalisation and localisation can be associated with the rise of good governance, or local entrepreneurial spirit and innovation on the one hand; but also to such things as local corruption or abuse of power, xenophobia and ethnic or religious violence, on the other. Grindle (2007: 9) therefore cautiously observes that the expectations associated with 'going local' have had to be modified downward, though the 'promise of good governance and democracy' initially attached to it has not been abandoned.

=== Local Politics as Arenas of Contestation ===
The book is premised on the contradiction-laden relationship between pressures for economic globalisation and the continuing vitality of the local and how this is expressed in the vagaries of concrete contests over power. In important respects it follows on the observations of authors like Boone, who suggests that economic deregulation and open market policies have eroded central state authority, but without 'unleashing market-determined policies of social interdependence and resource allocation as neo-liberal reformers had hoped' (n.d.: 4). Instead, what have been activated in the Sub-Saharan African case she examined are complex, and often brutal, struggles to redefine territorial jurisdictions, relations between the centre and the periphery, and the nature of the state at the local level.

In these and other contexts, a crucial task is often to understand how predatory systems of power remain resilient in the face of international pressures for market-facilitating 'good governance'. The answer to the puzzle, it is argued here, will frequently lie in the fact that entrenched local predatory interests have been able to usurp the agenda of good governance reforms, including that of decentralisation, to sustain their social and political dominance. From this point of view, the advance of local democratic politics does not necessarily constitute any direct threat to the position of assorted local oligarchs, strongmen and notables; neither are they always supportive of 'rationally' organised free markets.

Local power is thus but another arena of contestation among a range of interests concerned with the forging of economic and political regimes that would govern the way wealth and power are distributed, just as nation-states and the world at large are sites of such contestations.1 What is important in any empirical analysis is identifying the kind of social forces and interests that actually affect the dynamics of power at the local level. Obviously one cannot assume the homogeneity of interests among state, market or civil society actors in any context. One needs to concretely examine what kind of interests, ascendant, or subordinated, are involved or marginalised in actual contests over power. This entails an examination of prevailing 'political topographies', to borrow a phrase used by Boone (2003),2 or historically specific constellations of power and interest.

It is notable that much of the literature on local power in Southeast Asia has focussed on the phenomena of 'local strongmen', corrupt local machineries of power, or the resilience of pockets of authoritarianism (e.g. Sidel 1999). The Indonesian case is particularly intriguing because the heavily centralised authoritarianism of the New Order actually left little room for the emergence of relatively autonomous local strongmen frequently associated in the region with the experiences of Thailand or the Philippines (Sidel 2004).3 Nevertheless, it is argued here too that institutional reforms pertaining to the localisation of power, inspired by neo-liberal notions of 'good governance', have ironically assisted in 'clearing the way' for the kind of social and political milieu for their emergence and consolidation, rather than their pre-emption or eradication.

From a broader regional perspective, a major question that needs to be examined is why the localisation of power in Indonesia—like in Thailand and the Philippines—has failed to usher in more fundamental transformations in the prevailing relations of power that tend to be dominated still by long-entrenched predatory interests. In all of these cases, the localisation of power—through much lauded decentralisation policy—has notably taken place under distinctly post-authoritarian conditions.4

=== Neo-Liberalism and the Reconfiguration of the State ===
It has to be stated clearly at this juncture that the book diverges greatly from much of the neo-liberal/neo-institutionalist inspired work on decentralisation (see the discussion in Chapter 1) as the institutional expression of the localisation of power. It has to be noted that neo-liberals and neo-institutionalists, whether as consultants or academics, tend to see a close relationship between receptivity to global free markets and democratic governance, and more lately, decentralisation. Simonsen argues, for example, that 'Failure of economic performance within an increasingly globalised economy can be considered the most general underlying cause behind the demise of authoritarian regimes around 1989' (Simonsen 1999: 399). The distinguished works of Crook and Manor (1998) and Manor (1999)—as well as innumerable reports and policy papers produced by an array of international development organisations and policy think tanks—then attempt to make the link between market rationality, democratic governance and decentralisation.

The development of local village elections in China, therefore, has been viewed in relation to the new economic giant's massive experiment with market and local governance reforms (see Craner 2004; IRI n.d.), even if a highly autocratic Communist Party still rules unchallenged and deeply suspicious of the democratic aspirations of domestic groups of 'dissidents'. If there is irony involved here, it does not pre-occupy those who emphasise the 'market preserving' character of Chinese decentralisation. Such scholars place importance on how a 'federal'-like institutional framework of governance has emerged to support the growth of market forces, however, without explaining the persisting lack of democracy accompanying the shift to markets (e.g. Montinolla, Qian and Weingast 1995; Qian and Weingast 1996; Singh 2007). The ambivalent nature of the Chinese experience has led critics to stress how the localisation of power in globalising China has produced corrupt local governments (e.g. Gong 2006), with little accountability to the governed in the context of a rigid one-party system (Lin, Tao and Liu 2006: 322).

There has been less ambiguity in some treatments of other cases that have involved a similar shift to the market. The World Bank, for example, notes that the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia introduced its peoples to new opportunities generated by the combination of market capitalism and electoral democracy. It has also lauded the experience of administrative and fiscal decentralisation—as the accompaniment to electoral democracy—in these societies.5 Significantly, decentralised governance has been established as part of a broader and more fundamental project of rolling back the pervasive role of inefficient central states for the sake of the growth of healthy market economies. This project constitutes an exercise in defining the parameters of a desired state role in facilitating the operations of the market. The economist Bardhan, for example, notes that 'free-market economists tend to emphasize the benefits of reducing the power of the overextended or predatory state.' According to Bardhan, the occurrence of 'market failure' has led proponents of free markets to turn 'for their resolution to the government at the local level, where the transaction costs are relatively low and the information problems that can contribute to central government failures are less acute' (2002: 186). The assumption being made is that local states are inclined to be more receptive and flexible when it comes to the task of facilitating market operations (Montinolla, Qian and Weingast 1995; Qian and Weingast 1996).

Economic globalisation, therefore, does not signal the demise of sovereign states and of politics, even for market-oriented neo-liberals. Instead, it means a transformation of the nature and functions of state power. This is because under the pressure of global markets, 'many states are undergoing transformations toward de-statisation (that is, reduced state authority in favour of market liberalisation) and toward de-nationalisation (that is, the scalar reconfiguration of state power in favour of regionalisation and localisation)'. The consequence is that 'political authority is becoming increasingly diffused among state, market and civil society actors at local, national, regional and global scales' (Harris, Stokke and Tornquist 2004: 2). The degree to which such pressures have actually resulted in these transformations, of course, must be examined empirically from case to case.

It is well known that organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have acted as the main advocates of a particular view of decentralisation and 'good governance' that has become influential in the developing world. Their view highlights how integration in the global economy imposes market forces that pressure local governments to behave responsively as well as efficiently in the delivery of a range of services. The effect of their influence is to 'create and sustain political and discursive frames for thinking and acting, frames that are strongly influenced by a technocratic and apolitical approach that is itself rooted in the most powerful global institution of all—the market (Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist 2004: 2–3). As we shall see, this creates problems in terms of deciphering the sorts of social outcomes produced by the decentralisation experiences in post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies like Indonesia.

=== Odd Anti–Neo-Liberal Alliances? ===
However, the allegedly unstoppable rise of global markets has been understood as endangering the autonomy of local communities by those who challenge the neo-liberal view (see Escobar 1995; Hines 2000). Especially disadvantaged according to such dissenters are the urban and rural poor, as well as marginalised groups such as ethnic religious minorities, and 'indigenous peoples'. Abers, for example, notes the view that globalisation can kill off the possibility of genuine democracy. Thus, mobilising the resources of local communities against the forces of encroaching market capitalism (see Abers 2000) is the only way of saving democracy from globalisation. In a nutshell, while neo-liberals see globalisation as generating new vitality and entrepreneurship in local communities, their populist opponents effectively see globalisation as a great threat both to local cultural diversity (see Abdullah 2005) and local capacities that tend to get subordinated to the logic of the global market (Hines 2000). They also see the incursions of global capitalism, more often than not, as detrimental to the welfare of the poor in local communities; for example, they will lament the environmental degradation caused by the intrusion of capitalist enterprise or the propensity of global markets to destroy local community self-reliance (see Govan 1997; Maffi and Woodley 2005).

For localist populists, who are often represented in activist communities, neo-liberal economic globalisation is inherently anti-democratic in nature. As one observer (in the neo-liberal camp) writes in summarising their viewpoint: 'Among the many evils' perceived in globalisation 'is the suspension or blockage of local democratic processes in deference to more encompassing and generally more powerful systems, whether of a region, a state, transnational regions or the world as a system'. Thus, globalisation's successful inroads into local communities frequently 'by-pass local institutions, including democratic ones', and tend to 'nurture anti-democratic and corrupt local institutions and practices' (Teune 2004).

It is important to point out that localist populism of any kind is not a 'free floating idea'; its bearers can range from critical non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the advocates of state development programmes. The 'guiding principle', however, is almost always the stated desirability of rooting the development process in 'people's own practices'. Its claims to being participatory are thus embedded in the already existing cultural reference points of local communities (Connors 2001: 3). Moreover, localist populism is not necessarily anti-capitalist in nature, though its social agents are typically suspicious of globalisation's consequences on local productive capacities. Instead it is more frequently about the innate morality of protecting local agriculture and business from the encroachment of the forces of international capital (Connors 2001: 4).

From this last observation, another important point can be made: localist populism can take forms that merge readily with the official, statist-nationalisms of much of the developing world's most well-known leaders. Thus, prominent figures in Asia, such as former prime ministers Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia or Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand, can make strident appeals for the protection of local cultures—and simultaneously, domestic capitalist forces—while selectively engaging with the most salient actors of the global capitalist order. It is therefore possible to imagine newly ascendant local politicos in post-authoritarian Indonesia adopting a similar position—in relation to extra-local actors—especially if it serves their material interests.

Given the above observation, it is notable that localist populists have been supported intellectually by a hotchpotch of former Leftists, as well as academic post-structuralists and post-modernists, who are equally suspicious of the neo-liberal globalisation project (see Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist 2004: 1). These have largely dismissed grand historical narratives and, consequently, political contestation on grand scales. Having been let down by History, their hopes and aspirations are pinned on the revitalisation of democratic, humane impulses within members of local communities and citizenries (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe 1985). For them, meaningful politics are direct, local and subaltern (Chatterjee 1993). The latter also tend to be critical of the culturally homogenising threat posed by economic neo-globalisation. Thus local communitarianisms believed to be underpinned by local 'knowledge' systems (as understood by Geertz 1983)—as well as values, norms, beliefs and lifestyles (Harvey 2000: 84)—are thought to be under threat by 'development' (Diawara 2000). In effect, these threatened cultures and ways of life signal some sort of benevolent 'other' possibility—representing mankind's last hope of escape from the ravages of the impersonal and homogenising forces of capitalism on a global scale. In the concrete struggles over the localisation of power in Southeast Asia, such views are frequently found among representatives of the NGO community (Hewison 2000).

The irony, of course, is that the notion partly rests on an atavistic call to restore old religious or cultural values that can serve as the basis for various kinds of narrow ethno-religious solidarities and xenophobic nationalisms. Like notions associated with populism in general, such atavism easily falls into the hands of politically conservative, even reactionary, social forces that the aforementioned critics of the neo-liberal globalisation project would be averse to support. While atavism represents uneasiness toward the consequences of the march of global capitalism on the diversity and richness of the human experience, its deployment by conservatives may result in outcomes that are much less meaningful for emancipatory struggles imagined by those dissenting against the neo-liberal project. Socially and politically conservative forces in the United States, for example, that are suspicious of interventionist big states as well as the 'anarchic' tendencies unleashed by the free market, will find commonalities with intellectual and political positions that uphold the virtues of 'traditional' or 'Christian' values (see Harvey 2000: 70). In Indonesia and Southeast Asia—the parts of the world that this book is most concerned with—localism and atavism have certainly been valuable weapons for some of the most distinctly un-progressive of social forces—even if they do not necessarily find expression in overtly post-modernist discourse. In Thailand, for example, Pasuk's (2004a) otherwise sympathetic treatment reveal how inward-looking notions of 'Buddhist economics', emphasising local community, are conceptually linked to an idealised notion of village life that appears to be equally attractive to NGO activists, monks, the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the King. In Indonesia, particularly conservative and rigid interpretations of Islam have been utilised by a range of forces since the advent of democratisation in 1998 to provide ideological legitimacy to their fight for power (e.g. Irianto 2006: 20).

An intriguing development, therefore, as Harriss, Stokke, and Tornquist (2004: 1) rightly observe, relates to the importance now placed on local power by those espousing a wide variety of social and political agendas. Neo-liberals, and assorted populists and Leftist critics of globalisation, who often fiercely disagree on issues such as the social effects of globalisation and marketisation, have lately coalesced around the virtues of local grassroots politics. There is consensus that local initiatives are especially crucial for social change in a 'positive' direction, however 'positive' is to be defined. Likewise, Bardhan notes the oddity of free marketeers joining with 'a diverse array of social thinkers: post-modernists, multicultural advocates, grassroots environmental activists and supporters of the cause of indigenous peoples and technologies' in espousing the cause of strengthening local-level governance. According to Bardhan, though the latter 'are usually both anti-market and anti-centralized state', they 'energetically support assignment of control to local selfgoverning communities' (Bardhan 2002: 186), much like mainstream economists who view central states as a cumbersome obstacle to local initiative and development.

It is, therefore, not surprising that in Indonesia, as well as Southeast Asia more broadly (Ungpakorn 2003a: 299; also see George 1998), many largely populist NGO activists have been drawn into the World Bank-sponsored discourse on 'good governance', which has come to emphasise local community and civil society participation in development (World Bank 2000). This has occurred despite their usual hostility toward many other facets of the neo-liberal economic globalisation agenda, including those of privatisation and marketisation (see Culla 2006). For their part, organisations like the World Bank realise that support from NGOs could be useful in terms of garnering broader public acceptance of market reforms. The World Bank (2003a: 3) now highlights, for instance, that civil society organisations, including NGOs, 'are important actors in building a necessary social consensus for economic reforms and long-term development, in promoting effective governance by fostering transparency and accountability of public institutions'.

=== Indonesia and the Southeast Asian Experience ===
The position taken in this book—that of 'localisation as an arena of contestation'—involves a fundamental critique of the sort of convergence described above, which is developed in dealing with the main case study of post-authoritarian Indonesia, in comparative Southeast Asian perspective. It undertakes this critique by concretely examining the constellations of social interest that have presided over the localisation of power, especially in the Indonesian regions of North Sumatra and East Java. As Rodan, Hewison and Robison (2006: 7) point out, existing regimes anywhere 'cannot be dismantled at will because they embody a specific arrangement of economic, social, and political power.' Furthermore, 'Institutions that might appear dysfunctional for growth and investment often persist because elites are prepared to sacrifice efficiency where their social and political ascendancy is threatened'. Importantly, however, institutional reforms, including those pertaining to decentralisation and democratisation, may be advanced in such a way that already dominant forces might 'further their control or weaken their opponents in broad struggles over social, political, and economic ascendancy'.

As in other societies, the localisation of power has been expressed institutionally in Indonesia through the renewed salience of contests over decentralisation policy. After the fall of the late dictator Soeharto in 1998, Indonesia implemented a decentralisation programme that has been quite dramatic in many ways. Inheriting its far-flung borders from the Netherlands East Indies, this archipelagic country has struck many observers as being remarkable because it has remained intact despite an incredible diversity of cultures, religions, ethnicities, economies and geographies (see, for example, Bourchier and Hadiz 2003: 255). However, the combination of the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997–98, political instability, regional demands for autonomy or even independence, and the perceived rise of 'failed states' globally brought concerns about the long-term viability of the Indonesian nation-state as we now know it (Gelbard 2001). Such concerns have clearly been exacerbated by the rise of religious and other forms of 'communal' violence in post-authoritarian Indonesia (see van Klinken 2007; also see Sidel 2006). Not surprisingly, 'local autonomy' has been linked in Indonesia to issues pertaining to the revival of local traditions and customs (see Davidson and Henley 2007), which is reflective of the potency of mobilisations based on local cultural identities in spite of notions about the homogenising effects of globalisation.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the Indonesian case has been simultaneously placed at the heart of international policy and academic debates on both decentralisation and democratisation. The Indonesian case is also particularly instructive because it so readily displays the primacy of constellations of power and interest vis-à-vis institutional crafting in determining how institutions actually work at the local level in post-authoritarian situations—a theoretical point that is argued throughout this book. The Indonesian experience is especially valuable given the sharp contrast between the heavily centralised and authoritarian New Order and the highly decentralised and diffuse democracy that has replaced it.

Analysing the Indonesian case is therefore particularly useful because in spite of the caution of Grindle mentioned above, Bardhan (2002: 185) remains essentially right when he announces that 'All around the world in matters of governance decentralization is the rage'. Furthermore, according to Bardhan and Mookherjee (2006: 1): 'The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a significant rise in the scope of local democracy throughout the developing world, with increasing devolution of political, economic, and administrative authority to local governments. Along with privation and deregulation, this shift represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The phenomenon is geographically spread, occurring simultaneously in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The earliest changes were initiated in the 1970s, picked up momentum in the 1980s, and accelerated after 1990.'

But what is really the appeal of decentralisation, especially for the intellectually dominant proponents of the neo-liberal and technocratic view of statecraft? To put it succinctly at this juncture, the centralised state 'has lost a great deal of legitimacy', and decentralization is believed to promise a range of benefits as 'a way of reducing the role of the state in general, by fragmenting central authority and introducing more intergovernmental competition and checks and balances'. As a considerable bonus, 'In a world of rampant ethnic conflicts and separatist movements, decentralization is also regarded as a way of diffusing social and political tensions and ensuring local cultural and political autonomy' (Bardhan 2002: 185).

But the relationship between decentralisation, democracy and transparent and accountable governance is understood here as being essentially problematic and contentious. In the case of Indonesia, it will be shown here that the rise of local politics has been instrumental in—and become part of—the emergence and consolidation of newly decentralised and predatory networks of patronage that have become politically ascendant after the fall of Soeharto. These have continued to have a vested interest in resisting many institutional reforms or have usurped them in a number of creative ways. From this standpoint, this book also represents an attempt to explain the processes through which power has been reorganised in post-authoritarian Indonesia through the lens of local politics.

It should be added that there have now been a few edited collections produced that deal with the politics of the local in Indonesia (e.g. Aspinall and Fealy 2003; Kingsbury and Aveling 2003; Erb, Sulistiyanto and Faucher 2005; Schulte-Nordholt and van Klinken 2007). But this is a relatively new development because the particularly centralised nature of power during Soeharto's New Order meant that only rare studies of local power were previously ever undertaken. The few exceptions included those by Antlov (1995), Schiller (1996) and Malley (1999). Given this relative dearth, the study of post-authoritarian Indonesia will benefit from the insights provided by the experience of the Philippines or Thailand, where the study of local power is far better developed, partly because the Cold War-era authoritarian state was arguably never as successfully centralised as in Indonesia.6

It is for this reason that the discussion on the localisation of power in Indonesia is continually interspersed in this book with discussion of other cases of post-authoritarian decentralisation. The Indonesian case is far from unique in terms of its 'unintended consequences'—to borrow a well-known term from Weberian sociology. Across the world, decentralisation has produced 'unanticipated problems' (Grindle 2007: 2), perhaps especially for the technocrats, domestic or international, whose main task is to craft policy frameworks. In Southeast Asia, the cases of post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines provide some particularly useful points that help decipher the Indonesian situation due to certain commonalities in the prior experience of authoritarianisms born in the Cold War era. Of course, these two cases are not meant to have a 'status' within the book that is equal to that of Indonesia. There is no full-fledged analysis of Indonesia's neighbouring Southeast Asian democracies being offered here. However, key developments in the Philippines and Thailand, as well as in such places as Russia and China, will be cited to help shed light on such fundamental issues as the politics of institution-building, power and contestation, and on the determinants of societal trajectories.

=== Structure of the Book ===
Chapter 1 provides a critical analysis of dominant (economics-inspired) neo-institutionalist and neo-liberal perspectives on decentralisation, development and democracy. These perspectives essentially view the relationship as a mutually reinforcing process that is sustained by the free market. They typically highlight the importance of designing the 'correct' institutional frameworks to govern state, society and economy; and they have lately given much weight to Putnamian notions of social capital. These perspectives fail to seriously address conflict; they treat it mainly as a managerialist problem of insulating good policy-making from certain kinds of societal pressure. The chapter offers a contrasting position that highlights the importance of constellations of power and of social conflict in determining the way that institutions, including that of the state, actually work.

Chapter 2 extends the contrasting position by relating it to the role and composition of state and local elites in determining societal trajectories, especially in connection with experiences of democratisation in Southeast Asia. In particular, the chapter reassesses modernisation approaches in their myriad more 'classical' and contemporary forms to the question of technocratic design of social change. But this is no perfunctory revisit of old theories. The suggestion being made is that much of the social thinking that has emerged in relation to decentralisation constitutes a rebirth of modernisation theory assumptions about development, politics and technocracy. It then juxtaposes this sort of thinking to that which latches on to the role of predatory 'local strongmen' or 'oligarchies' in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia. In the process, the chapter provides the background for a concern that is pursued in later chapters: local elite responses/adaptations of/resistance to the allegedly homogenising effects of globalisation pressures.

Chapter 3 takes the book deeper into the complexities of the specific post-authoritarian Indonesian situation. It does so by examining the background of broader social and political changes since the demise of Soeharto's New Order in 1998 and then inserts into this context the actual contests over institutional reform. The chapter pays particular attention to debates about reforms pertaining to decentralisation and local governance in Indonesia in relation to those that have taken place in Thailand and the Philippines. In the process, the chapter expands the argument about the complex and often contradictory relationship between institutional reform design and concrete struggles over power at sub-national arenas of contestation.

Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the sociological background of Indonesia's newly ascendant local elites—particularly through case studies in North Sumatra and East Java. Chief among these are the former local apparatchik, and local entrepreneurs incubated within the New Order system of political patronage, as well as assorted goons and thugs who have managed to cast themselves as democratic actors. The chapter demonstrates how these have reinvented themselves as reformist local democrats, and pays particular attention to their appropriation of democratic institutions like political parties and parliaments. Comparisons with the social origins and bases of local elites in post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines are also presented to augment the view put forward about the primacy of constellations of power and interest over institutional frameworks in driving change.

The processes and mechanisms through which the social and political ascendance of local elites are secured and maintained in post-authoritarian Indonesia are more deeply examined in Chapter 5. In this chapter, the experiences of other post-authoritarian societies in Southeast Asia are shown to be particularly instructive. The focus of the chapter is on the vagaries of alliances and coalition-building in Indonesian local electoral politics, and the way in which localised networks of predatory power are now being developed through money politics, and to some extent, local instruments of coercion.

Chapter 6 presents an analysis of the modes of political inclusion and exclusion in post-authoritarian Indonesia, contrasting these at important junctures with other post-authoritarian Southeast Asian experiences. The chapter pays attention to the mechanics of electoral democracy at the local level as well as to the position of social groups that had been marginalised during the New Order. Chief among the groups to be examined in the context of the actual operations of local power is organised labour. In the process, the chapter raises crucial issues related to political participation and contestation, and the position of civil society in post-authoritarian situations. It also raises questions about the emergence of localised oligarchies.

The Conclusion offers observations that re-link the experiences of post-authoritarianism with the localisation of power. It also reviews the main arguments of the book as a whole in relation to the question of the entrenchment of distinctly localised forms of oligarchic power. The chapter offers speculations too on some of the possible implications of the outcomes of the localisation of power for particular kinds of integration with the global capitalist economy.

== Chapter 1: Decentralisation, Development and Democracy ==

=== Theoretical Issues and Debates ===
The main objective of this chapter is to examine the way in which the localisation of power has been understood in the contemporary literature on the developing world, especially as it pertains to Indonesia and other post-authoritarian Southeast Asian cases. The focus is particularly on the contradiction-laden relationship among decentralisation, economic development and democracy. As mentioned previously, decentralisation policy has been the institutional form in which the localisation of power has taken place (Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist 2004: 3).

This chapter questions why a particular kind of understanding, mainly associated with neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist schools of thought—and primarily originating from within the discipline of economics—has come to predominate in both the academic literature and that produced by international development agencies, while also appealing to many civil society organisations in the region.1

The intention is not to suggest a process by which developing societies merely swallow whole the framework of thinking predominantly advanced by technocrats perched in the offices of international development organisations. In fact, the agenda of neo-liberal governance reform, including the aspect of decentralisation can be appropriated by a range of local interests with little regard for upholding 'good governance' principles. These interests may even be strenuously opposed to the incursion of demands for accountability and transparency while fighting for greater local autonomy over a range of social, economic and political fields. At the same time, such interests seek to negotiate the terms of local engagement with the forces of economic globalisation, as the expansion of markets potentially produces new rent-seeking opportunities. Thus the neo-liberal reform agenda can morph into something completely different when the aspect of concrete political struggle is inserted into it.

=== Central Themes advancing decentralisation ===
In agreement with Bardhan and Mookherjee (2006), the World Bank has observed that decentralisation is 'a global and regional phenomenon', and that 'most developing and transitional countries have experimented with it to varying degrees' (World Bank n.d. a). Writing before the end of the twentieth century, Crook and Manor (1998: 83) specify in a highly influential work that 'more than sixty governments, mainly in developing countries' have experimented with decentralisation in some form since the mid-1980s. Observing Latin America in the late 1990s after a decade of decentralisation policy, Willis, Garman and Haggard (1999:7) noted that decentralisation has been 'championed' as the 'route to greater accountability and transparency in governance', as well as to other objectives like 'increased participation by ethnic minorities and social groups excluded under semidemocratic and authoritarian rule'. Writing on China, Montinola, Qian and Weingast (1995) argue that decentralisation protects pro-market reforms undertaken by local governments from central government intervention, and induces healthy economic competition within countries that leads to economic efficiency. Concomitantly, the link between decentralisation and corruption eradication is also often proposed.

Authors writing for the World Bank have put forward the case for decentralisation most confidently in relation to Asia. White and Smoke (2005: 1) thus declare:<blockquote>A fundamental transformation in the structure of government has been taking place across East Asia. Before 1990 most East Asian countries were highly centralized; today subnational governments have emerged as the fulcrum for much of the region's development . . . Though East Asia's decentralization has come later than in some other parts of the world, it is now here to stay.</blockquote>Since 2001, Indonesia too has been pursuing policies of decentralisation that have profoundly transformed the institutional framework of governance in a country that was ruled for more than three decades in a highly authoritarian and centralised fashion, to the extent that Indonesia's decentralisation approach has been described as a 'Big Bang' (World Bank 2003b; Bunte 2004). Thus, according to a document produced by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (2000:17), 'Indonesia is moving rapidly from years of tight central control to a far more decentralized and autonomous system of local government', which will help 'create the basis for national and local democratic governance' (USAID 2000: 17). Moreover, in 'opting for a decentralised model of government', Indonesia appeared to be sensibly 'following a global trend' (Turner and Podger 2003: 2), which was in any case 'well suited to the particular geography of Indonesia' (Turner and Podger 2003: 1; also see Bunte 2004: 379). The observation about Indonesia's geography is unsurprising given the sprawling, archipelagic form of the country, which is inhabited by hundreds of ethnic groups with distinct languages and customs.2

Geographical and ethno-linguistic factors notwithstanding, Indonesia's abrupt decentralisation turn would not have been possible without the fall from power of Soeharto in May 1998 and the consequent demise of the New Order. This occurred amidst a deep economic crisis that led to a harrowing political one—eventually leaving the entire institutional framework of the New Order largely unviable. The fall of Soeharto thus in many ways truly marked the beginning of a new chapter in the social and political history of Indonesia. This vast country—with over 220 million people of diverse ethnicity and belief systems, spread irregularly across an archipelago comprising some 17,000 islands—was to embark on a massive experiment in forging new, more democratic, transparent and participatory political and economic regimes. A cornerstone of the experiment was the much heralded programme of decentralisation that devolved considerable powers, resources and responsibilities to the local level.

The end of the Soeharto era therefore commenced an exciting, albeit short-lived, period of high expectation in Indonesia; this was in sharp contrast to the preceding long era of highly stifling, centralised and authoritarian rule. Some believed that decentralisation in particular would pave the way for a more genuine participatory form of democracy, especially if enough of the right kind of 'human capital' was produced to institute 'policies for the interests of the public' (Pratikno 2005: 33). Others saw great opportunities for the development of an empowering form of politics at the grassroots level (e.g. Antlov 2003a)—in spite of many structural and cultural impediments left over from the New Order—as communities in towns and villages re-learn the art of politics after decades of living in a starkly depoliticised environment. For the Indonesian bureaucrat-academic Ryaas Rasyid (2002), moreover, decentralisation was indisputably the natural extension of democratisation.

But a theme also running through the discussion on post-Soeharto Indonesia, especially during the early years, was of the possibility of national disintegration (Tadjoeddin, Suharyo and Mishra 2003;3 also see Berger and Aspinall 2001). This accounts partially for the rise of interest both within academia and international development organisations in Indonesian decentralisation. According to the World Bank-led Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI), decentralisation 'continues to be one of Indonesia's most significant reform initiatives' after the end of the New Order, and its successful implementation is 'crucial for Indonesia as a nation' (CGI 2003).

It should be recalled that following the fall of Soeharto in 1998, demands for greater local autonomy emerged from many parts of the Indonesian archipelago against a background of evidently rising violent ethnic or religious conflict, especially in such places as Maluku and parts of Kalimantan (e.g. Bertrand 2003; Kingsbury and Aveling 2003; van Klinken 2007). The fear commonly expressed was of Acehnese or Papuan secession, no doubt sparked in part by the successful attainment of independence by East Timor in 1999 after years of insurgency. In both natural resource-rich Aceh and Papua, the Indonesian military had also been long embroiled in armed conflict with local pro-independence forces. Other natural resource-rich provinces such as Riau soon also clamoured for greater local autonomy. It is worth noting that in the Philippines decentralisation was partly a response to the chronic instability in Mindanao and the communist insurgency in Cordillera;4 in Thailand, more substantive decentralisation has been put forward as a partial solution to the renewed violence in the predominantly Muslim South from 2004 (National Reconciliation Commission 2006).5 In other words, a stated commitment to decentralisation policy has repeatedly been an avenue pursued to hold together nation-states in the region troubled by threats of secession and rebellion. Indeed some of the literature produced by international development organisations suggests how decentralisation can enhance political stability as well as strengthen national unity in troubled polities.6

But the concerns about the disintegration of Indonesia following the abrupt departure of its Cold War-era strongman have far outweighed worries about threats to the integrity of post-authoritarian Thailand or the Philippines. This is an irony given the more successful centralisation of state power that the New Order achieved in Indonesia. Neither Thailand under Cold War military dictators Sarit or Thanom and Praphat, nor the Philippines during the martial-law period under Marcos, quite displayed the kind of centralised authoritarianism as existed in Soeharto's Indonesia, where officials 'at all levels of the state hierarchy were highly responsive to demands and directives from "above" ' Sidel 2004: 61),7 and where policy-making and implementation was the undisputed purview of Jakarta, only to be followed compliantly by the regions.

It would not be an exaggeration to place concerns about Indonesia's break-up in the context of the international security environment that emerged following the promulgation of the American 'War on Terror', for which the political disintegration of this largest nation-state in Southeast Asia constitutes a major source of distress. If Indonesia truly became a dreaded 'failed state' (Mallaby 2002), then there would have been some major consequences for American and Western security and economic interests in the Southeast Asian region, which has been presented as the 'second front' in the 'War on Terror'. As a former U.S. Ambassador to Jakarta once observed with some trepidation: 'Strategically, the security of most of Southeast Asia rests on a stable Indonesia and would be seriously threatened if a number of mini-states emerged from a political collapse here' (Gelbard 2001). A USAID (2005) document thus proclaims:

As the world's largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia is too important to fail. The outcome of Indonesia's democratic transition has profound implications for U.S. strategic interests in fighting terrorism; preserving regional stability in Asia; strengthening democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights; and expanding access for U.S. exports and investment in the fourth largest country in the world. Indonesia's importance also stems from its substantial natural resources, rich biodiversity, and strategic location across key shipping lanes linking Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Indonesian policy-makers no less presented decentralisation as the ostensible answer to the dreaded prospect of the disintegration of the country as we know it (Rasyid 2005: 17). Decentralisation also appeared to be the expedient political compromise between the idea of a highly central, unitary republic as existed under Soeharto's rule and the contending idea of a much looser federal republic of Indonesia, with the latter idea winning supporters among sections of the intelligentsia (see Mangunwijaya 2003; Sukma 2003). One major post–New Order political party, the National Mandate Party (PAN)—at the time led by the Muslim politician Amien Rais—had even placed the establishment of federalism in its official platform for the 1999 elections.8

It was under these circumstances that a 'team of experts' led by bureaucrat-academic Ryaas Rasyid was charged by the Habibie government, which immediately took over following Soeharto's resignation on 21 May 1998, with developing a blueprint for decentralisation. Habibie's enthusiasm for decentralisation was partly attributable to his intent to cling to power; he needed to distance himself from the New Order's centralised authoritarianism, while at the same time find ways of garnering political support from the outer regions (Hofman and Kaiser 2006: 83) for his precarious rule. The final product of the Habbie-appointed team's work comprised Laws no. 22/1999 on Regional Governance and no. 25/1999 on the Financial Balance Between Central and Regional Government.9 These laws have been characterised by international development observers as no less than 'radical' (Betts 2003; Rohdewohld 2004) in their aims.

=== neo-institutionalism as a variant of neo-liberalism ===
What might be called the 'neo-institutionalist' variant in the neo-liberal development literature, in which decentralisation emerged as a crucial theme, has been most prominently, though not exclusively, represented in the work of international development organisations. A great deal of the literature on decentralisation thus originates from within the prolific intellectual production lines of the World Bank, USAID, the Asia Foundation, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the German Organisation for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), as well as such private grant-making institutions as the Ford Foundation. These have a significant presence in much of the developing world and, because of their financial as well as intellectual resources and clout,10 have profoundly affected development planning and internal policy debates in a range of countries. For example, decentralisation featured in a number of the 'Letters of Intent' signed between the IMF and the Indonesian government after the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997/98 as a condition of a long-term programme of assistance and loans, although the IMF was always concerned that revenue sharing with the regions did not create an unsustainable central budget (Buentjen 2000: 14). Turner and Podger (2003: 15), among others, note how various advisers and consultants from GTZ and USAID provided significant input to the design of Indonesia's decentralisation framework.

Some authoritative accounts suggest that input from international development organisations played a major role in forging the decentralising agenda in the Philippines during the period of reforms that immediately followed the fall of Marcos in 1986.11 This is the case even though prominent domestic spokesmen for decentralisation, such as the politician Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., were to also emerge, as did Ryaas Rasyid in Indonesia. However, international organisations played a less significant role in the case of Thailand, where a group of domestic technocrats were the prime movers in getting decentralisation clauses prominently placed in the now defunct 1997 Constitution, and in drafting the 1999 Decentralisation Act.12 The latter was facilitated by the support of the Democrat Party of then Prime Minister Chuan Lekpai,13 who led a government that was already very much in sync with the economic reform agenda promoted in the region by the IMF and the World Bank after the Asian Crisis. Nevertheless, here too, synchronicity with the international good governance reform agenda was married to domestic political exigencies: the then ascendant Democrat Party had geared elections for local executive bodies as a means through which it could establish a stronger local base of voter support and bolster its local machineries (Nelson 2003: 8).

However, whether or not the localisation of state power through decentralisation policy was primarily driven by external or domestic technocrats in Southeast Asia is not really a key issue. Both kinds of technocrat share common assumptions about the largely mutually reinforcing relationship between decentralisation, good governance and the advancement of market economies. On this basis alone, neo-liberal and neo-institutional development thinking has left an indelible mark on the localisation of power in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia.

It is therefore appropriate now to consider more fully the ramifications of neo-institutionalist thought, as a variant of economic neo-liberalism, on decentralisation policy. It is first necessary to specify the kind of neo-institutionalism that is the subject of discussion here.

The term neo-institutionalism has been associated with a variety of actually quite disparate intellectual traditions of scholarship (Zysman 1994; Hall and Taylor 1996; Steinmo 2001; Sangmpam 2007), in spite of there being some common forebears and overlapping interests among them. It should be especially clear that a distinction is being made between the primarily economic neo-institutionalism (which, however, has made major incursions into sociology and political science) and the 'historical institutionalism' that was revived in sociology and political science by the work of Evans, Skocpol and others in the 1980s. The latter was developed further by authors such as Pierson (2000) and Thelen (1999), and adopted to analyse rapid East Asian growth in the state-centred work of Weiss (1998).14 What is scrutinised here is mainly the economics-inspired neo-institutionalism, often described perhaps too narrowly as rational choice institutionalism (Steinmo 2001; Sangmpam 2007). This type of neo-institutionalism should be placed within a broader neo-liberal orthodoxy that has been ascendant within governments, international development agencies and policy think tanks globally for nearly three decades. Importantly, its deep influence on shifts in thinking among neo-liberals generally in the 1980s and 1990s marked a distinct point at which many came to reassess their earlier market fundamentalism in ways that take into account the role institutions play in getting markets to actually work.

Yet that most important form of neo-institutionalism is simultaneously much more than this; it is no less than a school of thought that seeks to explain the history, existence and functions of a wide range of institutions (government, the law, markets, the family and so on) and social relationships. Specifically, it focuses on how institutional frameworks, norms, rules and regulations affect human behaviour and societal development. It does so by largely adhering to neo-liberal economic principles about the 'rationality' of the marketplace, even as it constitutes a partial internal critique of neo-liberal thought. Thus sociologists partially influenced by the economic neo-institutionalism, such as DiMaggio and Powell (1991), hold that human behaviour in modern society can take on 'irrational' forms, because they are embedded in pre-existing organisational or institutional structures. To be sure such sociologists have a greater tendency to speak in terms of a 'socially constructed rationality' (Scott 2005) that to an extent departs from the more strictly utility-maximising rationality that imbues neo-institutionalism in its manifestations in economics. In broad terms, however, the neo-institutionalist project addresses development in terms of the presence or absence of market facilitating institutions and complimentary cultural and behavioural norms; not surprisingly, this leads to a proclivity for social engineering and design among its proponents.

The neo-institutionalism tied to neo-liberal economics has undoubtedly driven the policy objectives of international development organisations, think tanks and foundations, as well as the policy agendas of the governments of leading industrial nations of the 'North'. But it has become increasingly influential in the wider social science community as well, from which development consultants are regularly recruited. This has been possible because the methodologies of mainstream economics have lately been increasingly absorbed by disciplines like sociology and political science (see Fine, 2001; Harriss, 2002)—as demonstrated in the influence of variations of rational choice or 'game theory' across the academic disciplines, as well as a particular notion of 'social capital', especially as advanced by theorists such as Robert Putnam and James Coleman.15

Interestingly, in the 'South' as well, we see otherwise critical NGO activists indirectly provide support for the neo-liberal globalisation agenda as it has come to be 'softened' by neo-institutionalist appeals for 'good governance' and 'social capital', and for public participation of 'civil society'. The Philippines scholar and activist Rocamora (2000), for example, suggests that it is in the interests of international mobile capital now to have authoritarian governments in the Third World ousted and replaced with democracies that espouse new governance practices that are more amenable to international investment. A key factor was the end of the Cold War; allegedly, this made authoritarian regimes such as existed in the Philippines during its height, redundant and often a mere barrier to the free movement of capital (for a contrasting view, see Rodan and Hewison 2006). Such an idea is of course appealing to NGO activists and scholars of a broadly 'progressive' political inclination in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

The way that decentralisation as the manifestation of the localisation of power actually takes place requires careful empirical investigation, however. This requires a rejection of the notion that governments can just 'choose' the most appropriate form and pace of decentralisation, as is implied by the World Bank.16 In fact, finding the 'right balance' of decentralisation in various areas of governance, or settling on the right 'pace', is almost never largely a matter of rational policy-making or of recognising and implementing the best policies. It more fundamentally involves constellations of social power and interests, and the outcomes of social conflict. In drawing attention to this aspect of the problem, it is not being suggested here that neo-institutionalists are unaware that policy-making is entangled in a highly political process of contestation. Of course they are not. Still, neo-institutionalists inspired by neo-liberal economics have a marked tendency to invoke politics largely as a process whereby rational policy-makers try to neutralise vested interests that lie as obstacles to the real business of technocratic weighing of policy options. As a consequence, democracy is embraced especially if technocrats/technopols can preside over policies relatively unimpeded by societal interests, which might include organised labour or other sources of social democratic or more radical agendas. Such a position has important theoretical as well as practical ramifications.

In contrast, it is put forward here that policy-making is fundamentally shaped by contests between competing interests, the outcomes of which are highly indicative of modes of distribution of power in state and society. Such a position entails an understanding of neo-institutionalism, not just as an intellectual endeavour, but as part of a highly influential and political (even if hardly ever made explicit) neo-liberal project of reconstituting state power and state/society relations in market-facilitating ways. Significantly, there is nothing that guarantees that the social agents representing the world view and interests of technocratic rationality will prevail in arenas of social conflict. Perhaps this is why neo-institutionalists have become embroiled in an ambiguous relationship with democracy. Their emphasis on the political insulation of technocratic policy-making from market-distorting societal pressures (for example, from labour unions or environmental movements) is also particularly conspicuous given the supposition that decentralisation paves the way for broader public participation in development.

Thus, China can be lauded for having undergone political reform, even if this is defined in rather minimalist fashion: strengthening local government, ideologically embracing the market, and opening the economy (Montinola, Qian and Weingast 1995: 52). Moreover, when explaining the politics of China's economic success, some writing from within the neo-institutionalist tradition can draw attention to decentralised institutional configurations that are supportive of the market to the extent of highlighting commonalities among the contemporary Chinese state, and the American and English states of respectively the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries (Qian and Weingast 1996), without seriously broaching the presence or absence of democratisation impulses.

In other words, the theoretical position proposed by neo-institutionalists is one that expresses a kind of liberalism that is in many ways highly exclusionary in its political aspects (Jayasuriya 2000). Again the obvious problem is that the outcomes of representative democracy cannot always be harnessed to the requirements of technocracy. Hence, Grindle's otherwise complex analysis of the success and failures of thirty Mexican municipal governments ultimately rests on the presence or absence of reformist 'state entrepreneurs'—effectively heroic figures who will push through innovations in spite of public opposition and the lack of a social base (2007: 11).

As demonstrated in subsequent chapters, the Indonesian case strongly suggests that what really matters in terms of social analysis is the system of power relations within which decentralisation takes place. In Indonesia, neo-liberal governance reform in the shape of decentralisation was already 'hi-jacked' in its early years by a range of local predatory interests.17 In fact, decentralisation provided a lifeline for them when the authoritarianism in which they were incubated had become no longer tenable. It is no coincidence that in the Philippines, too, fervent supporters of decentralisation acknowledge that it had the 'unintended consequence' of providing a windfall for predatory local bosses and dynastic families, whose power was strengthened rather than eroded, as might have been the case if good governance practices were to really take hold.18 In Thailand as well, decentralisation converged with the interests of local predatory forces, which in the context of broader democratisation processes arguably enhanced their influence on national-level political contests.19

But could the kind of benign 'democratic decentralisation' envisaged by Crook and Manor (1998) take hold in the foreseeable future as Indonesia's new institutions of democratic governance take root? Could benign democratic decentralisation, as opposed to one dominated by predatory elites, evolve through a more or less natural process once a particular set of institutional changes have been set in motion, as they have been now? Again, the same questions could be put forward in the instances of Thailand and the Philippines, although it should be noted that they would sound especially strained in the latter case, where the Local Government Code was promulgated as early as 1991. From the point of view adopted here, there can be no guarantees; the real questions are whether reformist coalitions of power will sweep away already entrenched predatory interests, and from where would these coalitions emerge in the first place.

Today, most major Indonesian political parties would include a range of former apparatchik, military men, entrepreneurs and assorted political operators and enforcers of Soeharto's New Order—at both national and local levels (Robison and Hadiz 2004). While political parties and parliaments have now become real vehicles of political contestation, a key issue is the kind of interests that are embedded within them and, therefore, the kind of roles they actually play. As touched upon in a later section of this book, Indonesian political parties do not fit the 'ideal type' associated—rightly or wrongly—with the experiences of Western liberal democracies, and neither do their counterparts in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia generally.

It should be pointed out that there are instances in which local officials in Indonesia have emerged to perform relatively well under difficult circumstances.20 Still, the comparative rarity with which such instances emerge indicate that the circumstances under which power is gained and maintained make it extremely difficult for a genuinely reformist impulse to take hold and not dissipate under the pressure of predatory politics. Yet, understanding cases that deviate from the norm of predatory ascendancy, if and when they do occur, is no doubt important. Dasgupta and Beard (2007: 237), thus maintain on the basis of field data from five urban and peri-urban communities in Java that decentralisation has variously produced outright 'elite capture', considerable democratic self-governance or combinations of both. While the finding is very useful, explaining outcomes that may deviate from what strongly appears to be the norm across the archipelago also requires more systematic attention to issues of contestation and social interest than is provided. Did reformist coalitions establish themselves in the cases of more democratic self-governance, and if so how did they emerge, what are their components, and how did they hold sway against local predatory interests that were embedded in the broader New Order structure of power?21

In Kebumen in Central Java (Straits Times 8 September 2003), for example, a bupati elected in 2000 was reported to have cracked down on local corruption with some success, so much so that its experience with decentralisation and reform was held as being exemplary. Significantly, however, even here a culture of good governance was not achieved well enough to prevent subsequent accusations of electoral fraud and abuse of power when the bupati won the re-election in 2005 (Suara Merdeka 13 June 2005).

Two of the contributors to an otherwise quite grim book edited by Schulte-Nordholt and van Klinken (2007) notably describe cases in which decentralisation appears to have resulted in relatively peaceful and prosperous local democracies. These are respectively the cases of Jepara (Schiller 2007), in Java, and North Sulawesi (Henley, Schouten, and Ulaen 2007).22 The editors to the volume explain these as anomalies partly having to do with relative local prosperity and peacefulness during the Soeharto era and the role of entrenched traditional religious elites in maintaining order (Schulte-Nordholt and van Klinken 2007: 27), though the articles are really suggestive of the need for a more detailed and explicit scrutiny of local political topographies. For example, Schiller's own previous detailed work (1996) on what he called the New Order's 'power-house state' in Jepara, calls for a re-examination of what happened, after 1998, to the constituents of the system of patronage that underpinned it.

But it is the case of Jembrana, in Bali, that is perhaps most frequently held up as a decentralisation success story. Here, a bupati (district head) elected in 2000 is commonly seen to have effectively pushed for local administrative reforms as well as led a drive for economic innovation and entrepreneurship (Erawan 2007). What is often forgotten about the Jembrana case, moreover, is that even this bupati is widely believed to have won power by bribing members of the local parliamentary body that voted him into office and later pushing for personal control over the local branch of the party that had been a source of opposition to his rise. Such was the extent that Schulte-Nordholt (2007: 406–407) does not categorise the bupati, Gede Winasa, as an enlightened technocrat, but as a new local strongman.

The evidence for 'success' using good governance criteria employed by technocrats or of people's or civil society 'empowerment' employed by localist populists commonly residing in NGOs is patchy to say the least throughout most of Indonesia. The case studies discussed in later parts of this book are intended to explain why this is so in spite of the general consensus across the political spectrum after 1998 for the need for Indonesia to decentralise.

<nowiki>**</nowiki>Decentralisation, State and Society**

Another aspect of the theoretical discussion that requires examination is how 'decentralisation' has become—along with 'civil society, 'social capital' and 'good governance'—an integral part of the contemporary neo-institutionalist lexicon that focusses attention on the 'social' and 'human' aspects of capitalist development. As mentioned previously, neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist thought suggests that a vibrant civil society contributes to good governance and democratisation by ensuring greater public participation in development. As the World Bank put it, 'we now approach economic reforms and the development process in a much more decentralized fashion. Individuals and various social groups are now seen not only as beneficiaries, but also as active forces that support the process of development (World Bank n.d. b).

From this point of view, the logical consequence of decentralisation is that local communities would be in a better position to demand more adequate provision of services (Grindle 2007: 12). Local officials are more accountable and 'closer' to these communities and can better identify their needs. As Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist (2004: 3) put it, the 'common assumption is that mutually enabling relations between decentralised state institutions, local businesses and civil associations will generate economic growth, poverty alleviation and good governance'. Such an argument provides a seemingly appropriate riposte to populist criticism about the socially marginalising effects of neo-liberal economic globalisation.

This faith in civil society and political participation, however, has some definite limits. A different World Bank-sponsored document declares that: 'the success of decentralisation frequently depends heavily on training for both national and local officials in decentralized administration' (Decentralization Thematic Team n.d.). This distinct 'training for success' explanation underscores that local governance reform must be enforced by technocratic and managerialist interests constructed within the state bureaucracy. Thus 'successes' cannot really depend on vital elements within broader civil society after all.

In keeping with this perspective, a USAID document on decentralisation in Indonesia states that 'local governments have little experience with participatory self-rule and will need assistance to create adequate mechanisms for participation, transparency and accountability'. These local governments are also recognised to have only 'limited technical capacities, particularly to perform functions that have been provided by central agencies'; thus, 'they will need assistance to demonstrate to citizens that autonomy does lead to improvements in services and the environment'. The document adds that 'particular attention will be paid to ensure women's participation and concerns are included at all levels' (USAID 2000: 18).

What is especially astonishing is that there is no mention of the lack of influence of local environmental lobbies, or the only limited clout of the women's movement in Indonesia. Nor is there acknowledgement of how in the Indonesian context, large domestic and foreign corporations can simply ignore environmental regulators, or that young female workers in low-wage manufacturing industries continue to face harassment and violent intimidation as they attempt to exercise their legally guaranteed right to organise. That such politically marginalised female workers will substantively 'participate' in decentralised development is assumed, without explaining how this might come about in the context of very unequal relations of power.

Given all the above, there are sound reasons to question the underlying assumptions about the link among decentralisation, good governance and civil society participation as understood in the neo-institutionalist literature, especially, but not exclusively, that produced by international development organisations. The following section therefore offers a closer examination of the ways in which the-neo-institutionalist literature proposes the existence of such a link.

=== civil society, social capital and public participation ===
Particularly through the work of Putnam (1993; 2000), social capital has become an ever more important part of neo-institutionalist thinking about civil society's role in the decentralisation process. As is well known, the social capital discourse emphasises the common norms and values that create 'trust' among development actors as well as between those who govern and are governed.23 Decentralisation is believed to be particularly helpful in setting the institutional environment for the nurturance of the social capital necessary for a vibrant civil society that can work together constructively with governments. Thus, the World Bank, too, has come to develop major social capital-inspired policy initiatives (Fine 2002: 220).

A too rarely acknowledged but contentious problem is the very concept of civil society that is utilised. Following the Tocquevillian tradition adhered to by Putnam, the Bank tacitly assumes a civil society defined by a homogeneous, common set of fundamental interests and values, generated by autonomous associational life, while academics like Diamond have stressed the democratic and rule of law-oriented culture that should arise out of civic activity (Diamond 1994). A counterweight to state power, pro-market and democratic values should emerge from a vital civil society to promote 'tolerance, moderation and a willingness to compromise' (Diamond 1994: 8), according to such views. They sit uncomfortably, however, with the usually existing reality of competing interests within civil society itself and discrepancies of access to wealth and power which is often rooted in class structures. They also do not accord with the finding that important sections of civil society may be profoundly anti-democratic or anti-market (Rodan 1996: 4–5; see also White 1994) including,24 ironically, the bourgeoisie and the middle class, which on the basis of assumptions most established in the classic work by Lipset (1959), are conventionally put forward as modernising and democratically inclined.

As Fine (2001) reminds us, 'social capital' actually began its life as part of a critique of the cultural aspects of class inequalities in contemporary capitalism (Bourdieu 1986) but was soon appropriated by the followers of theorists such as the economist Becker (1996), the sociologist Coleman (1988) and the political scientist Putnam (1993, 2000). The main purpose of 'social capital' at present appears to be to conceptually downgrade the importance of social conflict and the dynamics of unequal power relations in determining the development trajectories of societies. Social capital in its most well-known manifestations, therefore, has become an essential part of the wider technocratic project of conceptually depoliticising development itself (Fine 2001; Harriss, 2002).

In this respect, the functionality of social capital is to privilege the normative bonds assumed to be present in well-adjusted societies, and to cast social conflict as aberrations much in the same way as 1950s and 1960s sociological theories of the modernisation mould used to privilege social equilibrium. What has thus transpired is the successful reformulation of 'civil society' by neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist thought by way of a link to the intellectually spurious but attractive notion of social capital. Fukuyama (1999), for example, states that: 'An abundant stock of social capital is presumably what produces a dense civil society, which in turn has been almost universally seen as a necessary condition for modern liberal democracy'). As a consequence, civil society—actually an arena of struggle between competing interests—becomes conceptually sterilised and sanitised.

It is true that the Bank defines civil society as the space among family, market and state consisting of 'not-for-profit organizations and special interest groups, either formal or informal, working to improve the lives of their constituents' (World Bank 2000: 10). In this way, an array of organisations—research and policy design organisations, labour unions, the media, NGOs, grassroots associations, community-based organisations, religious groups and many others—can be placed within this definition as 'typical examples of the actors that comprise the dynamic web known as civil society' (World Bank 2000: 10). Still, there remains too little recognition that the so-called 'dynamic web' may embody a range of interests that are mutually antagonistic—of the powerful and the exploited—that may promote or resist good governance reforms.

The point is that by painting a picture of civil society free of fundamental contradictions, it can be overlooked that democracy, public participation, accountability and social and economic rights are all historically tied to the outcome of the struggles of social forces and interests; that they are not simply the product of intentional policy design. Liberal democratic regimes in the West, for example, are undoubtedly the product of wrenching social change over centuries, coloured by often violent and bloody confrontations, not the least between labour and capital. The neo-institutionalist view, however, would 'hold out the prospect of a democracy with substance and depth but without political competition or conflict between different social groups and classes'. For the World Bank a conflict-free democracy 'created through the crafting of local organisations and facilitated by NGOs' is a condition for good governance and economic development (Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist 2004: 8).

The rise of 'social capital' is indicative of the enhanced status of public participation in the mainstream developmental discourse. A glowing assessment of decentralisation policy in the Philippines thus claims that the 1991 Local Government Code there has been responsible for greater public participation in development, as well as rising levels of public accountability and greater local control over local resources. But the story is obviously not a simple linear one, for besides the presence of a more mature civil society, the author acknowledges the continuing salience of predatory local political bosses, who regularly deploy 'guns, goons and gold', in the post-Marcos era. Still he holds out hope that a more 'modern' and 'technocratic' elite will eventually arise out of their families (Rood 1998)—pointing to the case of the son of a notorious old local boss who is 'an American-educated sophisticate quite at home with technocratic modes of governance'.

Away from Southeast Asia, a broad survey of decentralisation and democratisation in southern Africa by Wunch is quite instructive and thus worthy of mention. It cites studies that show how 'democracy must be rooted in functioning local, participatory self-governance institutions'. It points to 'untapped local capacity to make collective choices and take collective action'. At the same time, however, Wunch notes that 'experiments' in local governance and democracy in virtually every place in Africa he mentions has met with failure. The way out of the quandary is to suggest that these failures are rooted in 'specific policy choices and strategies pursued by African governments', including deliberate withholding of resources from 'local entities' (Wunch 1998). But why were the policy choices and strategies made, and what made them more possible than others? What was concretely at stake? What was the specific constellation of power and interests that made it difficult for others to challenge these policy choices?

These same questions could of course be readily transferred to the Southeast Asian experience. Rocamora (2000), for example, believes that decentralisation in the Philippines, specifically the Local Government Code of 1991, opened up new political space for progressive movements. 'People's organisations' and NGOs are now in a better position to genuinely strive to empower society's politically and economically marginalised, according to his assessment. One important innovation has been the building of a political party vehicle to directly contest power via elections by these movements. Insofar as the efforts described by Rocamora are successful, they point to the fact that it is necessary for coherent, reformist or progressive social and political coalitions to exist—and successfully contest processes that might otherwise only result in new space for established local elites. But there are real structural impediments that must be overcome. Thus, Hutchcroft, also writing on the Philippines after Marcos, emphasises the existence of old political clans that dominate the institutions of representative government, and elections that are marred by money politics and intimidation. He points to 'the enormous expense of running for election' that serves as an 'effective barrier to the entrance of reformist forces into the political arena', and that 'many so-called new faces often retain strong connections to old centers of power' (Hutchcroft 1998b). This observation is highly relevant to the case of post-authoritarian Indonesia, as we shall see.

In other words, the crafting of democratic institutions of public participation, while important, is not sufficient. This is seen clearly in the other post-authoritarian Southeast Asian case, Thailand. Here, the 1997 Constitution (abrogated after the September 2006 military coup against Thaksin) stipulated a decentralised structure of governance that contradicted the logic of the famed 'bureaucratic polity' (Riggs 1966)—though it should be noted that it had already been undermined progressively with the emergence of local politicos over the decades (Sombat 2000). Democratisation, especially after the 1992 public uprising against the military, was accompanied by a drive to more formally decentralise power from Bangkok, and to create new local administrative entities endowed with greater power and responsibilities (Patpui 1999). As the Asian Development Bank put it, the aim of decentralisation in Thailand was to 'reconfigure the political, legislative, judicial and administrative machinery of government.'25

As in post-Soeharto Indonesia, the expectation was that successful decentralisation would make governance in Thailand 'more decentralized and participatory' and induce government institutions at all levels to become 'more transparent, accountable and responsive' (ADB 1999: 7). But of course there were to be structural impediments. These included a 'number of influential forces have a vested interest in the status quo', as well as the presence of 'fierce bureaucratic resistance to the decentralisation initiatives envisioned in the constitution, and widespread perceptions of corruption' (ADB 1999: 7). Another obvious obstacle was the widespread practice of vote buying, especially in rural areas where politics remains an exclusive sphere dominated by 'strongmen', notable families and informal networks of patronage (see Arghiros 2001; Nelson 2005). Thus even the modes of political participation involved in the local workings of democracy could be tied to the persistence of corruption, another issue with which the neo-institutionalist literature on decentralisation and good governance is concerned, but finds difficult to resolve.

=== decentralisation and corruption ===
Besides civil society empowerment, it was already mentioned that decentralisation is also linked conceptually with corruption eradication in the neo-institutionalist literature (e.g. Fisman and Gatti 2002). Fjeldstad (2003) notes the widely-held assumption that decentralisation would bring the government 'closer to the people'; hence, it would help discipline the state, resulting in the improvement of 'service delivery' as well as the decline of corruption.26 He also notes, however, that there is little empirical evidence to support this assumption across cases.

Today Indonesia has the well-deserved reputation for being one of the most corrupt countries in the world. In fact, Transparency International listed Indonesia as the joint third most corrupt country in the world in its 2001 survey and joint-fourth in 2002, although improvements were 'achieved' in 2003 when Indonesia took position 122 out of the 133 countries surveyed, and position 130 out of 163 countries in 2006. The Philippines stood respectively at positions 92 and 121 in 2003 and 2006, while Thailand stood at 70 and 63.27

Long-term observers of Indonesia or corruption issues in general will not be surprised by these results. In 2000, for example, the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) showed that expatriates working in Asia viewed Indonesia as the most corrupt country in the continent (Kompas 23 March 2000). Indeed, Indonesian government data show that the state lost some Rp 22 trillion (US$2.35 billion) in nearly 1,200 corruption cases from January 2002 to April 2004 (Jakarta Post 18 June 2004).28 It is impossible to ascertain the number of cases that go unreported in the sprawling archipelago, and therefore, this must be considered a very conservative estimate.

It should be recalled, however, that rampant corruption in Indonesia is hardly a post-Soeharto phenomenon. In fact, Indonesia did not rate much better under the New Order, which was often praised by international development agencies for its economic performance. Transparency International, for example, ranked Indonesia at position 80 out of 85 countries surveyed in 1998 (Wee 2002: 5),29 the year Soeharto was finally toppled.

Understandably, a major fear is that rampant corruption will deter much-needed investment, especially of the foreign kind, given that Indonesia still struggles to re-emerge from the ruins of the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997/98 (Winters 2000). While corruption and cronyism were notoriously unbridled in the Soeharto era, the key difference is that corruption now is especially unpredictable. If foreign investors easily accommodated the more predictable form of corruption, they are less keen about today's more decentralised form. Of course this is not surprising; no less than Max Weber (1978: 240, 1095) had famously recognised the importance of the predictability of corruption for business at the much earlier development of capitalism in Europe.

Instead of necessarily creating conditions favourable for investment, the newly decentralised and unpredictable form of corruption may promote new business uncertainty. This is why no less than Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla, himself a prominent businessman, warned local administrations against adopting policies of increasing local revenue through levies on business. He was responding to a study that found that 30 per cent of these would lead to 'high-cost economies', as well as a survey in which '24 per cent of 5184 respondents in 214 regencies and cities complained about business distortions' caused by local government edicts. These edicts, as we shall see, have been particularly controversial because of the perception that corruption has particularly grown at the local level of governance, leading one seasoned Indonesian observer to declare that 'People got nothing out of autonomy, while local officials got rich.'30 Significantly, the survey also showed that businesses had to bear the burden of illegal payment demanded by 'security forces, the courts, social organizations and mobsters' amounting to '6.81 percent of total production costs' (Jakarta Post 21 March 2005); many will rightly regard this as a rather conservative estimate. So rather than inducing the kind of healthy competition between localities envisaged by authors writing on China like Qian and Weingast (1996), decentralisation has produced local governments, armed with greater autonomy in various spheres, such as taxation (Lin, Tao and Liu 2006: 324), that provide sustenance for predatory interests.

The World Bank has of course long suggested policy and institutional frameworks that are crucial to the successful eradication of corruption.31 A World Bank-sponsored compilation on fighting corruption in Asia (Bhargava and Bolongaita 2004) concludes by recommending a fairly uniform set of policy measures geared toward strengthening institutions tasked with curbing and monitoring corruption, while also inviting civil society participation. Clearly, in the case of Asia, the emphasis on constructing anti-corruption institutional frameworks is a direct response to the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997/98, which has been portrayed as being triggered fundamentally by corruption and market-distorting policy choices. Given that Indonesia's experience of the crisis was uniformly regarded as the worst, it is little surprise that curbing corruption has been at the front of the reform agenda pertaining to Indonesia.

While anti-corruption institutions have now been established in Indonesia, the outcomes of Indonesia's reformasi contests described earlier constrain their effectiveness. Not surprisingly, entrenched predatory interests have had some success in resisting measures to monitor and constrain corruption, which Dick (2002: 71–86) calls the 'new frontier in social engineering'. Some of the worst offenders among New Order tycoons, bureaucrats and politicos thus remain unscathed by anti-corruption probes, in spite of some notable convictions. In such a context, decentralisation may only 'multiply existing opportunities for corruption' as well as offer 'unrestrained possibilities of wealth accumulation' (Harris 2003: 62) on the part of bureaucrats and criminals alike. In fact the line of differentiation between the two could become exceedingly blurred.

The recent experience of the Philippines is particularly instructive given the high hopes that inevitably accompanied 'People Power' in 1986, not just in terms of democratisation but also eradicating corruption and cronyism. Hayllar shows that institutional changes did not loosen the hold on power of traditional economic and political elites, despite the stated intentions. Decentralisation resulted instead in 'the institutionalisation and considerable enlargement of pork-barrel funds necessary to maintain congressional and elite support for the government's reforms' (Hayllar 2003: 257). The system of patronage fuelled by corruption was, therefore, actually perpetuated by decentralisation, as privatisation and deregulation policies provided new rent-seeking opportunities for predatory elites.

Given rising local corruption accompanying decentralisation in Indonesia, much attention is now being paid to corrupt practices by local officials. Such local corruption often relates to contests for control over the local state machinery and resources, as well as developing potential bases for localised predatory networks of patronage. In the process, it has also involved a misallocation of local government budgets for private gain by local politicos. It was estimated in late 2001, for example, that 40 per cent of central government subsidies to the regions under a fiscal assistance scheme had been misappropriated—and this less than one year after the official implementation of local autonomy (Kompas 27 November 2001).32

=== Re-Politicising Decentralisation ===
The discussion above suggests that largely depoliticised accounts of actually messy and contradictory decentralisation processes are being produced in the intellectually predominant accounts written from within the neo-institutionalist perspective inspired by neo-liberal economics. However, the problems of institutional design, civil society participation and corruption eradication, to name a few, are those that cannot be treated adequately on the basis of politically sanitised narratives.

The point to be made here is that neo-institutionalists inevitably are often trumped by the very power relationships that they would like to wish away with theory. This is because the agenda of democratic decentralisation, whose broad outlines may have been drawn by technocratic experts, has frequently been usurped by decidedly non-technocratic interests that may only selectively engage with neo-liberal inspired governance reforms. These could be even threatened by good governance reforms that demand transparency, as will be shown in more detail in the case of post-authoritarian Indonesia—even if they are advantaged by other facets of decentralisation.

Such an observation paves the way for a more realistic, and overtly political, understanding of why decentralisation in Indonesia has failed thus far to achieve its stated aims, and in the process sideline those that champion the worldview of 'technocratic rationality'. It also allows for the incorporation of important insights from other experiences, such as that of Thailand and the Philippines, to help explain the trajectory that Indonesia is presently on and the social and political outcomes of the localisation of power.

Another implication of the above analysis is that because decentralisation is primarily about contestation of power, rather than technical policy-making, its course is hardly ever linear; there can remain strong tensions between centralising and decentralising impulses over long periods. Thus, one ambition of the demised Thaksin government33 in Thailand was to recentralise state power, involving renewed efforts to exert control over, or absorb, the local politico-economic alliances that had particularly thrived in the 1980s and 1990s.34 In other words, even after decentralisation has been set in motion, it might still be partially rolled back, as appears to be the case to some extent in Indonesia today—to the detriment of ambitious local politicos who thought their fortunes were to be continually rising.

== Chapter 2: The Post-Authoritarian Context Technocratic Ambitions and the Challenge of Predatory Power ==
Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines make up the three major post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies in which the localisation of power has emerged as a key part of debates about democratisation and governance. In all three cases, decentralisation policy has been instituted as an ostensibly key pillar of reform, although the outcomes have been contentious and ambivalent. On the one hand, these cases have been featured in the varied and voluminous literature on 'democratic transitions' and technocratic 'good governance' reform; on the other hand, they have been included too in the literature on the resilience of predatory local elites.

Several issues are grappled with in this chapter. First, what could the Indonesian experience with decentralisation and, more broadly, the Southeast Asian, contribute to our understanding of the driving forces behind the localisation of power in post-authoritarian societies? What could they tell us about the factors that may prohibit the emergence of the kind of 'democratic decentralisation', characterised 'accountability' and 'transparency', as understood in the neo-institutionalist literature? What is the role of technocratic 'modernising elites' on the one hand, and what is often referred to as predatory local bossism, on the other, in the concrete struggles pertaining to the localisation of power, according to the experience of Indonesia and other post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies?

=== The Post-Authoritarian Context ===
In spite of important differences as products of distinct histories, post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies share features that demonstrate serious problems in envisaging the replacement of authoritarian regimes with liberal forms of democratic governance, certainly in any 'rationally' and technocratically engineered manner. Instead, they tend to show how old interests or such un-civil forces as predatory local notables and political gangsters may find a strong niche in or even usurp the democratisation and decentralisation processes when circumstances allow. They therefore indicate the limits of engineered processes of institution and capacity building that take place within certain terrains of power. Such observations are crucial to a deeper understanding of the 'successes' and 'failures' of decentralisation in post-authoritarian contexts. In particular, the case of Indonesia, which has undergone substantial transformations in the sphere of governance institutions since 1998, provides ample evidence to support an analysis that privileges power, interests and contestation over technocratic institutional crafting.

=== Post-Authoritarian Trajectories ===
As is well known, an international literature on 'democratic transitions', including the 'crafting' of 'democratic institutions', grew quite spectacularly after the 1980s (see Munck 2001) and continues to develop even today. Some of the most influential works on the subject can be attributed to such scholars as O'Donnell and Schmitter (1986), Linz and Stepan (1996), Huntington (1991) and Di Palma (1990). Though the starting point was democratisation in Southern Europe in the 1970s and Latin America in the 1980s, the literature soon came to deal with the experiences of post-communist Eastern Europe/Central Asia (see McFaul 2002) and later, the globalising capitalist economies of East and Southeast Asia (see Johannen and Gomez 2001). A central characteristic of the literature is the concern with how benign elite pacts could emerge in very fluid situations following the fall of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, and how they might give rise to lasting institutions of democratic governance. Especially for the East European post-communist cases, a major concern has been the relationship between 'transitions to democracy' and the nurturing of capitalist market economies (see Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Przeworski 1991).

Though remaining influential,1 the assumptions and approaches of 'transitionists' or of 'transitology' are now being placed under more scrutiny than before. Notwithstanding the privileged position still held by ideas like 'democracy promotion' within governments like that of the United States and by extension, many international development organisations, the 1980s euphoria concerning waves of democratisation—accompanying globalisation and market-friendly economic reforms—had somewhat abated by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Thus, Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, writes about the 'End of the Transition Paradigm' (2002). He notes with conviction that 'reality is no longer conforming to the model' and that 'it is time to recognise that the transition paradigm has outlived its usefulness' (2002:6). One of his main laments is the disingenuousness with which transition authors had categorised a host of countries as being on the way to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s; he suggests only a small minority of them today can be unambiguously labelled 'democratic'. With regard to Indonesia, one vociferous critic, Schulte-Nordholt (2004: 29), has labelled the use of the transitions paradigm as 'outdated sociology'.

Writing on Chile, Posner critiques the fixation among 'transitologists' with elite pacts. He notes that whether or not it is acknowledged, the participants in such pacts represent sets of concrete social and economic interests, and that any 'institutional crafting' of the new 'rules of the game' that ensues will inevitably reflect this. He points out too that there is no real reason to assume that 'pacted democracies' will incrementally become more broad-based or accountable, or result in more equitably shared power. In fact, elite pacts may result in institutional arrangements that hinder such a development because they are against the interests of the dominant participants (Posner 1999: 63). Such observations are very relevant in particular to the case of post-authoritarian Indonesia and issues related to the localisation of power, as we shall see more clearly below.

In this book, the messy and often volatile changes in Indonesian politics and society are not seen as a characteristic of any transitional stage to an idealised democratic form. It is proposed, following Robison and Hadiz (2004; also see Hadiz 2003), that the patterns and essential dynamics of the exercise of social, economic and political power have more or less been established, and will remain relatively unaltered in the foreseeable future. This is a direct product of the fact that old oligarchic and predatory interests were not overcome by reformasi but managed to reinvent themselves as democrats and reformers and then preside over newly constructed institutions of governance. The presence of predatory elites and a variety of local bossisms, the rise of money politics and notable tendencies toward political thuggery are therefore not the symptoms of the 'growing pains' of a society whose political development was stunted by decades of authoritarianism. They are essential characteristics of the logic of an (illiberal) type of democracy, variations of which can be found in the Philippines, Thailand and in many other post-authoritarian situations, and which have now become well entrenched. The consequence is that Indonesia is following a well-traversed historical trajectory that differs significantly from that associated with the entrenchment of liberal or social democracy.

Nevertheless, Indonesia has been at the core of recent discussions about 'democratic transitions'—not just as represented in the academic literature (see various chapters in Budiman, Hatley and Kingsley, 1999; Liddle 2001; Aspinall 2005a) but also in the more technocratic kind spawned by experts based in international development agencies or consulting institutions (see USAID 2000; also see Bjornlund 2000).2 In fact the discussion on democratic transitions in Indonesia depicts the ease with which the assumptions of 'transitology' and neo-institutionalist good governance can be combined.

In response to the fact that local elections from 1999 tended to produce local governments that were unresponsive to local needs and thrived on money politics, Turner and Podger (2003), for example, suggested the need to revamp the electoral system by making heads of local executive bodies directly elected by the local electorate, rather than the local parliament, as was the practice until new legislation requiring direct elections started being implemented in 2005. They also suggested that a system that had more district-based features might make elected members of local parliaments more accountable to those who elect them. However, governors and mayors have long been directly elected in the Philippines (as they have been in Indonesia since 2005), as is well known, and both Thailand and the Philippines have electoral systems that have strong district-based features; yet, money politics obviously abound in both cases. Therefore, what seems to be more important than electoral and institutional reforms per se is the context within which they take place.

But the product of generous infusions of neo-institutionalism into transitology has significant implications, especially in relation to the strategies of international development organisations. A USAID document thus describes part of its activity in Indonesia for the year 2004 in the following manner:3

USAID will provide technical assistance and training to the national legislature and political parties to enable them to become effective agents of democratic reform. Technical experts will work directly with legislative commissions deliberating key pieces of legislation, including bills on freedom of information and justice sector reform. Training will be provided to officeholders, youth groups, and women's groups of political parties. The training will strengthen internal democratic features of the parties, including how to make the parties more responsive, policy-driven and able to communicate directly with their constituencies.

What is overlooked in the USAID document is that the kind of groups that have coalesced in Indonesian political parties may not have a genuine vested interest in governance reforms that would make them more accountable to the citizenry and place restrictions on predatory, rent-seeking opportunities. Moreover, being 'policy-driven' is not necessarily compatible with the persistent interest in rent-seeking. The key point to keep in mind is that the demise of authoritarianism in Indonesia—as was the case in the other Southeast Asian societies—did not produce any kind of clear liberal victory. As McFaul (2002: 225) states in a useful internal critique of the transitions literature in relation to the former communist bloc, 'if powerful democrats draft the rules, it does not matter what electoral system is adopted or whether a parliamentary or presidential system is adopted'.4

Helping to ensure such persistence of predatory politics in democratic Indonesia is the continued marginalisation of cohesively liberal, social democratic, or more radical social forces from the processes of political contestation. This is partly indicated in the fact that in just six years after Soeharto's fall, the former state party of the New Order, Golkar, had already regained its status as the country's premier political organisation. Winning the presidential poll in 2004 was a former senior New Order general, although one whose reputation is not nearly as sullied as that of the majority of his peers. The vice-president that emerged from the same poll is part of a group of businessmen that gained much from New Order patronage of pribumi (indigenous)-owned enterprises in the 1980s (see Pangaribuan 1995) and is head of Golkar. Indonesia's new Regional Representation Council (DPD), resulting from a major Constitutional amendment and modelled to a degree on the American Senate (though much less powerful), came to be led by Ginandjar Kartasasmita.5 Implicated in corruption scandals, he was no less than one of Soeharto's most important economic aides outside of the so-called 'Berkeley Mafia'. Down to the local level, in fact, one finds that a range of former New Order petty apparatchik and state-connected entrepreneurs or gangsters have achieved pre-eminent status in local politics (see Chapter 4).

Further complicating the analysis of Indonesian democratisation is the fact that the military has not been completely eliminated from politics nationally or locally. Though it has had to give up seats previously automatically allocated in national as well as local parliamentary bodies, military commanders are still able to engage locally in political and business alliances on the basis of the so-called territorial command structure, which provides for a military counterpart to each level of civilian governance (see Mietzner 2003). Nico Schulte-Nordholt (n.d.) proposes that decentralisation has facilitated corrupt practices on the part of local military commands, especially in resource-rich areas like Kalimantan and Papua, while Jun Honna (2005) argues that in line with the need of each local/regional military command to remain financially viable, military commanders have had the tendency to enter into accommodations and alliances with locally or regionally ascendant political parties. It should be remembered that many of these military commands have long been involved in illicit economic activities (for example, in illegal logging, human trafficking, drugs and prostitution); therefore, they have an interest to continue working with local gangsters, businesspeople and officials to ensure that money continues to flow into the local military coffers (Honna 2005: 3–5).

Again, Indonesia's situation is not unique. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, was followed by the emergence of a Russian Federation within which party competition and parliamentary politics have been prominent. For quite some time, studies of Russia's 'transition' tended to closely look at the degree to which institutions of democracy, like legislative bodies, had developed and matured (e.g. Hahn 1996). As in Indonesia, however, the new salience of such institutions did not rule out the repositioning of old ruling party apparatchik in new positions of power, or the rise of political gangsters as powerful officials or as rulers of thriving politically-connected business empires. Thus, it is incorrect to present the main lines of conflict in Russia as being between conservative, backward-looking survivors of the Soviet nomenclatura and a business 'oligarchy' representing 'free market' interests. The business oligarchs, who are far from being champions of the free market, infamously made their huge fortunes by politically usurping the process of privatisation in the 1990s (Oversloot 2006). Moreover, many present-day Russian tycoons were also the field operators of the old Soviet regime, acting as functionaries of such organisations as the Communist Youth League.6 The very genesis of the post-Soviet tycoons therefore was at the intersection between politico-bureaucratic power and business, and riddled with all kinds of criminal influences. Organised crime, already in existence during Soviet times, grew and proliferated with the rise of Russian capitalism and the corruption that characterises business and state relations (e.g. Lynch 2005).7 Such developments in democratic Russia can be viewed as having been directly affected by the social configuration of power that existed during the late Soviet era.

The legacy of authoritarianism is one aspect of the problem that certainly requires a significant degree of emphasis in the case of Indonesia. Immediately following the fall of Soeharto, the social forces that were not directly nurtured by the New Order and, therefore, would possibly have an interest in challenging the system of predatory capitalism that it forged (for example, sections of the liberal intelligentsia and professional groups in society, or the politically marginalised working class or peasantry) were not able to organise and develop into a coherent social force. This in turn allowed for the continued ascendance of many of the elements of the ancien regime—who were always more organised, coherent and endowed with material resources in the first place—in the context of an illiberal form of democracy that was mainly to be run by the logic of money politics. In a nutshell, these elements were better positioned than others in taking advantage of the opening up of Indonesian politics after 1998.

In this regard, another of McFaul's observations about Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union seems to be quite relevant. According to McFaul, democracy only emerged out of the ruins of the Soviet Union when there had been a clear political defeat of the forces of the ancien regime by strongly reformist interests, while new dictatorships have resulted from the alternate situation (McFaul 2002). Although no new dictatorship has emerged in Indonesia, a core argument made by Robison and Hadiz (2004) is that the constituents of the ancien regime in Indonesia were much less than unambiguously defeated, and certainly not replaced by any coherent liberal or reformist coalition.

In the Philippines, another icon of the Cold War, the anti-communist dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was dramatically toppled more than a decade before Soeharto. Here, the broad-based political opposition in 1986 benefited from having relatively sustained organisational activity over the years, owing to the authoritarian regime's comparative lack of success in domesticating sources of political dissent. The latter is partly shown in the fact that the Marcos regime continued to confront substantial armed insurrections on the part of both communist rural-based forces and of Moro separatism while in power and lacked authority over swathes of territory where such insurgencies were prominent. Boudreau observes, however, that the celebrated People Power Movement of 1986 displayed the important role of social and economic elites which included politicians and entrepreneurs who presided over social movement organisations. For this reason, 'elite activists', as Boudreau terms them, never feared that social protest 'would have socially revolutionary consequences' (see Boudreau 2004: 187; also see Thompson 1995) in the sense of radically redistributing power and wealth in society. Not surprisingly, the local political dynasties that were subordinated to Marcos when state power became more centralised under martial law subsequently found new opportunities to reclaim the privileged social and political positions they had enjoyed, under the subsequent money-politics run democracy typically presented as being characterised by the salience of 'goons, guns and gold'. In other words, the sway that elite families hold over local politics in the Philippines was strengthened by democratisation and the 1990s turn to decentralisation. Moreover, Hedman (2006) notes that more recent, post-authoritarian, civil society-based mobilisations against dominant oligarchic groups have frequently elicited counter-mobilisations spurred by conservative elements, operating with equal vigour in the name of a civil society—which by now has amply displayed its heterogeneity and internal contradictions.

Democratisation in Thailand has also been beset with problems that are eerily similar in several respects, especially in relation to the features of sub-national politics. Like in Indonesia, but with a degree of violence more closely approximating that of the Philippines, local politics long became the preserve of local strongmen and notable families and their informal networks of patronage, or phuak (Nelson 2005). This is in spite of any criticism that one might advance against the stereotyping of Thai local political figures (see Nishizaki 2006) in the style of the godfather-like chao pho. In the Thai context, decentralisation policy further entrenched the social and political position of predatory local notables rather than empower local citizenries.

In Indonesia, the system of power that came to replace the heavily centralised and authoritarian 'New Order' had already developed the following features within just a few years (see Hadiz 2004b: 619):

1) The decentralisation of power from the presidency to political parties and to parliament.

2) The rise of political parties mainly as expressions of shifting alliances of predatory interests, primarily those incubated by the New Order.

3) The decentralisation of power from Jakarta to the regions and the associated new importance of local offices such as that of bupati (regent) or town mayor, and of party branches and parliaments at the local level.

4) The emergence of decentralised, overlapping and diffused patronage networks built on the basis of competition for access and control over national and local institutions and resources.

5) The rise of political fixers, entrepreneurs and enforcers previously entrenched at the lower layers of the New Order's system of patronage.

6) The related emergence of hooligans and thugs organised in party militia and paramilitary forces, many of which have taken over some of the functions of the security forces proper.

Given the above, one could rightly ask from where the social base of support for the neo-liberal/neo-institutionalist agenda of reforms would emerge as it concerns decentralisation in post-authoritarian societies like Indonesia (or the Philippines and Thailand). From where would be found the social agents that could win the liberal victory that is required for these reforms to become politically ascendant? One answer that might be given appears in the form of an old favourite of modernisation theorists of a prior age: state bureaucratic and technocratic elites.

=== Elites, Decentralisation and the State ===
One view that has been highlighted is that the experience of Indonesia after 1998 demonstrates how the legacies of authoritarian rule can remain essential even as the institutional structures of authoritarian regimes dissipate. While decentralisation has accompanied the institutional unravelling of authoritarianism in Indonesia, good governance in the technocratic sense has not transpired because of the persisting legacies of the New Order. Thus is Indonesia's current quandary insofar as decentralisation is concerned: the centralised authoritarian system is no longer viable, yet democracy combined with decentralisation has failed to break down the predatory relations of power that underpinned the old system.

If one legacy of the New Order is that of instrumental control over state power, its institutions and resources, by powerful predatory forces, another is the severe disorganisation of civil society and independent societal movements—a development that followed the elimination of the Left in the 1960s. These legacies persist even as the institutional framework of governance in Indonesia has been radically reconfigured, and even as technocrats aided by able consultants and experts in international development agencies attempt to 'craft' or 'design' the appropriate sorts of institutions that are expected give rise to a culture and practice of good governance, and even political participation.

Neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist thinking might suggest that the way out of this predicament depends on the nurturance of forward-looking elites, whether within the state or sections of civil society—thus, the 'training for success argument' already alluded to. The aim would be to nurture strategic elites that would act as the vanguard of any push toward the desired form of decentralised governance by equipping them with the right skills and imbuing them with the right world views. There is clearly something eerily reminiscent here with early modernisation-style sociological understandings of social change. Because of this, it is useful to revisit some of the ways in which the roles of modernising elites have been understood as far as Indonesia and Southeast Asia are concerned, particularly as some of these have reappeared in new guises and implicitly come to inform much of the conventional thinking on decentralisation policy today.

It is well known that classical modernisation theory conceived the state as an intrinsically interest-neutral and, therefore, potentially benign agent of development and modernisation. From this perspective, the absence of a solid entrepreneurial class in virtually all the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s left the state with the role of being the main agent of the modernisation project. It was in this context that technocratic elites were invariably invoked to safeguard economic and political modernisation, frequently in a social and cultural environment that was understood to be 'pre-modern'. It was through the moulding of such technocratic elites that the emergence of a kind of 'civic culture' (à la Almond and Verba 1963) preconditioning democratic life was supposed to emerge. Moreover, it was no coincidence that at the height of the Cold War, these same elites were also imagined to be the main safeguards against the threat of communism. In the context of the Vietnam War's escalation, institutions like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, with close links to American policy-making circles, came to be very active in providing academic scholarships to selected members of the intelligentsia and bureaucracy in Indonesia and other parts of Asia (Hadiz and Dhakidae 2005: 11–13).

In Indonesia, the Ford Foundation was particularly instrumental in the emergence of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Indonesia as a major intellectual centre, from which the Soeharto regime would be provided with a steady stream of economic technocrats and experts (Ransom 1970). Many of these went on to key economic positions in his various cabinets over the years. The Cold War (and Vietnam War) context was very important in dictating this development—a similar process of training technocrats that would become bastions against the incursion of communist ideology occurred in Thailand and in the Philippines (Suehiro 2005; Tadem-Incarnacion 2005). Needless to say, particularly insofar as Indonesia and Asia in general are concerned, much of the emphasis on technocratic elites pre-dated the period of rapid capitalist development from the 1980s in the region that ultimately produced vibrant middle classes and bourgeoisie. The latter social actors would much later be seen as the most vital of modernising agents, the rise of which gave the state reason to retreat, especially from the economy.8

It is useful for our purposes to note the significance of Samuel Huntington's work, especially in his late 1960s and early 1970s incarnation (see Huntington 1968). It is not an exaggeration to suggest that this work signalled the beginning of a new variant in modernisation thinking that came to define society's modernity in terms of its institutional capacity to successfully maintain political order and stability. As a consequence, modern political systems of power and their institutions were to be increasingly understood as those that were capable of averting a society's descent into revolutionary chaos, which would be a sign of a lack of modernity. For the political scientist Emmerson and others who studied Indonesia broadly in this vein, a return to the party-based parliamentary system that had preceded both the New Order and the late Soekarno period's so-called 'Guided Democracy' offered political instability (Emmerson 1978: 104, 105; 1976: 250) rather than a way to political modernisation. In contrast, the New Order's 'bureaucratic pluralism' (Emmerson 1983) allowed institutions of state charged with economic policy a significant measure of autonomous space. In other words, state technocrats were insulated from societal pressure for the sake of the common good.

It is suggested here that the disposition within the neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist literature today—including on decentralisation—to emphasise benign technocracies able to rise above narrow interests, partially harks back to this particular phase of modernisation theory. Such is the case in spite of the actual history of overtly political links between technocrats and dictators in Southeast Asia and elsewhere during the Cold War. Thus, after a period of decline, modernisation theory has more lately been undergoing resurgence, taking the form of an economics-inspired neo-institutionalism as well as the predilection of social theory for rational choice and/or Putnamian notions of social capital—all of which feature significantly in the decentralisation literature.9

Not surprisingly, the Huntingtonian version of modernisation theory had become attractive to the intellectuals, technocrats and ideologues of authoritarian capitalist regimes, such as those in Soeharto's New Order (see Moertopo, 1973; Boileau 1983: 68), as it helped to legitimise their harsh treatment of detractors within society. In other words, the Huntingtonian revisionism helped to provide intellectual legitimacy for state policies that systematically maintained the disorganisation of civil society in order to guarantee the sort of political stability that was said to be conducive to economic growth (see Bourchier and Hadiz 2003). It should be recalled too that Marcos' vision of a New Society in the Philippines was partly formed with the help of Western-trained economic technocrats whose influence grew in the context of harsh authoritarian rule (Abinales and Amoroso 2005: 207–212), and yet were either complicit in or could not stop the looting of the economy by regimist cronies (e.g. Hutchcroft 1998a, chapters 6 and 7).

As is well-known, the New Order in Indonesia emerged in the mid-1960s out of the victory of an alliance of anti-communist forces led by the military, and which consisted of elements of the urban and rural propertied and middle classes. These groups were threatened by the increasingly strident radical populism of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), then the third largest in the world, which had forged a political alliance with President Soekarno—the nationalist firebrand whose autarchic (and ultimately disastrous) economic strategy and anti-Western foreign policy ostracised Indonesia from the major powers of the capitalist world. Soekarno's downfall was accompanied by the annihilation of the PKI through the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of real and alleged communists as well as detainment without trial of innumerable others. The violence that characterised the elimination of the PKI from Indonesia's political and historical landscape in turn paved the way for the development of a political regime that was not only designed to curtail the re-emergence of the Left, but also to pre-empt any substantial independent organising activity within any group in civil society. Labour, for example was to be organised only through one state-initiated and controlled labour union, as were other groups in civil society (Hadiz 1997).

This was the environment of systematic depoliticisation in which modernisation perspectives became influential in the scholarship on Indonesia. Borrowing from Riggs's (1966) classic analysis of Thailand, scholars like Jackson (1978) produced works that transferred to the Indonesian case many of the assumptions of modernisation theory, and incorporated such concepts as the 'bureaucratic polity' dominated by a narrowly-based elite freed from societal pressure. Other scholars, like Liddle, thought that the authoritarian New Order could be the incubator of a rational capitalist system and believed that Soeharto was being ably assisted toward fulfilling this task by a team of economic technocrats trained in the neoclassical tradition of economics (1991: 403, 404, 1992: 796–798).

In spite of some variations, Indonesian development problems were thus more or less posed in terms of producing the values conducive to modernisation or ensuring that agents possessing those values were politically or economically ascendant. Western-trained economic technocrats (MacDougall 1975)—starting with the University of Indonesia's so-called 'Berkeley Mafia' (Ransom 1970)—were usually portrayed in many accounts as the 'heroes' of modernisation who had to struggle to enforce rational policy decisions in the face of a pervasive pre-modern social and political culture.10

In Indonesia, another period of technocratic optimism was spurred after the fall of Soeharto, when the importance of educated 'modern' elites capable of making rational choices and rising above petty politics was once again regularly invoked. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, for example, declared upon his election in 2004 that he would appoint a cabinet made up of experts and technocrats, and limit the participation of political party figures driven by narrow interests. This was a promise he was notably unable to keep due to the realities of the constellation of power (Kompas 11 August 2004). Indeed the appeal of a supposedly interest-free technocracy has never completely abated in the region, although in Thailand, Thaksin had more or less marginalised the departments and agencies traditionally equated with technocratic influence (Suehiro 2005). In the Philippines, the case of President Arroyo is particularly interesting, as she is simultaneously a traditional oligarch and self-professed technocrat with advanced training in economics. Though keen to emphasise the latter part of her identity by assembling a so-called 'technocratic dream team' (Tadem-Incarnacion 2005) in her cabinet, the continuing corruption and cronyism that has tarnished her government speaks volumes about the limits of technocracy when placed in a broader social constellation of power that remains inhospitable.

Pro-technocracy positions obviously do not only arise from within sections of the state apparatus. A staunchly pro-technocracy approach has been more recently championed outside of the state in Indonesia by Mallarangeng (2002), an admirer of the economic historian Friedrich von Hayek. A U.S.-trained political scientist and now public commentator, Mallarangeng espouses a rather exceptionally blunt form of market fundamentalism in the Indonesian context. In fact, he has argued for the innate wisdom of technocratic pro-market policies and ideas as opposed to the objections typically put forward by groups representing populist and distributional coalitions. The Jakarta-based Freedom Institute, which he leads, has become a leading advocate of neo-liberal policy and technocratic decision-making. Mallarangeng certainly has his intellectual counterparts in the region—among them is Thammasat University's Medhi Krongkaew (2000), whose work ultimately portrays economic policy-making as the province of 'power-elites' that are essentially defined as technocrats perched in the state bureaucracy. Besides recalling Riggs's bureaucratic polity, his work largely and conveniently leaves out sustained discussion of the range of societal interests, including the Thai capitalist class, that profoundly influence the direction of policy-making; not the least after one of its leading representatives assumed the office of prime minister in 2001.11

There are different ways, of course, of understanding the role of the state, and its bureaucratic or technocratic elites. Robison (1986), for example, proposed that state power in Indonesia, as elsewhere, needed to be understood in the context of the wider system of class relationships (Robison 1986: 117–118). He analysed developments in Indonesia around the mid-point of New Order rule by postulating the emergence of an increasingly powerful domestic capitalist class and the implications this might have for the country's future. He later suggested that a version of 'Bonapartism' had taken hold in Indonesia insofar as a bourgeoisie forfeited power in favour of an authoritarian state, in order to maintain political stability. In Indonesia, the state thus proved especially vital to the consolidation of both capitalism and the capitalist class (Robison 1993: 41), and provided the catalyst as well for the emergence and consolidation of a capitalist oligarchy. Significantly, this capitalist oligarchy was to appropriate state power and to use it instrumentally to further its own interests (Robison and Hadiz 2004).

Still, what was the position of the technocrats within this oligarch-dominated system of power? Many Indonesian populists made the error of equating New Order economic policies with the interests of the technocrats (see Chalmers and Hadiz 1997, especially chapters 1, 2 and 6). On the other hand, those more favourably inclined toward the technocrats saw them as pushing through 'good' policies in spite of the rapacity of Soeharto-era politics. Such a view perhaps lingers on. It has been suggested, for example, that decentralisation policy was successfully advanced after 1998 through the efforts of technocratic 'agenda setters' who were endowed with superior information and knowledge vis-à-vis politicians who needed something to prove their reformist intentions (Smith n.d.). However, the neo-classically trained economists in Soeharto's various cabinets only provided a façade of technocratic rationality for a regime that exercised arbitrary power and was irreparably corrupt, and it is hard to sustain that they have become any more powerful subsequently. Lindsey (2001) thus likened the New Order not to rule by technocracy but rule in the style of criminal gangs, in which highway robbery as well as coercion and violence were formalised in the practices of the state.

It is indeed arguable that these much-lauded economic technocrats, in spite of international support, only enjoyed periods in which they were especially influential. This was during the early years of the New Order, when Soeharto was particularly eager to court international aid and investment, and when the Indonesian oil 'boom' of the 1970s ended around the mid-1980s. It was during these times that technocrats were able to promote economic agendas, such as that of partial economic deregulation and privatisation in the 1980s, as was strongly advocated by the World Bank.12 The economic technocrats' influence, however, was noticeably very low even during the New Order's final economic crisis in 1997–98, when Soeharto brushed aside IMF conditionalities that would have harmed the economic interests of the oligarchy, including the business fortunes of his family members and cronies (see the discussion in Robison and Hadiz 2004).

Even as Indonesia continues to struggle to re-emerge from the effects of this crisis in the post-Soeharto period—for several years amid continuing pressure from the IMF to institute neo-liberal economic reforms—there are few signs of more powerful economic technocrats as would-be 'modernising elites', who are able to spearhead the process of designing and constructing new institutions of markets and economic governance. This is in spite of the role of various groups of technocrats in helping outline the blueprint of post-crisis reforms, including with regard to decentralisation, with the assistance of international development experts and consultants. Thus the basic problem of the absence of a coherent domestic coalition of interest to underpin the neo-liberal agenda remains, excepting rather woefully isolated pockets of neo-liberals in a few government ministries and agencies, and some vocal academics who typically air their views through the media.

In short, it is true that Soeharto's fall marks the end of a long chapter and the beginning of a new one in Indonesian history, but it is not the sort of chapter that neo-liberal reformers or neo-institutionalists would have written. To their chagrin, the social, political and economic legacy of the New Order will likely prove quite enduring and continue to influence Indonesia's trajectory in the near future. Thus, powerful coalitions of modernising elites espousing genuine good governance reform agendas, and effectively contesting local power, remain rather difficult to find.

So, if not the social agents of neo-liberal technocracy, then what kinds are instead presiding over the process and outcomes of decentralisation in Indonesia? It is here that we me must turn to the already significant literature on predatory local bossism in Southeast Asia.

=== The Resilience of Predatory Power: Bossism and Its Cousins ===
As already pointed out, the post-New Order Indonesian experience has inspired comparative analyses with post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines (see Heryanto and Hadiz 2005). One area of comparison involves the role of local bosses or notables and predatory networks of patronage in the context of the rise of the institutions of democratic politics (see Savirani 2004). Sidel notes that as 'power has shifted "downwards" and "upwards" from within a centralised bureaucracy firmly rooted in Jakarta to elected members of assemblies in regencies, municipalities and provinces around the archipelago', scholars of Indonesia 'were quick to pick up on the rapid rise to prominence of local powerbrokers' (Sidel 2004: 67). This is the case although Indonesia's previously exceptionally centralised system of authoritarian rule made it difficult for anything resembling local bosses—prominent individuals with control over local coercive and economic resources and political machineries (Hedman and Sidel 2000: 88)—to have emerged.

By contrast, local strongmen or 'godfathers' are far better established in Thailand's recent history. Dubbed the chao pho, their social origins were at the junction between formal politics and criminal activity. According to Kasian Tejapira (2006: 13–14), these men 'usually had a provincial entrepreneur-cum-local mafia-boss background' for whom the 'establishment of a parliamentary democracy were unexpected gifts, which provided them with a golden opportunity to convert their hitherto shady local wealth and influence into legal power at the centre of national politics.' Kasian also considers such individuals as comprising a layer of 'electocrat' within Thai democracy: people who would typically have built personal fortunes in the 1960s and 1970s 'exploiting American aid intended for war efforts against neighbouring states and the military government's market-oriented development projects.' They are engaged in businesses 'such as land speculation, logging, public works, trucking, cash crops, entertainment, gambling, underground lotteries, prostitution, bootlegging, gunrunning, drug-trafficking, smuggling, etc.' Government contacts and violence were key features of their rise, as 'Intractable conflicts with business rivals and uncooperative officials were often solved with the help of hired gunmen.'

Still, according to Kasian Tejapira (2006: 14): 'the electocrats themselves were transformed from lowly mafia businessmen who had to kowtow to local officials into respectable members of parliament or Cabinet ministers, with jurisdiction over the promotion (or demotion) of their former 'patrons'. Once elected, they treated politics as a kind of business, effectively selling public policy, office, concession or title deed to the highest bidder. Shameless avarice was fuelled by the need to gather enough 'ammunition' for election campaigns to enable them to stay in power.'

In the Philippines, however, local political bosses come from traditionally dominant families and clans, the cacique, who were able to reclaim their ascendant position in society and politics after their authority was curtailed for so long by the state-centralising ambitions of Ferdinand Marcos. These families and clans could typically trace their lineage and dominant position back over many decades.13 As a lawyer-politician who did not emerge from the ranks of the cacique-proper, Marcos's rule, particularly during the period of martial law after 1972, was aimed at empowering the central state and its apparatus 'an active weapon against landed privilege'. Attacking the economic base of these clans, Marcos established quasi-government monopolies in such important export industries as sugar and coconut, and established control over other, smaller, export crops. Control of these monopolies was placed under businessmen whose position was dependent on Marcos's personal patronage (Rocamora 1995: xiv–xv). In the process, the latter cobbled together a new coalition of 'new entrepreneurs, newly professional politicians and technocrats' (Boudreau 2004: 79) who similarly resented the 'traditional' politicians or trapos. Anderson (1988) came to dub the system in the Philippines, post-People Power, as 'cacique democracy', dominated as it is by the traditionally dominant social forces that had been threatened by Marcos's state-centralising project.

Nevertheless, it is certainly necessary to be mindful of significant differences within Southeast Asia with regard to local bossism.14 Clearly, insofar as it has emerged in Indonesia, local bossism has been coloured by less outright violence than in either Thailand or the Philippines, where assassinations of politicians and activists are regarded as being a much more 'regular' part of political life. Furthermore, Tornquist (2000: 388) comments that bossism 'in the Philippines is characterised by the long history of US colonialism, partially elected government and more private control of resources'. In Indonesia, however, 'primitive accumulation through political and administrative means' has been comparatively more important. Therefore, most local Indonesian bosses are likely to be comparatively 'petty' in terms of having less private wealth, and in their dependence on public resources, according to Tornquist.

In this connection, Sidel (2004) provided a rather systematic basis for distinguishing the specific manifestations of the local bossism/local strongman phenomenon in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia. He does this by explaining their origins in diverse historical settings. He points out, for example, that local bosses only appeared as major players in Thailand in the 1980s in the context of the rapid industrialisation that coincided with the gradual withdrawal from politics of the military, which in turn opened the way to power for a range of civilian forces. The Thai so-called chao pho also essentially came to flourish within a European-like parliamentary system of democracy, but in which figures of authority in local and provincial components of parties have become very important partly due to the strategic nature of the rural, non-Bangkok vote. Moreover, the bureaucratic polity of Riggs (1966) did not completely dissipate; as Sidel notes (2004: 60), career civilian bureaucrats still retained much authority over local executive bodies, while military generals continued to wield influence through senatorial appointments and various forms of economic and political interventions. A major function of the chao pho in Thailand's democracy is to guarantee votes by 'delivering parliamentary constituencies, or regional clusters of constituencies, to Bangkok-based patrons, local clients, or themselves'. They do this on 'elections day, through a combination of coercion, vote-buying, and electoral fraud' (Sidel 2004: 59).

In the Philippines, it is the legacy of U.S. colonialism that was the most decisive factor in determining the evolution of bossism and the peculiar system of rule that characterised it. This system of rule gave rise to politically powerful, even dynastic, local families15 within a highly decentralised state, with a U.S.-style presidential system and a 'multi-tiered pattern of municipal, congressional, and provincial bosses (Sidel 2004: 60). Local bossism in the Philippines, in this sense, has a longer, more entrenched and formal history than the Thai 'strongman'. In the Philippines, local bossism has sometimes given dynastically entrenched families firm control over elected office, which in turn 'provides access to a broad array of state resources and prerogatives'. Here, political violence, intimidation and money politics all 'work in tandem with the mobilisation of local machines for self-perpetuation in office' (Sidel 2004: 56–57). It is well known that political violence in the Philippines can become exceedingly stark: in Sulu, for example, competing local clans are documented to have openly fought battles by fielding hundreds of armed men against each other in the provincial capital's streets (Gutierrez 1995).

Sidel is certainly correct about the aspects of 'timing' and 'context' that distinguish local bossism in Thailand from that of the Philippines. Nevertheless, it is still possible to trace the social origins of the chao pho to a more distant past. In fact, they arguably go back to a time when, despite King Chulalongkorn's administrative reforms initiated in the late nineteenth century and geared to develop a modern bureaucratic form of governance, the state failed to apply control and surveillance effectively in the hinterlands. This provided the chao pho, or at least their antecedents, with the opportunity to develop profitable illicit trades (drugs, gambling or smuggling) that enabled them to emerge as feared but respected leaders. Such leaders typically became 'strongmen' to whom locals could turn for protection against state and capitalist encroachment (Nishizaki 2002). As a result, they came to wield enormous influence in their communities and carved out loosely defined territorial bailiwicks largely beyond the control of the central state bureaucracy (see various chapters in McVey 2000; also see Nishizaki 2002). As capitalism developed in Thailand, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, such individuals increasingly developed a more varied range of economic interests.

In contrast, it has already been said that Indonesia's heavily centralised and bureaucratic New Order, which presided over a rapid period of industrialisation from the 1970s to the 1990s, provided comparatively little opportunity for the emergence of local 'strongmen' or 'bosses'. Insofar as they existed, they were subordinate to a broader system of political patronage based on Soeharto himself and also more distinctly based within the state and its local apparatus. According to Sidel, the fall of the New Order made it possible for bureaucratically-rooted 'local 'mafias' and 'networks', once an organic part of Soeharto's system of rule, to emerge 'around the country in tandem with the shift to competitive elections and the devolution of considerable state powers to elected regency-level,16 municipal and provincial assemblies'. Thus, local bossism in post-Soeharto Indonesia is less dominated by 'individual strongmen' or 'dynasties' than in Thailand and the Philippines than it is by more fluid clusters and cliques of businessmen, politicians and officials (see Sidel 2004: 68–69).

Nevertheless, there are variations even within the individual societies. Thus, many local politicians in Thailand could no doubt rightly object to the chao pho label given the many connotations involved, and Hedman and Sidel (2000, chapter 5) note how bossism within the Philippines can take different forms. Contrasting two economically advanced provinces—Cavite, just south of Manila, and Cebu—they observe that the former is characterised by the predominance of single-generation families of gangster-style politicians or warlords. The latter, by contrast, is notable for the predominance of more stereotypically paternalistic and dynastically-entrenched families at different levels of governance who manage to pass on power to succeeding generations.

As we shall see, predominant within the 'clusters' or 'cliques' that Sidel identifies as having emerged in Indonesia are politico-bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, military officers and gangsters—many cultivated within a range of youth and paramilitary organisations—that see democratisation and decentralisation as opportunities to now break free from the shackles of Jakarta-based interests to pursue their own predatory objectives. They also include actors, old and relatively new, whose social base lies within the corporatist and social organisations from which the New Order regularly recruited new apparatchik and local functionaries for decades. Again, the social actors most prominent in the local scramble for power and in forging regimes of governance at the local level are those who represent forces that had been nurtured in the provinces, kabupaten and towns within the formerly vast New Order system of patronage (Hadiz 2004a, 2004b).

It is therefore correct that the politics of 'local bossism' in post-Soeharto Indonesia are more fluid than in the Philippines or Thailand, in the sense of the more easily shifting nature of local coalitions of interests as well as the actual sites of local centres of power. Thus, Sidel refers to 'local mafias' in Indonesia rather than bosses per se to highlight the distinction. This Indonesian divergence is a legacy of having had to emerge 'out of' a more 'successfully' centralised authoritarian regime.

The tantalising question that arises as the localisation of power proceeds, however, is whether local bossism in Indonesia will develop features that are more 'solid' and give rise to more coherent, entrenched interests and alliances dominated by local notables of various sorts, leading toward local oligarchies. This is not merely a 'matter of time' question, but an important acknowledgement of how democratic politics can be consolidated in such a way that the mechanics and coalitions of interest that underpin them can be very different from those that characterise liberal forms.

Therefore, in spite of historically-defined differences, all three post-authoritarian Southeast Asian cases are characterised by regimes distinguished by the appropriation of state power, its prerogatives and resources; and by local predatory interests, whether through executive bodies, parliaments or both. The Philippines case may stand out in the way that power is expressed in the form of local political dynasties that wield such extensive control over local political and economic machineries. In all three cases, however, the maintenance of political ascendance involves different combinations and degrees of money politics, electoral fraud, political intimidation, selective mass mobilisations and parastatal or non-state security groups.

Moreover, one of Sidel's main reasons for asserting the continuing lack of opportunity for either Thai- or Filipino-style strongmen in Indonesia is an electoral system that remained prohibitive of the emergence of influential individuals or powerful 'dynasties'. He notes that in the Indonesian system, the heads of local and provincial governments are elected by their respective parliaments; this is in 'sharp contrast with the direct elections—and unrestricted powers—of mayors, governors and congressmen in the Philippines, and parliamentarians (MPs) in Thailand.' Hence, there are supposed to be 'institutional obstacles' in Indonesia to the rise of Thai- and Filipino-style local bossism (Sidel 2004: 70).

However, as discussed more fully especially in Chapters 3 and 6, there have been many changes applied to Indonesia's electoral system, including the institution of direct elections for the positions of bupati, mayor, governor and president/vice president. Although such changes have been welcomed by Indonesian democracy activists and neo-liberal/neo-institutionalist advocates alike, ironically, they also help newly ascendant and ambitious local politicos to secure their privileged positions in post-Soeharto Indonesia, relatively free from the shackles of a Jakarta-directed dynamics of party politics. Thus, as we shall see, direct local elections are providing new possibilities for those who aspire to be 'local bosses' in the Thai or Filipino sense. For those with higher ambitions, this might yet fuel a more vociferous appetite to build more coherent local networks of patronage based on less diffused economic and political alliances.

It should be re-asserted that the ascendance of local bosses and the like is not at all about the absence of a civil society cemented by enough social capital—civil society does exist in post-authoritarian Indonesia, in spite of the ravages of the Soeharto era, and it remains rich and dynamic in the Philippines and Thailand. Evidence of a measure of civil society dynamism in Indonesia is seen in labour organisations, for example, which have proliferated since the demise of the New Order, even though they remain largely ineffective as workers go about re-learning the business of organising in the context of large-scale unemployment and the pressures of international capital mobility, as well as intimidation from hired goons and thugs. Business and professional organisations exist in abundance as well, and the media is free despite having experienced some setbacks from time to time (see Heryanto and Hadiz 2005). NGOs, too, remain quite vibrant; even during the New Order there was a rich diversity of NGO-type activity in Indonesia (see Hadiwinata 2003; see also Eldridge 1995); the government had regarded some of these as potentially troublesome. Furthermore, though their origins cannot be separated from links to the state, it is fruitful to view many of Indonesia's current aspiring local bosses as occupying a space within civil society, or at least where civil society intersects with the state. In recognising this, it is not necessary to adopt Migdal's (1988) overly dichotomous arguments about local strongmen being the products of societies that are 'strong' and states that are 'weak'. It is significant that their political socialisation and incubation were in societal organisations, though of the kind previously patronised by the state.

The real issue with regard to civil society, therefore, is that most of its salient elements in post-authoritarian Indonesia, including at the local level, are those that were organised and nurtured under a rabidly predatory system of power and therefore were really placed at what might be conceived as an intersection between state and civil society. Most significant among these were the kinds of groupings of political operators, entrepreneurs, and goons and thugs that were so instrumental in the operations and sustenance of New Order rule at the local level. The interests of civil society are often tacitly understood in the neo-liberal tradition to favour free markets, rule of law, and democracy; thus, basically those associated with idealised notions of a vibrant and independent middle class or bourgeoisie. The reality is that there is a diversity of often competing interests within civil society itself. The political rise of such elements as goons and thugs constitutes nothing less than a 'glowing' testimony to that diversity, as well as the failure of other kinds of interests to successfully challenge them.

Comprehending the nature of this diversity is necessary in getting to the heart of contemporary struggles over power and the way these are organised at the local level. It is not some vague and lofty ideological battle about preferred systems of economic and political governance that is at stake. The contest is also not about the supposed rationality of the market in contradiction to the irrationality of politics, including identity politics; the way that markets actually operate is politically defined in the most basic sense. The struggle is more about the moulding of rules through which the fruits of rent-seeking are to be distributed among competing coalitions of local and national predatory interests. As we shall see, one of the major vehicles for these battles in Indonesia is now about control of the institutions of democracy par excellence, such as political parties and parliaments. But what kinds of political parties are they, and what sort of interests underpins them? These questions are addressed in the discussion to follow.

== Chapter 3: The Localisation of Power and Institutional Change ==
When placed firmly within a concrete societal and historical setting, the dynamics of electoral and party politics can provide important clues about the nature of the localisation of power. They may provide insights into the way in which the institutions of decentralisation and democracy at the local level actually operate and the kinds of interests that they advance and marginalise. Local electoral and party politics in post-authoritarian Indonesia are therefore worthy of the same kind of scrutiny given by Kerkvliet and Mojares (1991) to local politics in the Philippines in the immediate post-Marcos period. Whether in the Philippines, Indonesia or elsewhere, the dynamics of local electoral and party politics provide indicators of the way in which 'the articulations between the "local" and the "national" in politics' (Kerkvliet and Mojares 1991: 3) takes place in practice. They have ramifications as well for our understanding of the contradictory relationship between local power and pressures for pro-market good governance reforms.

In Indonesia, Golkar was for decades the vehicle that lent Soeharto's authoritarian rule a significant facade of electoral legitimacy. Notably, this was a vehicle that had begun life in the early 1960s as a mass organisation created by the military and its civilian allies to counter the influence of the PKI and its array of mass organisations (Boileau 1983; Reeve 1985). Throughout New Order rule, Golkar never failed to overwhelmingly win a national election, and it was only rarely defeated in elections at the local level (see Suryadinata 2002). As is well known, the People's Action Party (PAP) in Singapore and United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in Malaysia also provide good examples of dominant one-party rule in Southeast Asia that remain relevant to this day—though in the latter case it has lately been destabilised. In fact, not all attempts at establishing dominant state parties have been as unambiguously successful in the region as it has become ever more integrated with the global capitalist economy in the last few decades.

Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, for example, had attempted to form the so-called New Society Movement in the 1970s which, like Golkar in Indonesia, was intended to extend his reach and authority into the farthest corners of a vast archipelagic country. Although Marcos was highly successful in rigging elections so that the New Society Movement would convincingly triumph—much in the vein of Golkar—the façade of electoral legitimacy was decidedly more flimsy in the Philippines case. Thus, the last election held under Marcos actually helped to stimulate the emergence of the People Power Movement that would topple him in 1986 (Thompson 1995; Boudreau 2004). Clearly, part of the problem that Marcos's authoritarian centralising project faced was the legacy of strong local ruling families.

State and political party centralising endeavours have, in fact, been taking place in Southeast Asia more recently. Thailand's controversial businessman-politician Thaksin Shinawatra, for example, was known to have expressed his admiration for the Malaysian and Singaporean models of one-party rule. According to Pasuk, Thaksin once declared his preference for 'a parliament like Singapore where an opposition exists to give the state democratic credentials, but where the opposition is too small to have any effect.' As prime minister, he openly strived 'to achieve an effective one-party state' partly by ensuring that his Thai Rak Thai party absorbs 'smaller parties on what is a modified version of the UMNO model' in Malaysia (Pasuk 2004b: 2–3; also see Ockey 2003: 663). The state centralising project was cut short in September 2006 with the Thai Rak Thai's ouster by military and royalist elements (Nelson 2007) hostile to the Thaksin-led bourgeois appropriation of the state.1

It is Indonesian party and electoral politics, however, that have come to resemble those in post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines rather than the other way around. This is because state power has become much more diffuse since the end of the New Order, thereby providing opportunities for the development of a new dynamic that involves the rise of more localised coalitions of power and interest. At present, the institutions of governance and of electoral politics, national and local, contrast ever so starkly with those that seemed to be so permanently enshrined during Soeharto's long tenure, and which hindered the development of Philippines- or Thai-style bossism. Such a situation provides a unique opportunity to analyse breaks and continuities in power relations beneath the surface of institutional change.

This chapter provides an overview of the dynamics of institutional change in post-authoritarian Indonesia, including the format within which electoral and party politics now take place, with a focus on issues of localisation of power. The overview is premised on the idea that, as with all institutional frameworks of governance, those that define electoral and party politics can be regarded, first and foremost, as expressions of the way in which power is distributed in a specific context of time and space—of what sorts of interests tend to be dominant and which ones tend to be subordinated.

=== The Dynamics of Institutional Change ===

==== reorganising power institutionally ====
The most observable and dramatic change in Indonesia since the fall of Soeharto has undoubtedly been the prominence of electoral politics, now so energised and animated after decades of stringent and rigid controls. This change has involved the rise of political parties and parliaments, national and local, which play an important role in the post-authoritarian framework. Thus, few observers will dispute that while elections and political parties merely provided a façade for an essentially predatory, authoritarian regime during Soeharto's rule, they are now genuine vehicles of political contestation. The importance of political parties, and national and regional parliaments, is currently reflected in the often intense competition among elites to wield control over them and the increasingly vast resources expended in the process.

It should be noted that the main pieces of legislation that came to regulate the workings of Indonesia's electoral and democratic institutions following the demise of the New Order were Laws no. 2/1999 (on political parties), no. 3/1999 (on elections) and no. 4/1999 (on the constitution and status of various representative bodies). Most of the content of these laws was notably produced under the auspices of the same 'team of experts' led by scholar-bureaucrat Ryaas Rasyid, who was appointed by Habibie and played the most instrumental role in drafting the legislation that was to govern 'regional autonomy'. The original drafts produced by the team, however, were revised considerably as political parties ensconced in the last Soeharto-era parliament were already taking advantage of the demise of authoritarian rule and made important interventions (for details, see Robison and Hadiz 2004, chapter 9). The set of new political legislation was finally passed in January 1999, although it was a contentious process that involved objections from some civil society groups on some clauses they considered still too restrictive.

Thus, free parliamentary elections took place in June 1999, contested by 48 political parties out of the 150 or so that initially registered. These were Indonesia's first democratic national elections since 1955. Except for the first New Order-era elections, held in 1971, which involved a number of parties left over from the late Soekarno period,2 electoral contests had always pitted Golkar against only two other vehicles in a highly uneven race: the 'Islamic' United Development Party (PPP) and the 'nationalist' Indonesian Democratic Party were both actually strange, state-enforced amalgamations of otherwise highly disparate and even mutually antagonistic political parties. The historic 1999 elections thus contrasted sharply with elections implemented during the New Order (Suryadinata 2002; Antlov and Cederroth 2004), which were controlled and fixed to ensure the resounding victory of Golkar.

As is well-known, the 1999 legislative elections in Indonesia also ultimately opened the way for the largely unexpected emergence of Abdurrahman Wahid as president in October that year and brought an end to the seventeen-month tenure of B. J. Habibie, Soeharto's immediate successor and former protégé, as well as an embarrassing symbol of lingering New Order influence. For the first time in its history, Golkar was placed in an unfamiliar position of electoral loser, although its resources and still intact machinery ensured a respectable second place showing. In first place was the Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P) led by the enigmatic but then wildly popular Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of Indonesian first president and independence hero, Soekarno. But she failed to win the presidency at that time due to intricate, behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings in the MPR, which was still the supranational body that elected Indonesia's presidents and vice presidents, on behalf of Wahid. Nevertheless, PDI-P's victory did stimulate a process of migration to the party from Golkar and associated organisations, including in the towns and provinces.

The erratic Wahid, leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama, and with a reputation of a liberal-minded reformer, also did not last long as president. He was impeached by the MPR in July 2001 (see Barton 2002, especially chapter 12, for the long saga) ostensibly because of his implication in corruption scandals, notably involving the alleged misappropriation of Indonesian State Logistics Body (Bulog) funds (Baswir 2000) as well as a donation from the Sultan of Brunei. Wahid was replaced in July 2001 by his vice president, Megawati Soekanoputri.

There was more to Wahid's abrupt fall than 'mere' corruption scandals. In reality, he had become increasingly besieged the more he had challenged the authority of parliament, which was still full of New Order luminaries, as well as still-powerful institutions like the military and the police force. For example, he interfered unsuccessfully in military leadership squabbles, replaced political party figures from cabinet positions in favour of his confidantes, reshuffled the composition of the Supreme Court in a process that involved a scuffle with the political parties, and tried to dismiss the head of the national police in the face of parliamentary objections (for details of the Wahid presidency, see Barton 2002, chapters 11 and 12). Members of the NU-linked National Awakening Party (PKB) or those personally close to him often received positions as heads of institutions with significant rent-seeking opportunities at the expense of members of other parties.3

It seemed that Wahid the erstwhile reformer was increasingly being sucked into the system of money politics and patronage networks as he attempted to secure his own position in the face of institutions that remained obstinately predatory. The Wahid experience provided interesting glimpses, essentially, of the way that political power was being reorganised within Indonesia's new democratic institutions by a range of elites concerned with securing their positions and access to state power and resources in a highly uncertain period. Such a reorganisation would not just take place in Jakarta but occurred even in local political arenas. It may be said that Wahid was an initial victor but later became one of the chief casualties of this often highly intense process of reorganisation.

Although the unpredictability of events in Indonesian politics after the fall of Soeharto can be discomforting to those used to New Order-era 'orderliness', by the majority of accounts, Indonesia is now well and truly on the path of electoral democracy. This is in spite of fears that persist about the possibility of a future military comeback should Indonesia's civilian politicians botch things so badly that the country descends into a 'failed state' or risks disintegration. Although the military still retains its territorial command structure (as well as charitable foundations and companies), Indonesia has almost certainly gone too far away from the kind of heavily centralised authoritarianism of the New Order to slide back to it very easily.

More proof of democracy at work in Indonesia was displayed in 2004. On the occasion of the national and local legislative elections held in April that year, twenty-four political parties met the formal criteria that enabled them to participate. This time, Indonesia took one major step further—the legislative elections were followed by Indonesia's first ever direct presidential election in July 2004. Such a development saw incumbent Megawati Soekarnoputri run against such rivals as former Soeharto-era military strongman General Wiranto and other New Order-era notables. At the run-off stage of the process, which took place in September, Megawati lost to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, yet another retired key New Order General. Yudhoyono was a former chief of military social and political affairs and a member of the cabinets of various post-Soeharto governments. More importantly, these direct presidential polls were made possible by one among several amendments and reforms to Indonesia's 1945 Constitution, which during the Soeharto era was regarded as 'sacred' and unalterable as a matter of supposed national interest. All these changes paved the way for the next logical step, the holding of direct voting polls for provincial and local government heads in 2005 (see Chapter 6).

In spite of the move toward a popularly elected president, a series of reforms had actually been previously introduced, significantly, to formally reduce the powers of the president in relation to the national parliament. Given the long rule of both Soekarno and Soeharto, this was best reflected in the new limit of just two five-year terms for any president. Moreover, an amendment to Article 20 of the 1945 Constitution paved the way for an MPR decree, which stated that bills passed by the legislature would have to be made law within one month regardless of presidential approval. These changes expressed the fact that under the circumstances that came to prevail after the fall of Soeharto, no single individual could harness the kind of authority and power that the dictator had enjoyed in almost unchallenged fashion for decades. More specifically, the conjuncture of factors that made possible Soeharto's rise to such a dominant position in the 1960s was not there for any new aspiring national strongman to exploit. Among these the international Cold War context could be mentioned, as well as such domestic factors as the emergence of an army-led coalition of elite urban and rural interests that was seriously threatened by the presence of well-organised radical social forces.

What all these changes signalled was the flow of power away from the presidency and toward the legislature (and almost concurrently, from Jakarta to the periphery, as we shall see more clearly later). There was, however, more than that—also transpiring as presidents came and went, and election after election came to be held, was the development of a system of money-politics through which old and some new predatory interests found the means of reconstituting themselves within new networks and vehicles (Robison and Hadiz 2004, see chapter 9).

Thus, the advent of a new period that more prominently emphasised electoralism, parties and parliaments must be fundamentally understood from the vantage point of the survivors of a fallen regime struggling to ensure their survival within what seemed like new, uncharted territory after May 1998. The ascendance of parties and parliaments cannot be extricated from the strategies employed by a variety of interests to secure their position in a changed social and political environment. The survival of salient New Order elements as leading forces in Indonesia's democracy has led some observers to lament that the fall of Soeharto 'has seen massive institutional changes but little true reforms' (Antlov 2003b: 144). What such a sentiment actually expresses is the sense that even important institutional changes have failed to redistribute power in post-authoritarian Indonesia.

==== political parties and new contestations ====
Given this context, it not surprising that most of Indonesia's political parties have not emerged as 'natural' political entities that carry out 'aggregating' and 'articulating' functions, as conventional political theory would have it. Instead, these parties are the institutional expressions of temporary tactical alliances that draw from the same pool of predatory interests (Robison and Hadiz 2004: 228). In this sense, they are similar to most major parties in the Philippines and Thailand, which are also largely pragmatic alliances in nature and devoid of distinctive programmes or political vision (Shatkin 2003; Rocamora 2005; also see Ockey 2003). Indeed, it is essential to understand the logic of party politics in post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies as being quite fundamentally different to those associated with liberal forms of democracy.

Aquilino Pimentel, a prominent Senator and political party leader in the Philippines, as well as a major advocate of decentralisation, has suggested that (2006: 8–9):

In my country, today, crossing over from one party to another can easily be done because the political parties are not differentiated by ideologies. They are differentiated only by the depths of the pockets of their political leaders and the charisma that their financial fortunes create. And sad to say, what passes for their political platforms are mainly motherhood statements that have no bearing on the real needs of the people.

Following the fall of Soeharto, not only did a plethora of new parties—major and minor—appear, but several were significantly strengthened by close links to old New Order elements that found them convenient vehicles to protect and further their interests. Thus, the mass migration of former Golkar and military bigwigs to a number of so-called reformasi parties like the PDI-P took place, which at the provincial and local levels was accompanied by a similar migration of the New Order's former lower level operators and apparatchik (Hadiz 2004b). In Thailand, too, instructively, the abrupt fall of Thaksin was followed by the mass exodus of Thai Rak Thai stalwarts and members to rival parties (The Nation, 3 October 2006)—providing credence to Nelson's view that Thai politics are much less based on parties proper than they are on informal networks of patronage (2003: 9, 2005).

In Indonesia, the bureaucracy was always a major pillar of Golkar's supremacy, mobilised as it was on behalf of the state vehicle in every electoral contest held in the New Order. Malley suggests, instructively, that career civil servants have now taken over many of the top elected positions in local governments since the fall of Soeharto, riding on the coat tails of political parties, old and new. Of the eighty-nine cases of new mayoral and bupati appointments that he examined across several Indonesian provinces from November 1999 to December 2001, two-thirds were reportedly career civil servants, while only a quarter were 'other civilian' (another 6 per cent were from the military) (Malley 2003: 115). This is not only an indicator of continuity with the old New Order but is also indicative of the success that Soeharto-era local elites have had in reconstituting their power in the new democratic environment dominated by parties and parliaments.

Given this background, it is not surprising that schisms within and between political parties are not, therefore, primarily ideological or policy-related; their function has primarily been to act as vehicles for old and some new predatory elites to contest access to the spoils of state power. It is instructive as well that in spite of being provided with the opportunity to do so after 'Pancasila' was dropped as the ideology to which all organisations in Indonesia must adhere,4 few parties have come to develop distinctive social, political and economic platforms,5 aside from some that emphasised their adherence to Islam, such as the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS). Even such Islamic parties, however, have tended to 'moderate' their focus on Islamic identity over time. Thus, as we shall see, local politics are so fluid that inter-party alliances at the local and provincial levels can take forms that have nothing to do with alignments at the national level and allow individuals and groups to regularly switch their allegiances with little or no concern for ideology, policy or programme.

This view, however, is contested by a number of analysts. In a paper published by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) based in Sweden, Schneier (2005) acknowledges that Soeharto's abrupt departure from political power 'left the entire structure of New Order people and positions essentially intact', but he views this as no real obstacle to incremental change toward democracy and good governance. Schneier specifically suggests, that 'there is a dynamic by which a legislature's growing ability to make marginal changes in policy emboldens its members and outside groups to seek incrementally larger inputs' (2005: 21). More broadly, he argues that 'the success of the constitution-building process' that has taken place as part of the process of establishing a new framework of governance in Indonesia 'is contingent on a continuing dialogue between elite and reform elements in Indonesia and their counterparts in the global environment'. He also points to the experience of the United States, where the Constitution was written by wealthy property owners to protect their interests, but 'the institutions they created deliberately opened the system to progressive democratization and social justice'. Schneier ventures, moreover, that this is exactly 'what is happening in Indonesia' (2005: 24), where the process is being helped along in a global context that is generally more conducive to democratisation.

Apart from simplifying the historical experience of the United States, and the social conflicts and struggles that gave the descendants of Southern slaves many of the rights of citizenship almost two centuries after the Constitution was drafted, Schneier's analysis demonstrates some of the pitfalls of analyses that privilege institutional change as the central dynamic of social change. One of these is his implied 'matter of time' argument. His is a view that assumes that because new institutions are in place, new possibilities for important shifts in the structure of power and opportunities to consolidate liberal democracies will also be created in due course. Indonesia's democracy, according to such a view, will ultimately become more liberal in character as the constitutional liberalism that Schneier emphasises is nurtured gradually.

However, institutions do not have a life of their own that is independent of context. So, rather than mirror the United States, Indonesian developments after 1998 reflect more closely post-authoritarian developments in the former American colony of the Philippines. Here, political parties, for example, are described by one source from the early 1990s (Marlay 1991) as lacking 'coherent political programs', and generally tend to champion 'conservative social positions'. Political parties in both countries also have to go to great lengths to enforce any semblance of 'party discipline', which is so low that 'politicians switch 'capriciously back and forth' between vehicles, as Pimentel (2006) had observed for the Philippines. Rocamora (1998) regards political parties in the Philippines as belonging to elites who do not even attempt to organise support from broad segments of society but are underpinned by shifting coalitions centred on wealthy families. Such families may be wealthy enough to unite municipal political organisations and finance electoral battles at the provincial level or for congressional district seats.

Shatkin's (2003) analysis of local leadership in Thailand displays how informal power blocs, sometimes linking local bosses engaged in a range of illegal economic activities to Bangkok bigwigs, lie beneath the surface of electoral and party politics and determine such matters as candidate selection. Such a world as exists in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines is far from the liberal-pluralist model of aggregating and articulating functions, even if the model inadequately captures the empirical reality of the West itself.

Since political parties in post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies tend to be captured by conservative and predatory elites, they have little interest in pursuing programmes or policies that threaten the prevailing social relationships of power. As a consequence, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand may have parties, just like in the United States, and parliaments just like in Western Europe, together with a range of other institutions associated with democratic politics. However, the question remains: why do they operate so differently? To understand this apparent puzzle, one must go beyond institutions.

Here we must go back to a recurring theme in this book as far as Indonesia is concerned: the possible survival and continued salience of predatory interests both at the levels of national and local politics in spite of a raft of institutional reforms in the neo-liberal vein. In Indonesia, as was mentioned earlier, Golkar had regained its ascendance over Indonesian political party life just six years after the fall of Soeharto. It would be a grave mistake, however, to distinguish the interests that pervade in Golkar too starkly from those that underpin its rival political parties. As Robison and Hadiz have pointed out (2004: 227), other parties are 'also well populated by a variety of elements—political entrepreneurs and fixers, business and bureaucratic interests, both central and local'—that constituted the building blocks of the New Order's system of patronage, 'albeit sometimes ensconced only in the second or third layers'. For these sorts of interests, parties and parliaments are now the main avenue to political power and control over state institutions. Thus, varying concentrations of old oligarchic forces are dispersed among virtually all the major political parties, which are joined by an array of relative newcomers variously emphasising statism or social justice appeals, typically with reference to nationalist or Islamic ideals. Here and there, one will also find scattered bands of neo-liberal reformers, some with a high public profile but limited weight in terms of internal political party wrangling.

Thus it is not possible to speak of a clear reformist or anti-reformist political party in Indonesia today, whether or not reformism is to be strictly defined in the neo-liberal vein.

These developments are in turn partly attributable to the absence of effective organising vehicles representing social groups, such as labour and the peasantry, which were most politically marginalised under the New Order. The consequence is that the struggle over reformasi became the domain of vehicles that drew on the interests of those who were part of the New Order's extensive system of patronage, though not necessarily those who were ensconced at the very top layer. Democratisation and decentralisation, the rise of parliaments and political parties in Indonesia has meant, in a nutshell, the rise in fortunes of individuals and groups that had been nurtured and cultivated by the New Order as its local notables and apparatchik, minor political party operatives, fixers and entrepreneurs, and as its contractors, gangsters and thugs. It is these sorts of people and groups whose ambitions have been raised by the new opportunities opened by decentralisation and democracy, as shown in Chapters 4 and 5.

Perhaps most instructive of the nature of Indonesia's democracy has been the repositioning of the role of organised goons and thugs in politics. Formerly, these served as the informal henchmen of the New Order. Together with local military and police commands, they helped to 'maintain order' in local communities by keeping crime organised, while simultaneously profiting from illegal trades like gambling, prostitution and drug trafficking. It was an open secret that much of this organised crime was taking place with gangsters working in cahoots with their military and police patrons and protectors locally (see Ryter 2002; Wilson 2006). These criminals and thugs also helped to sustain a culture of fear that was important to the longevity of the New Order in spite of its periodic rituals of demonstrating popular legitimacy through elections. As explained further, although these sorts of links to local military or police commands continue to be maintained by some 'youth' organisations, the 'landscape' of organised thuggery is now far richer and more diverse than it used to be.

Thus, within the first few years of the fall of Soeharto's centralised regime, we witnessed the sudden proliferation of paramilitaries often related to individual political parties (see Wilson 2006). Henk Schulte-Nordholt (2002: 51) reports that there are about thirty militia organisations in Indonesia with an estimated membership of 700,000 people. Of course, it is difficult to corroborate such figures; however, they are a good indicator of the proliferation of uniformed, though essentially civilian, groups of goons and thugs in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Among the most notorious of these have been the PDI-P Satgas or Task Force, which seemed to have absorbed a large number of local thugs especially in and around such major cities as Medan in North Sumatra and Surabaya in East Java. Another feared outfit has been the Banser, a much older organisation linked to PKB, and its parent organisation, the 'traditionalist' Islamic Nahdlatul UIama. The latter was heavily implicated in the anti-PKI actions of the 1960s. Filling some of the space left by a military forced to take more than a step or two back from its previously pervasive role in politics as well as the informal security services business, some paramilitary forces have been hired by capitalists to protect factories during labour disputes.6 Moreover, some representatives of these organisations have achieved success in local electoral contests, though they have certainly not been able to achieve all of their lofty ambitions, as we shall observe in more detail later.

=== Decentralising Governance or Institutionalising Local Predatory Power? ===

==== centralisation vs. decentralisation ====
According to the World Bank (2003b: 1), Indonesia is now 'one of the more decentralized nations in the world'. Its degree of decentralisation 'is higher than the OECD average, and all other East Asian nations, except China'. For the most part, decentralisation has been deemed a success. The Asia Foundation (2004), for example, reports that local governments have coped well with the task of carrying out new functions and responsibilities delegated by the central government. However, much of the foregoing discussion suggests that such assertions should at least be questioned, especially with regard to objectives like the empowerment of local citizenries, public participation and the like.

Rather than aimed at substantively strengthening civil society participation at the local level, in more important ways decentralisation policy can be understood in relation to new quandaries arising from the politically and materially rising ambitions of local and regional elites immediately following the fall of Soeharto. Thus the so-called 'Big Bang' of decentralisation was a tangible response from Jakarta to the new, growing aspirations of local elites (World Bank 2003b; Bunte 2004) given the unravelling of the New Order's institutional framework of governance.7 These local elites had quickly latched on to the language of localism and of asserting local identities, often in ways that were quite distinctly if selectively atavistic, and which recalls some of the populist positions alluded to earlier in this book (see Introduction). Though many of these same local elites had been fastened to the New Order juggernaut, they were cognisant of the new opportunities being presented in the context of the very real diminishing capacity of the central state to impose its will and agenda.8

It should also be noted that the national parliament that passed Indonesia's decentralisation legislation was a leftover from the end of the Soeharto era. Schulte-Nordholt (2004: 37) argues credibly that its most dominant element, the former state party, Golkar, perceived that its position was particularly vulnerable on the main island of Java in any future electoral contest. Thus, supporting the decentralisation thrust constituted an attempt to maintain key support bases in the outer islands, a strategy that also suited the aims of then-President Habibie—who needed to distance himself from the centralising and authoritarian tendencies of his predecessor.

It may be useful to recall at this time just how centralised the New Order was in its mechanics. As the anthropologist Antlov notes, economic growth, which 'integrated the diversity of regions in Indonesia', was 'managed through a regulated and centralized system of plans and programs emanating from Jakarta down through provinces to districts, sub-districts and villages.' In the heyday of the New Order, 'Government offices, from central agencies in Jakarta to village branches, were in control of this process and policy blueprints', rather than local governments (Antlov 2003b: 143). The formulation of these blueprints was a process that was no less heavily centralised. Thus, 'Priorities and initiatives were determined from atop and seldom in line with local demands. The diversity of Indonesia's socio-economic conditions and cultures—the array of customary rights and modes of decision-making associated with the peoples of different localities—was effectively ignored' (Antlov 2003b: 143). In other words, due to the absence of vehicles through which resistance could be effectively and cohesively organised, policies and regulations were not only established but also implemented from above. Policy-making, not surprisingly, hardly ever required the targeted sections of the population to be involved in any substantive way.

Such a strategy of rule was reflective of the way in which a centralised system of patronage, centred on Soeharto himself, had come to evolve and become entrenched over the course of the New Order. Antlov (2003b: 143) describes it in the following way:

A massive patronage system was created in which the central government awarded local governments with budget allocation in exchange for loyalty. Budget allocations were not based on performance or need, but rather on how close local governments were with the central government, and how well local elites could lobby decisions-makers in Jakarta. The resulting rent-seeking system was effective in rapidly building the economy, but was not transparent or sustainable and created great regional dissatisfactions.

The overall product of these circumstances was a rigid and politically stifling regime, both for the locals and, arguably, for local officialdom. Again, Antlov's description of the situation that existed (2003b: 144) is apt:

Local government officials were accountable to central government authorities rather than local constituencies and thus had very little grassroots liability and support. Afraid of repression, citizens could not demand changes from their government. Public policies were determined by the state. The centralistic and authoritarian governance system also ruptured the social texture of local politics and community institutions. The crippling uniformity that the Suharto regime imposed on ordinary people undermined critical thinking and extracted a heavy price in the form of uniformity, standardization, co-optation of community leaders, abuse of power, and corruption.

Indeed, the New Order upon its inception had quickly enforced Jakarta's grip over the country, which had experienced a number of regional rebellions of varying levels of seriousness in the 1950s. The New Order achieved this by centralising the military apparatus and the state bureaucracy, a process that saw thousands of military officers appointed to strategic positions in local government, and the establishment of a military territorial system in which each layer of 'civilian' government was 'shadowed' by a parallel military command structure. Until the post-Soeharto decentralisation laws, the institutional foundations for twenty-five years of central domination of the apparatus of governance were laid down in Law no. 5/1974, which made heads of local and provincial governments accountable to superiors in Jakarta. A further measure of centralisation was administered with Law no. 5/1979, which standardised village administration throughout Indonesia on the basis of a Java-centric model and effectively reduced village heads to the status of subservient civil servants (MacAndrews 1986: 39; Kahin 1994: 209–210; Bourchier and Hadiz 2003: 255).

It is because of such a background that Laws no. 22/1999 and no. 25/1999 that spearheaded Indonesia's decentralisation seemed quite impressive. Some of the more salient stipulations of these laws included:9

a) The scrapping of a regional hierarchy in which provinces supervise kabupaten (regencies) and cities. The consequence was the establishment of the kabupaten and the city, instead of the provinces, as the focal points of regional governance. As a result, provincial governors are henceforth relegated to the position of mere 'representatives' of the centre, with little authority over the city mayor or bupati.

b) The related granting of permission to the kabupaten and the town/city, as the focal points of governance, to deal directly with various Jakarta agencies and ministries.

c) The awarding of jurisdiction over a large number of administrative and financial functions to the kabupaten and the city, but not over such matters as foreign policy, the judicial system, monetary/fiscal policy, religion, defence and security; these continue to be the domain of the central state.

d) The election of members of local parliaments (DPRD) among the local citizenry, from candidates offered by authorised political parties. The DPRD, in turn, were to elect the local bupati or mayor (and in the case of the provincial-level DPRD, the governor). This provided local parliamentarians with a great deal of latitude in terms of dealing with heads of local governments, whose election and tenure depended on them and the kinds of loose alliances and coalitions assembled in local parliaments.

e) The establishment of the mayor/bupati as being accountable to the DPRD or local parliament. The mayor or bupati must present periodic accountability reports to the relevant local parliament, which has the power to reject them.

f) The vesting of the DPRD with an array of broad powers. For example, members of the DPRD are to be involved, together with their respective bupati or mayors, in the formulation of the budget of the kabupaten and the municipality as well as in formulating other legislation. The DPRD also 'supervises' the implementation of bylaws/edicts.

g) The simplification of local level administrative structures. During the New Order, numerous national government bodies were represented through offices at the level of the town/city or kabupaten, as were local representations of provincial government offices. Thus, a dual structure had existed that, under Law no. 22 /1999, was to be scrapped. The array of nationally- and provincially-affiliated offices was to be amalgamated and integrated under a single structure headed by the mayor of a city/town, or bupati in the case of a kabupaten.

h) The transfer of an array of personnel functions to the local level of government, including those that deal with the appointment, transfer or dismissal of officials, as well as those that deal with their remuneration.

i) The provision by the central government to the regions of a General Allocation Grant (DAU) that is to be 'at least' 25 per cent of domestic revenue. Ninety per cent of this fund goes to regencies and cities and 10 per cent to provinces. Distribution to individual sub-national territories is done according to a special formula' (Turner and Podger 2003: 26).

j) The introduction of revenue sharing between central and regional governments in areas such as land and building taxes, forestry, fishery, mining and the important oil and gas sectors. According to the legislation on the fiscal balance between central and regional governments (Law no. 25/1999), 85 per cent of oil revenues (after tax) were to be taken by the central government. The remaining 15 per cent is to be taken by the region from which the oil is extracted.

k) The stipulation of a Special Allocation Grant (DAK) through which special regional initiatives could be funded. Significantly, local governments are also given the opportunity to secure loans, including loans from overseas sources.

l) The vesting of the Ministry of Home Affairs with the power to cancel any regional decree or regulation deemed to be in contradiction to higher legislation or the 'common good'.

In Indonesia, therefore, the initial design of decentralisation policy meant power being distinctly shifted from Jakarta to sub-provincial kabupaten and cities/towns, with the provinces in danger of being overlooked. As a point of comparison, decentralisation in the Philippines meant the establishment of a multi-tiered system of governance supervision involving the president, provincial governors as well as city and municipal mayors; whereby the central government has limited supervisory power over local government beyond the provincial level. In Thailand, by contrast, there exist separate administrative bodies responsible for the same territorial areas, one linked to the Ministry of the Interior and the other being units of elected local governments at different territorial levels. Here it is the empowerment of the latter that is intended in the institutional design of decentralisation. The point, however, is that in all these cases, the institutional design of decentralisation—regardless of whether intended to facilitate technocratic and market rationality or pave the way for the empowerment of local communities—would prove to be less important than the kinds of social interests and forces that would actually preside over actual institutions.

It should be noted in the Indonesian case that some of the stipulations on decentralisation listed above were later revised as a result of Law no. 32/2004, which replaced Law no. 22/1999. As has been pointed out earlier, the very limited official role of provincial governors became a bone of contention as elites at the local, provincial and central levels of governance jostled over control of state institutions and resources. Thus, the status and power of the provinces and the provincial governors—and provincial level elites, in general—were to be partially restored in subsequent revisions of the decentralisation legislation. If governors had complained that mayors and bupati no longer recognised their authority because of the vagueness of 1999 legislation,10 they were partially placated by the amendment that once again placed them more firmly in the role of superiors. Again this was no mere wrangling over technical details. Coalitions of interests ensconced at the provincial level feared being left out of the spoils of local power.

Furthermore, the 2004 legislative changes also established that mayors and bupati would be, for the first time, popularly elected. It is possible to view the changes to the 1999 legislation as being induced by conflicts related to growing challenge to the authority of Jakarta (and provincial governors) presented by bupati and mayors alike; paradoxically, these expressed both an attempt to rein them in and the growing propensity of aspiring local political bosses to carve out some form of institutional independence. In particular, one highly contentious issue between Jakarta and the regions pertained to the inclination of local DPRDs and heads of local governments to produce edicts and bylaws to supplement revenue in local budgets, many of which were controversial not the least because of the growth of predatory, rent-seeking activities at the local level (Media Indonesia 15 June 2006). Nevertheless, an important change was already achieved by 1999 and was reflective of the newfound bargaining position of some local elites vis-à-vis Jakarta: by then the heads of local government were no longer to be appointed by power-holders in the capital as had been the practice during the New Order. Although the earlier change represented achievement in carving out a real degree of autonomy from the dictates of interests entrenched in Jakarta, the subsequent introduction of direct local elections represented the successful extrication of bupati and mayors from their great dependence on the local legislative bodies that had been charged with electing them in the interim system.11

==== the fiscal regime ====
It is important to note that much of the wrangling about the rules for governing regional autonomy or decentralisation has pertained to its material basis; it most often concerned the financial arrangement set up between Jakarta and the regions to redistribute revenue. This arrangement also made accommodation for natural resource-rich areas to especially enjoy economic advantages.12 Significantly, the outcome of the financial stipulations contained in the 1999 legislation was that the revenues of kabupaten and city governments would derive from the DAU, the transfer of revenue shares and income accruing from local taxes and levies.

The World Bank (2005b: 1) soon came to enthuse that regions in Indonesia 'are responsible for one-third of all government spending, and half of the development budget', and that most 'spending on education, health and infrastructure is local'. Many like Turner and Podger, however, have noted a pertinent fact: according to Indonesian official data, the main source of revenue for 92 per cent of the sub-provincial governments of cities and kabupaten came from the DAU, 'with half the regions depending on it for 90 per cent or more of their revenues' (see Turner and Podger 2003: 40). According to a GTZ assessment, 'there are no significant own-source revenues of the regions since all major taxes are still kept by the central government', including property taxes which in other countries are typically a local source of revenue (GTZ n.d.).

Such sobering assessments suggest that most local-level governments do not in fact enjoy a significant level of financial autonomy from Jakarta in spite of the bombastic rhetoric. According to Lewis and Chakeri (2004), moreover, the central government of Indonesia spends a little less than half its development budget outside Jakarta and provides more than one-third of the development spending of the regions; moreover, the central government spending sometimes covers costs that, under the decentralisation legislation, have actually been transferred to sub-national governments.

In reality, therefore, the majority of sub-provincial governments remain financially dependent on centrally-allocated funds, particularly governments of provinces that are not particularly rich in natural resources. The Indonesian situation is not very different from those of Thailand and the Philippines. But the problem in each case is not simply a lack of political will to genuinely decentralise. Much of the hesitancy surrounding fiscal decentralisation in particular is no doubt tied closely to continuing tug-of-wars between national-based coalitions of interests and those ensconced sub-nationally.

With reference to Thailand, for example, one document described the situation there in the late 1990s in the following terms:13

(L)ocal government in Thailand is subjected to strong control by the central government . . . most resources and revenues generated are drawn into the centre . . . What is left to the local government is hardly adequate to meet the needs of local communities, both urban and rural.

Like their counterparts in Indonesia, local government units in Thailand have continued to rely heavily on central government subsidies,14 although the Decentralisation Act of 1999 intended that the share of government expenditure under the jurisdiction of local authorities was to have increased gradually from 20 to 35 per cent (Shatkin 2003: 20–21; Charas n.d.). By 2006, the 35 per cent level was far from being reached,15 and this was at least partially reflective of a tug-of-war between Bangkok and local coalitions of power, much like what has developed in Indonesia.

The situation is not very different in the Philippines, where the Local Government Code 1991 'mandated an automatic transfer of 40 per cent of internal revenue collections and widened the taxing powers of local governments,' although this has not been achieved. Nevertheless, according to Rocamora (2004), decentralisation has meant significant increases in local government revenue. Even in the Philippines case, however, central subsidies to local governments remain crucial.16 This displays the limitations of most local revenue bases, especially outside major municipalities,17 and also provides the central government with an economic instrument to control sub-national governments in spite of decentralisation. As in Indonesia and Thailand, the implementation of the internal revenue-sharing scheme has not always been in accordance to the written law; in Rocamora's view, it has not kept up with functions being devolved to the local level.18

In Indonesia, besides the necessity of ensuring that the central state coffers remain adequate to carry out such tasks as debt servicing, it has been a matter of concern to maintain some kind of economic parity among the different provinces and regions, in spite of ideas expressed about the necessity for local governments to compete with each other for a greater part of the economic pie. The same official data mentioned above show that 20 per cent of regions in Indonesia could be considered very poor, while another 20 per cent were well off. The richest 10 per cent of localities, however, had more than six times the revenue per capita of the poorest 10 per cent (Turner and Podger 2003). The World Bank, for its part, estimates that the richest local government in Indonesia today has fifty times the revenue per capita of the poorest one, and the richest province has 10 times as much revenue per capita as the poorest province (World Bank 2003b: 34). Lewis and Chakeri (2004) find that central government spending in the regions has helped to mitigate such inequalities, but only to a limited extent.19

It is in this context that the kabupaten of Kutai Kertanegara, in previously peripheral East Kalimantan, have become the most prominent beneficiary of decentralisation. A major producer of oil, gas and coal—and with a population of only about 500,000—the Kutai Kertanagara local government recently worked on the basis of a budget that was four times that of the entire nearby province of West Kalimantan (Hill 2006), which has a population of roughly four million.

Given the resources at his disposal, it is no coincidence that the bupati of Kutai Kertanegara, a New Order-era Golkar stalwart named Syaukani H. R. (van Klinken 2002.), came to be in a position to sponsor the formation of the Apkasi (Asosiasi Pemerintahan Kabupaten Seluruh Indonesia)—the main lobby group of kabupaten chiefs vis-à-vis Jakarta policy-makers. Under his leadership, Apkasi attempted to fight the central government's 2004 amendments on the 1999 set of legislation for fear that these would rein in the powers of local governments (Kompas 27 May 2004). It was supported in its endeavour by other groups representing local power interests, including Adeksi or the Association of Indonesian Municipal Parliaments (Kompas 31 January 2002). These associations clearly aspire to play a role in the future that is as prominent as that played by the various 'leagues' of local government officials in the Philippines, and play them far more effectively than the relatively tame Thai associations.20

Much of the impetus for the amendments in Indonesian law had to do with the widespread perception that local governments were abusing their newfound powers when dealing with local revenue collection. Significantly, the realities of budgetary constraints have induced local governments, with the approval of local parliaments, to develop new ways of collecting revenue; these are usually in the form of the controversial new levies and taxes mentioned earlier, which by now number in the thousands. Supporting the argument of local officials is the fact that approximately 2.6 million of 4.2 million civil servants who were employed at other levels of government were transferred to the local level (Jakarta Post 24 October 2000). This placed the burden of responsibility of paying these civil servants' salaries squarely on the shoulders of budget-constrained cities and kabupaten.

It is interesting, however, that the World Bank suggests that in aggregate terms, local governments should not claim to be facing such a struggle. According to its calculations, 'more than enough revenues were devolved in 2001 to match the transferred expenditure responsibilities'. This is so even when one accounts for the salaries of re-assigned civil servants, and the maintenance of former central government offices (World Bank 2003b: 32).

Whether driven by budgetary imperatives or simply by the impulse to carve out new economic niches or predatory practices autonomous from Jakarta politics, local officials routinely accuse Jakarta officials of not having a real political will to wholeheartedly implement decentralisation. Thus, local officials are particularly aggrieved at, and feel threatened by, central constraints on their taxation capacities. Many also argue that authority over a number of areas of governance, legally stipulated to reside at the sub-provincial level, has in reality never been transferred to them by Jakarta.21

It must be recalled that some statements from the very top of the Jakarta political hierarchy would have strengthened this perception among local officials of a lack of real intent to implement decentralisation. Indeed, no less than Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Soekarnoputri were known as only reluctant supporters of decentralisation. During their respective presidencies, both expressed themselves as staunch supporters of the unitary state structure who were concerned about the evolution of any decentralisation framework that would be federalist all but in name. Indeed, Megawati—whether unwilling or unable to distinguish between national disintegration and federalism—once pronounced her fear that Indonesians from different parts of the country will 'have to raise our own flags, sing our own anthems and may well have to have our own militaries' (Jakarta Post 17 July 2000). The commitment of the Abdurrahman Wahid presidency to decentralisation was also questioned when it abolished the Office of the State Ministry for Regional Autonomy (Brodjonegoro 2003) in August 2000, leaving decentralisation matters to be absorbed into the responsibilities of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Considerable controversy also erupted over the effective annulment of a local government right as stipulated by the legislation, that of borrowing from overseas sources. As a result, foreign borrowing continues to be negotiated and managed centrally from Jakarta, in spite of the greater role that sub-provincial units of government should theoretically have had with decentralisation. This appears to contradict the regional autonomy laws that in fact allow local governments to borrow abroad, albeit through the central government. They are unable to make use of this privilege, however, because Rizal Ramli, the coordinating minister for Economic Affairs under former President Abdurrahman Wahid, had banned local administrations from seeking loans from both domestic and foreign sources as early as February 2001 (Jakarta Post 13 February 2001). Significantly, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had asked the Indonesian government not to allow provincial administrations to obtain loans and issue bonds, fearing that these could eventually burden the central government.

The above shows that the controversy around the scope and design of local autonomy is indicative of contests among competing interests that have a concrete, material basis. This has been fairly consistently demonstrated in tussles around the rules of the game governing the power and jurisdiction of officials at the local, provincial and national levels.

In a nutshell, the politico-bureaucrats in Jakarta obviously have a vested interest in maintaining control over local financial resources while attempting to balance this against aspirations for greater local autonomy. On the other hand, local elites want to wrest direct control over these same resources, and they typically cite the injustice of past practices that allowed Jakarta to exploit Indonesia's vast riches at the expense of locals—this despite disparities in wealth among Indonesia's various regions. Thus, the contest has clearly been about control over resources, though it is also often expressed in terms of local pride, or ethnic or regional identity versus national unity (e.g. Schulte-Nordholt and van Klinken 2007).

It is important to note that the stakes involved will vary from place to place. They may be relatively limited in poor areas but not so for rising political entrepreneurs in resource-rich places like Kutai Kertanegara. The bupati of Bantul in Yogyakarta, who governs an area that is inclusive of the popular Parangtritis tourist site, spoke in 2000—just before the formal implementation of the decentralisation laws—of setting up new local state enterprises that would take a leading role in a variety of endeavours.22 Interestingly, though obvious rent-seeking opportunities are much scarcer here than in cash-rich Kutai Kertanegara, the same bupati allegedly has been involved in such activities as forcing businesses to make pay-offs when undertaking new projects and utilising public resources to fill his own electoral campaign war chest (Savirani 2004: 48–49). In any case, for this bupati and many like him, it is clearly better to have direct control over relatively scarce resources than to have no control over more abundant resources that are under Jakarta's jurisdiction.

Nevertheless, neo-institutionalist authors like Turner and Podger are inclined to view the reforms in Indonesia described above as primarily 'driven by democratisation'. They suggest that the institutional changes are but the 'logical extension of the overthrow of authoritarianism and the introduction of democratic politics at the local level.' The decentralisation legislation in particular, therefore, constituted no less than 'further demonstration of the strong impetus to promote and establish democracy' (Turner and Podger 2003: 27) that existed in the immediate period following the end of Soeharto's stifling rule.

Yet proponents of such a fairly straightforward relationship between decentralisation and democracy have had cause for discomfort. Interestingly, Turner and Podger complain that Law no. 22/1999 does not provide an 'explicit rationale' for decentralisation. They point out that there are only 'fleeting references to its purpose' in 'emphasising democracy, promoting community participation, being guided by popular aspirations, and introducing a range of accountability measures'. Thus, they warn against 'one of the dangers of political decentralisation'—the mere substitution of elites with the result that 'local populations fail to reap the benefits of local democracy' (2003: 70). Obviously, there are strong grounds for such fears.

One of their other laments is quite revealing of how the technocratic and managerialist world view dictates neo-institutionalist accounts of decentralisation and social change. A major flaw in the laws, as Turner and Podger see them, is the absence of 'Managerial and economic arguments extolling the efficiency advantages of decentralised governance' (2003: 27). Apparently, the fear is that without the unambiguous proclamation of such arguments, decentralisation would proceed aimlessly and fail to generate the intended institutions of good governance. But of course, the problem is much more complex than just the absence of such overt proclamations—decentralisation in Indonesia has morphed into something that is quite alien to the 'good governance' worldview because of the kinds of social interests that have presided over it.

The hopes, complaints and fears expressed by such authors encapsulate very neatly the dilemmas of the neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist understanding of decentralisation. On the one hand, decentralisation is viewed as part of the broader good governance agenda that is supposed to create the institutions necessary for the operations of the market. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that the good governance agenda can be usurped by social forces and groups that constitute strong sources of resistance to neo-liberal market reforms. Though the formal rules of the game governing decentralised governance were mainly designed by domestic and international technocrats, the case studies to which the book now turns reveal why they have not been able to run the local show at all.

== Chapter 4: A Political Sociology of Local Elites ==
This chapter examines the social and political bases of elite dominance in the context of the localisation of power in post-authoritarian Indonesia. It pays particular attention to the cases of North Sumatra and East Java, for reasons discussed below, though references are also made to other regions, notably Yogyakarta, which has a diversity of societal organisations and richness of intellectual life,1 and has long been considered an alternative centre of politics to Jakarta. Among the key issues examined are those that revolve around identifying local elites and their interests and the institutions and vehicles through which they attain or secure their positions within the institutions of governance of Indonesia's decentralised democracy.2 Many of these same questions occupied Shiraishi (2003) soon after the first electoral contests were held in the post-Soeharto period in June 1999. Shiraishi's survey, significantly, found that the majority of local parliamentarians have backgrounds in New Order-era political parties and youth and mass organisations.3

The picture that emerges from this chapter is one of local elites who have little abiding interest in good governance reforms in the neo-institutionalist vein. In fact, it may be argued that reforms involving transparency and accountability run diametrically opposed to their largely predatory inclinations. However, the groups that comprise these local elites have a large stake in the localisation of power, thus in decentralisation and democracy, and would be among those with the most to lose from any slide back to centralised authoritarianism, regardless of political genealogies that frequently can be traced back to the New Order. What these local elites have learned to do, effectively, is to safeguard their interests while negotiating with neo-liberal reformist impulses emanating from pockets of technocratic power in Jakarta and from within influential international development organisations. An observation can be made also about some similarities in terms of the attributes of rising Indonesian local elites in relation to their counterparts elsewhere. As in post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines, successful local elites in contemporary Indonesia tend to be those who already have access to substantial material resources as well as some degree of control over instruments of political intimidation, though the role of political violence in electoral politics remains much less salient in Indonesia than in the other Southeast Asian cases.

=== Terrains of Local Politics: North Sumatra and East Java ===
It should be noted that the geographically uneven nature of the development of capitalism, and therefore of integration with the world economy, often means that different parts of the same country will have experienced economic globalisation in diverse ways. This is perhaps most evident today in the rising economic behemoth that is China (Breslin 2000), where the coastal provinces in the southeast have far outstripped the rest of the country in terms of growth and the intensity of social change. It is for related reasons that North Sumatra and East Java are of particular interest in terms of understanding tendencies toward the localisation of power within the broader processes of economic globalisation.

Both North Sumatra and East Java have long been vibrant urban and industrial centres, through which links between the Indonesian national economy and global markets have been forged back to colonial times. North Sumatra, for example, was a centre of the vital colonial-era plantations sector, while East Java is home to the major port city of Surabaya—now regarded as a gateway from the western to the eastern parts of Indonesia—as well as to vast rural and agricultural hinterlands. East Java is also the site of oil and natural gas fields in Cepu and Bojonegoro, respectively. During the New Order, North Sumatra and East Java benefited from the national economic development policy; for example, both were locations for sprawling and quickly expanding centres of light manufacturing industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Like the heavily industrialised areas in and around Jakarta, portions of East Java and North Sumatra were sites of growing unrest and independent organisational activity by industrial workers during the late Soeharto years (Hadiz 1997; Kammen 1997; Ford 2003). In a nutshell, North Sumatra and East Java have long been among the parts of Indonesia in which integration with the world economy has taken place most intensively.

East Java and North Sumatra are also among the most heavily populated provinces in Indonesia. The population of East Java is 34.8 million, making it the second most heavily populated of Indonesia's provinces. This is second only to West Java, which is exceptional because large portions of it are but extensions of the gargantuan Jakarta economy. North Sumatra's population is considerably smaller, although its 11.7 million people make it the most heavily populated province outside of Java, which is one of the world's most densely populated islands. The capital city of East Java, Surabaya, is inhabited by about 2.6 million people while Medan, the capital city of North Sumatra, has close to 2 million citizens; this makes Surabaya and Medan the second and fourth largest cities in Indonesia, respectively.4 These statistics mask the fact that sprawling industrial, urban and peri-urban formations, with a substantial number of inhabitants, surround these two cities to make up a Greater Surabaya and Greater Medan with much larger total populations. Any brief visit to these cities will confirm the existence of massive peri-urban formations that are in reality inextricable from the economy and society of both cities. In this regard, they are but smaller versions of Jakarta, which spilled-over into neighbouring Tangerang, Bekasi and Depok a long time ago; the vast urban sprawl that is Metro Manila, which made incursions into such regions as Cavite; and the Thai behemoth that is the Extended Bangkok Metropolitan Region.

As in many other parts of Indonesia, in both North Sumatra and East Java, those who inhabited the lower layers of the system of patronage on which the New Order was premised have been the greatest beneficiaries of the opening of political space. They have since latched on to political parties and parliaments at the local level, which they now populate and typically dominate, to further their growing ambitions (Hadiz 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Malley 2003). As mentioned, this has raised the issue of the emergence of new, decentralised systems of corruption that are at least equally rabid as the New Order's but, undoubtedly, less predictable—to the chagrin of business. One major East Java-based businessman in the real estate sector calculates that official and unofficial levies make up to 20 per cent of his operating costs.5

In 2002, the leaders of two North Sumatran business associations claimed that 'some 70 percent of development projects in the North Sumatra provincial administration were tarnished by the practices of collusion, corruption and nepotism' (Jakarta Post 23 September 2002). Echoing a fairly commonly held opinion in the general public, Indonesian political scientist Indria Samego laments that 'People got nothing out of autonomy, while local officials got rich' (Jakarta Post 21 August 2002).

As elsewhere in Indonesia, electoral politics have become lively in North Sumatra and East Java since the departure of Soeharto from the political stage. In North Sumatra and the rest of Indonesia, the PDI-P was the clear victor in the 1999 elections. It won 10 of the 24 North Sumatran allocated national parliamentary seats, 30 of the 85 provincial parliamentary seats and 228 of the overall 690 seats scattered across the sub-provincial parliaments in the province.6 Altogether, the PDI-P won over 2 million of the 5.1 million votes cast in North Sumatra, while in second place was Golkar, the former state party of the New Order, with around 1.1 million votes. The fortunes of the PDI-P in North Sumatra were to change in 2004 as a reflection of its dwindling popularity nationwide after several years of the Megawati presidency, during which she failed to fulfil the high expectations of, especially, the poor among her supporters. In 2004, the PDI-P only managed slightly more than 825,000 of the over 5.5 million votes cast in North Sumatra. This was well behind the result achieved by Golkar, which won more than 1,130,000 of the votes,7 thus winning first place in the province, as it did nationally this time around.

In East Java, the PDI-P came second in 1999, winning 6.7 million of the approximately 19.8 million votes cast. The victor in East Java in 1999, not surprisingly, was the PKB led by former President Abdurrahman Wahid; the party is particularly strong in the province's rural hinterland. Here, the PKB won more than 7 million votes although, significantly, the PDI-P was victorious in the capital city of Surabaya.8 Not coincidentally, rural East Java is also the mainstay of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the traditional Islamic organisation with a reputed membership of 30 to 35 million nationally, and which is mainly organised on the basis of networks of Islamic boarding schools or pesantren. In 2004, the PKB maintained its first place position in the province, winning 6.3 million of the votes cast out of a total of just over 20.5 million. The PDI-P and Golkar mustered a little over 4.3 million and just under 2.7 million of the votes, respectively.9

The ups and downs in the political fortunes of political parties are highly suggestive of a vibrant democratic life in Indonesia today. While it is true that decentralisation has been accompanied by democratisation in North Sumatra and East Java, as it has elsewhere in Indonesia, this is not the complete story. The present and following chapters will illustrate in some detail how predatory elites have appropriated Indonesia's institutions of decentralisation and democracy.

=== The Arena of Struggles ===
A few basic propositions need to be put forward at this juncture about Indonesia's local elites. First, former New Order elites have learned to dominate democracy at the local level through the use of money politics and various instruments of selective political mobilisation and intimidation. Insofar as relatively new players have entered the game, including those with at least nominally reformist credentials, they have also been largely drawn into the logic of money politics and rent-seeking to ensure their political survival.10 Second, among these New Order elites are old bureaucrats who now wish to transform their longstanding hold on the bureaucracy into direct possession of political power, and they have sought to do this mainly by cobbling together local coalitions that would support their forays into elected office. Third, also among these increasingly salient elites are local entrepreneurs, commonly presiding over only small- or medium-level businesses—for example, in contracting, trade or a range of services—whose ambitions have similarly been on the rise. Although many are content to participate in the new democratic arena as unofficial financial backers of candidates11—more than a few in the hope of obtaining access to contracts and gaining other forms of preferential treatment from local government—a growing number have directly plunged into electoral politics by contesting local elections. Thus many local entrepreneurs now seek to reinforce their economic position through possession of direct political power. In this regard, comparisons with post-authoritarian Thailand in particular are instructive, where Arghiros notes, citing Withaya, that 'around 61 per cent of councillors in office between 1990 and 1995 were merchants or owned their own business' (2001: 24).

Significantly, many such local entrepreneur-politicos in contemporary Indonesia have backgrounds in business associations that were linked to Golkar and the state during the New Order. Among the most notable are Gapensi (the Indonesian National Contractors Association), Kadinda (branch of the nationally-organised Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry), REI (Indonesian Real Estate Association), HIPPI (The Indonesian Indigenous Entrepreneurs Association) and HIPMI (The Association of Indonesian Young Entrepreneurs). These were all organisations through which businesspeople forged political alliances, advanced their business fortunes and sought access to state projects and patronage. Though clearly always playing in a league much lower than the Jakarta-based conglomerates of the Soeharto period, these businesses were no less distinctly a part of, and nurtured within, the network of patronage that extended down to the local level during the heyday of the New Order.

Fourth, an array of goons and thugs that had played the role of local enforcers during much of the New Order has also been seeking to establish a niche within Indonesia's democracy. Given the scrutiny placed on the human rights record of Indonesia's military and police forces following the demise of the New Order, they have been well-positioned to provide muscle when political actors and groups require instruments of coercion, intimidation or selective mass mobilisation.12 Even though their fortunes, collectively, have not been consistently good, many among their ranks have grown in ambition and have actively tried to wrest control of local political party instruments, as well as contest local office. Here, lines of comparison with the Philippines—where 'goons and guns' (plus gold) have 'traditionally' featured prominently in local political life—can be drawn to some extent, as they can be with Thailand. It should be pointed out that levels of gross acts of political violence in Indonesia have yet to reach those associated with post-authoritarian politics in either the Philippines or in Thailand, where politically motivated murders, for example, are more regular occurrences.13 In fact, as discussed in Chapter 6, many local elites in Indonesia are lately developing an interest in ensuring that violence in local politics is curtailed as much as possible during election time.

Finally, usually scattered within the other groups are political operators who have emerged out of student and mass organisations that were either considered to be amenable or tolerated by the New Order. Among these are the HMI, the Islamic Students Association; the GMNI, the association of 'nationalist' students with traditional affinities to Soekarnoist populism;14 the GMKI, an association of Christian students; and the KNPI, the New Order-era state-sponsored corporatist youth organisation. Such organisations had traditionally been a major recruiting ground from which the New Order replenished its supply of political operators and apparatchik; thus, they were rather important conduits to power. It should be remembered that members of the HMI and other non-communist student organisations, perhaps most notably the small but well-connected PMKRI (Association of Catholic Students of the Republic of Indonesia), played a major role in the destruction of the PKI and its affiliate organisations and in the early process of the New Order's institutional development.

It should be noted that the above 'list' of local elites is not exhaustive nor is it mutually exclusive in nature, as individuals can straddle more than one of the categories. Easily added to this list, for example, are local aristocrats and assorted nobilities (Dwipayana 2005), strewn across many parts of Indonesia, who see decentralisation as an opportunity to press their claims for a privileged place in the post-authoritarian system. They will do this by latching on to decentralisation demands that are made in the name of protecting local identity and culture or religion (Faucher 2007: 443); the enactment of customary law, for example, would almost anywhere largely benefit pre-capitalist ruling elites. Many of them might overlap with what van Klinken (2002) calls new 'ethnic elites'.

Van Klinken (2004) also notes that long-dead sultanates and mini royalties are being revived all across Indonesia, and many members of old royal families see democratisation and decentralisation in Indonesia as a window of opportunity for regaining their social and political standing. Clearly, populist sentiments, partly consisting of the call to return to old traditions—and of the type discussed in the Introduction—are an important part of the ideological weaponry of these kinds of social actors as they seek to carve out a niche for themselves in local politics after 1998. Their predictably atavistic pretensions have often had negative effects on inter-ethnic relations in areas characterised by the presence of an 'indigenous' people and significant migrant populations.15

Local nobilities and other traditional elites are not rank outsiders who are only now trying to gain a foothold on local power with the demise of authoritarianism. As Magenda's (1991) study of East Kalimantan elites in the 1980s showed, one dynamic of the New Order involved the absorption of local nobilities into the local state apparatus, and so many of them will have been endowed with considerable local bureaucratic power. In other words, some 'royalist' social actors may actually represent entrenched local bureaucratic interests pursuing new strategies of social and political ascendancy.

Whatever a more 'complete' list of salient local elites would actually look like,16 an important point to make is that local politics today also offer teasing glimpses of Indonesia's possible near future. It is interesting, for example, that even local politicos sometimes speculate that only the rich will soon be able to win political office. What this kind of speculation actually throws up is the real possibility that parties and parliaments will sooner than later, and much less ambiguously, become vehicles for the distribution of the spoils of power among the wealthy and the ruthless.17 Thus, Indonesia's democracy could increasingly exclude those unequipped to play the game of money politics, and to a lesser extent thuggery, in spite of the widening of political participation through elections and the stated intentions of decentralisation policy. In other words, the localisation of power may continue to produce domains within which local elites preside over contests to control institutions and resources without significantly empowering local citizenries.

Of course, the rich are especially well positioned in most functioning democracies in the world today—the United States is one of the finer examples of a democracy whose workings are dominated by the moneyed and propertied. Such an observation clearly would not have surprised Karl Marx. Nevertheless, the observation pertaining to Indonesia takes on a different importance in relation to the logic of a particularly predatory mode of politics, whereby control over public institutions and their resources becomes a major means for private accumulation as well as the forging of corrupt networks of patronage, including through non-transparent and illegal forms of distributing largesse. Thus, as to be expected, local officials in Indonesia are finding their positions quite profitable, as the rent-seeking possibilities offered by decentralisation are enhanced, and new alliances with local business interests are forged. One former member of the Surabaya legislature openly confesses to receiving regular kickbacks from businesspeople to facilitate their projects; he considers this to be 'normal' practice.18 In the same vein, Savirani speaks of entrepreneurs giving kickbacks to the bupati of Bantul in Yogyakarta, who some consider a reformer, as a matter of course when doing business in his area of jurisdiction (2004: 48–49).

The new rent-seeking opportunities provided by decentralisation clearly make up the fuel for the often intense levels of conflict that surround contests for control of key institutions of governance at the local level. In places like North Sumatra and East Java, especially in the more economically advanced and industrial areas that surround the capital cities of Medan and Surabaya, respectively, much is to be gained by local elites through their levy-making prerogatives and control over local budgets. Through the control of these local budgets, officials are able to approve or reject projects, for example, and are able to be involved in the widespread practice of marking up their actual costs. In this regard, the Indonesian experience does not depart substantially from that of the Thai, as documented by authors like Arghiros. He notes that Thai local politicians have stood to gain much from approving development budgets and infrastructure projects through which businessmen can make huge profits from skimming and overstating costs (Arghiros 2001: 23–24).

Clearly, it is quite easy in a world such as this for would-be reformers to be either marginalised or simply sucked into the logic of rent-seeking. The late Yogyakarta provincial parliamentarian, Ryadi Gunawan, talked about gradually reforming his party, the PDI-P, through an internal gradual process. A former academic and NGO activist who had been active in the GMNI, he expressed disappointment at the same time with the fact that he had to regularly deal with corrupt practices as well as goons and thugs within the party, though he had come to accept this as being unavoidable.19 Marin Purba, a former critical student figure based in Bandung in the 1980s and active in the Christian student organisation, the GMKI, somehow managed to win the mayoralty of the town of Pematang Siantar in North Sumatra through complex deals with a number of political parties in the local legislature.20 Though keen to project an image of technocratic rationality and professionalism, he was to be ousted from office because of his implication in a corruption scandal.

The advent of direct popular elections for heads of local and provincial governments (discussed in Chapter 6) also provided the stimulus for the creation of some peculiar political bedfellows. For example, some well-known representatives of predatory elites, and NGO and other reformist activists have sometimes converged in supporting particular candidates due to peculiar local exigencies. In such cases, the activists often become quite acutely aware of the strains being placed on their self-perceptions of personal integrity as they are forced to engage in the ruthless game of money politics.

Interestingly, local politicos have sometimes been placed on the defensive in the public discourse by having to rationalise what appear to be policies that repel investment and place a burden on ordinary citizens—the exact opposite of what decentralisation is supposed to achieve according to neo-liberal/neo-institutionalist prescriptions. Despite the growing criticism of local levies, for example, Medan parliamentarian and Pemuda Pancasila prominent figure Bangkit Sitepu suggested in 2001 that it should not be problem for businesspeople to give back to society some of the profits they have been allowed to enjoy.21 This is an opinion not dissimilar to that often voiced by representatives of locally powerful groups latching on to populist notions of justice, especially those laced with racist sentiments against members of the ethnic Chinese business community.22

Such an opinion is obviously worrisome to international development organisations like the World Bank, which have invested resources as well as a significant measure of prestige into the Indonesian decentralisation process, and for whom decentralisation itself is a major pivot of good governance and markets. Thus, World Bank economists in Indonesia came to characterise decentralisation here as a 'flawed process'—one that still opens up immense opportunities to improve the lives of ordinary people but is marred by a host of 'nuisance taxes' imposed by local governments that adversely affect the climate of business (Jakarta Post 16 July 2003).

It should be emphasised that local predatory interests are not entirely homogenous in their make-up. Thus, there also can be important tensions and contradictions insofar as local interests are concerned: businesspeople like Yopie Batubara, elected in 2004 as a member of the DPD representing North Sumatra, or Medan-based ethnic Chinese entrepreneur Surya Sampurna echo then KADIN chief Aburizal Bakrie's concerns, voiced in Jakarta, that the barrage of new, formal and informal levies will burden business and discourage investment.23 Yet, in spite of such locally-rooted tensions and contradictions, distinct politico-business alliances at the sub-national level are clearly emerging; these are concerned about gaining a measure of autonomy from the dictates of Jakarta. This is particularly so given that rent-seeking opportunities at the local level can be quite enticing, as the divide between the realms of politics and business, and the public and the private, remains as hazy as during the heyday of the New Order. Local NGO activists in North Sumatra, for example, have characterised the provincial parliament there as a 'boxing ring', in which parliamentarians slug it out with one another to further the interests of powerful business groups with which they have respectively forged alliances to pursue rent-seeking opportunities.24

One major area of controversy insofar as business interests are concerned relates to which level of government actually has the jurisdiction over investment approvals. Officials at different levels regularly give conflicting accounts of the formal procedures of foreign investment and how much real autonomy sub-provincial authorities have with regard to approving new projects. Whatever the actual written rules spell out, the reality of uncertainty does not bode well for Indonesia's efforts to attract foreign investors after the debacle of the 1997–1998 economic crisis. Furthermore, according to one researcher, it would be difficult to get approval for many new investment projects if members of local legislatures were not approached and somehow remunerated.25 The consequences of this situation is investor lack of confidence in the state's ability to uphold and enforce legal contracts and the requirement that they seek out the instruments through which politically-connected racketeers can be dealt with, for example, in the form of non-transparent deals with local politicos.

Conscious of the newfound power and authority of heads of local governments, and because 'the paradigms on doing business' have now changed, a 'Meet the Bupatis' Forum was organised in Jakarta as early as May 2002 by no less than two leading international firms operating in Indonesia—PT Harvest International and PT Microsoft Indonesia. During the forum, the chief executive officer of Harvest International, Harvey Goldstein—who has had years of experience in Indonesia and often acts as an unofficial spokesman for foreign investors—proclaimed that as most business activity takes place outside of Jakarta, doing business in the regions required 'a firm and committed relationship with the Bupatis' (Guerin 2002). Clearly, international investors have become increasingly aware of the importance of forging alliances with local officials.

In this connection, many central government officials openly suggest, however, that local officials lack the skill and ability to negotiate complex contracts, for instance with large multinational mining companies, and that this responsibility should remain with Jakarta (Jakarta Post 30 October 2000). Much of this notion stems from the belief that local politicos are poorly educated, which is supposed to explain the poor performance of many local legislative bodies. The failure of local parliamentarians to live up to the standards of 'good governance' is better explained, however, by their innate interests rather than poor education. Indeed, Shiraishi (2003) discovered in four provinces he surveyed (North Sumatra, East Java, Bali and East Kalimantan) in 1999 that the vast majority of local parliamentarians were university graduates, though of course there is a large number of tertiary education institutions in Indonesia with questionable reputations.

Thus, on the basis of a viewpoint directly opposite to that frequently stated by Jakarta-based technocrats, the bupati of Deli Serdang in North Sumatra in 2001—at the time a retired military officer—expressed his annoyance at what he saw as Jakarta's underestimation of the capabilities of local officials. In his view, local officials and politicos are more than capable of carrying out the burden and responsibilities of decentralisation. For him, this was merely another excuse not to devolve power and authority to the local level. He was equally adamant that investment plans within his area of jurisdiction would have to go through his office though this was denied by the then provincial governor, the late Teuku Rizal Nurdin. The latter insisted that the right to approve investment projects was a prerogative of government at the provincial level.26 Given the preponderance of kickbacks related to investment approval procedures, the lack of clarity regarding the jurisdiction of each level of government is undoubtedly troublesome for potential investors.

In response to such a problem, the central government has made initiatives to simplify investment procedures and update the existing legislation governing foreign investment. In April 2004, President Megawati Soekarnoputri signed a decree on investment procedures that aimed to 'end confusion about which authorities investors should approach, following the implementation of a huge regional autonomy programme in 2001' (Jakarta Post 16 April 2004). This did not seem to solve the problem, however. According to the same newspaper report, 'The decree said regional officials as well as ministerial offices may transfer their authority for issuing permits to the [National Investment Coordinating Board]. But it did not say whether they must do so'. Such ambiguity displays the continuing tug-of-war between officials at different levels of governance.

Investment procedural issues will take particularly sticky forms in industries that are resource-based. Gellert notes, for example, that during the Habibie and Wahid presidencies, governments at the level of the kabupaten were given the authority to issue 'timber utilisation permits', as well as 'timber extraction permits'. This was of course in line with the decentralisation agenda that was running at full speed at the time. The outcomes, however, were a boom in the issuance of such permits and the effective legalisation of lucrative illegal logging activities. A struggle ensued whereby the central government under President Megawati Soekarnoputri attempted to restrict the authority of local governments over logging. Gellert remarks as well that the kabupaten continued to issue small-scale logging permits and impose local fees for quite some time, while the collection of central fees remained minimal. He also adds that the bupati of Berau, in forestry-rich East Kalimantan, was brought up on charges of embezzling US$9.4 million in relation to the tax obligations of companies engaged locally in lucrative logging activities (Gellert 2005: 154–155).

On occasion, local predatory interests will collide spectacularly with those of foreign investors, as was the case in the controversial sale of 25.5 per cent shares of the state-owned cement producer, Semen Gresik, to the Mexican concern, Cemex. A Semen Gresik subsidiary named Semen Padang, a cement producer in West Sumatra, was also involved in the purchase by default. The problem that ensued was that the management of Semen Padang and local politicos in West Sumatra adamantly opposed the deal and were eventually able to win the support of some members of the central government in Jakarta. Frustrated with the protracted wrangling over its purchase, Cemex brought the government of Indonesia to arbitration after the latter failed to abide by a 1998 investment deal that was supposed to allow the company to gradually become the majority shareholder of Semen Gresik (Jakarta Post 26 May 2006). On the other hand, through a different company called PT Andalas Tuah Sakato, the government of West Sumatra stated its intent to purchase the shares in dispute (Tempo Interaktif No. 38/VI/May 23–29, 2006) and was opposed to an alternative arrangement whereby the exasperated Cemex would sell its stake in PT Semen Gresik to an Indonesian private concern, PT Rajawali, owned by New Order-era businessman Peter Sondakh, or to PT Bosowa, a company seen to be linked to Vice-President Jusuf Kalla.27 Though the stand-off was finally resolved by the sale to Rajawali (Jakarta Post 25 July 2006), the issue has been both very emotive in West Sumatra, where local politicos have successfully used populist and atavistic sentiment to cast Semen Padang as a source of pride of the people, as well as exceedingly messy. In a damning indictment of opponents of Cemex, the journalist Vincent Lingga (Lingga 2006), characterises them as:

vested interests, narrowminded nationalists and various groups of rent seekers [who] have tried since 2001 to spin off SP [Sement Padang], one of three SG cement subsidiaries, from the SG [Semen Gresik] group. Leaders of the West Sumatra provincial legislature, the then governor of West Sumatra and top SP executives in mid-2001 passed a decree expropriating SP until such time as it is separated from SG. But would the campaign to spin off SP from SG to make it a stand-alone state company really benefit the West Sumatra people? Not likely, if the findings of the special audit on SP by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 2004–2005 is any indication.

According to Lingga, in the same article:<blockquote>The rent seekers simply want to retain SP as their cash cow as they did in 2000–2003. The forensic audit that was made at the order of SG shareholders and completed in May 2005 found almost all types of bad corporate governance practices rife in SP. They were notably rampant between 2001 and September 2003, when it was controlled by the then renegade management with the full support of local rent seekers within the legislature and local administration. Auditors estimated tens of millions of dollars in outright and potential losses due to bad practices or even blatant fraud in procurement, inventory and marketing management.</blockquote>

=== Local Elites, Local Ambitions ===
Following up on the points made in the previous chapter, special attention will now be devoted to local elites who have dominated Indonesia's party politics and electoral contests—conducted from 2005 on the basis of the popular vote, and before that on the basis of voting confined to local parliamentary bodies. These contests are intricately related to the emergence of still shifting and mutually competing local systems of patronage, cemented by money politics, and at times, instruments of political coercion involving youth/gangster organisations and civilian militia.

Significantly, competition among different groups of enforcers has become more intense and less regulated than it was during the New Order. Although typically revolving around turf disputes, inter-gang conflict has also been more directly related to the dynamics of inter-political party competition. This is unlike the previous New Order era, during which state-sponsored henchmen and enforcers would characteristically find protectors within the local Golkar leadership or military and police commands. It is in the context of this new, unpredictable and frequently rough-and-tumble world of local politics that conflict and competition within a diverse array of local elites will be examined, with particular consideration given to the New Order-era entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and henchmen who have now reinvented themselves as democratic actors.

It is interesting that many of the examples of conflict among players in local politics are often presented by the actors themselves, at the one extreme, as having to do with lofty conceptions of political morality or community interest. At the other extreme, they are also often presented as boiling down to banal rivalries between local individuals and personalities, as animosities among different political actors may indeed run very deep for a variety of reasons.28 These kinds of self-presentations are often quite misleading. Whether or not banal, underlying these conflicts is almost always the scramble for power and control over key institutions and resources. The crux of the matter is that control of local political offices and machineries, and the resultant access to rent-seeking opportunities, provide the concrete basis for some of the most intense of electoral and political party conflicts at the local level in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Furthermore, many of these conflicts instructively involve the growing schism between local coalitions of power and those based in Jakarta.

In connection with the previously mentioned example of central and local conflict over the issuance of highly lucrative logging permits, Obidzinski (2005: 199) notes how the framework of decentralisation had made the bupati very powerful and, therefore, predictably encouraged businesspeople in that industry to heed local governments at the expense of Jakarta. Such conflicts are no less than the concrete manifestations of a continuing tug-of-war among powerful coalitions of interests at different levels of governance that have a tangible, material basis. They have considerable impact as well on the way in which the formal institutions of decentralisation, and of democracy, continue to be forged and reshaped in Indonesia, and the modes in which they actually operate. McCarthy (2007), in particular, in his study of Central Kalimantan, offers a grim picture of how illegal logging involves conflict in which a range of people, from gangsters to officials at various levels of government to businessmen and traditional local notables, all play an integral part.

<nowiki>**</nowiki>bureaucrats and political power**

As was noted earlier, not long after the fall of the New Order, Malley had shown that old New Order bureaucrats tended to already dominate and prevail in local electoral contests. The significance of this observation is that it indicates how individuals endowed with bureaucratic power, as career bureaucrats, have successfully sought to transform themselves into holders of political power proper. Again, the Indonesian situation is not exceptional when developments here are placed in the context of broader global developments. In post-Soviet Russia, for example, it has been noted that prominent members of the old communist-era bureaucracy had taken control of many local governments even in the context of the early Yeltsin reforms, and were able to use their incumbency to good use when having to face electoral contests (see Slider 2001).

What Savirani has called the 'bureaucrat model' (Savirani 2004: 73) of powerful new local politicos is perhaps best represented in the person of Syaukani H. R., a controversial bupati of Kutai Kertanagera. The area, as mentioned previously, is particularly wealthy due to its natural resource endowment. As head of, undoubtedly, the richest local government in Indonesia, Syaukani was also chairman of Apkasi, the Indonesian District Governments' Association. This group has played a leading role in protecting the interests of local governments in the face of threats of some degree of re-centralisation.

As Savarani notes, Syaukani started his career as a civil servant in 1973 and only transformed himself into a major politician at the very end of the New Order when he headed the local parliament in the former kabupaten of Kutai resulting from the 1997 election—the last of those highly orchestrated by the New Order. Not surprisingly, he was backed by powerful Golkar political machine. Elected as Kutai Kertanegara's first bupati following the division of Kutai into three kabupaten after the fall of Soeharto, the ambitious Syaukani was re-elected in 2005 (Tempo Interaktif 2 June 2005). Armed with huge amounts of readily available funds, he has built his popularity on a number of local semi-welfarist programmes. He has also displayed a penchant for supporting financially dubious, high prestige 'white elephant' projects (van Klinken 2002). Interestingly, one of Syaukani's actions was to revive the long comatose Sultanate of Kutai Kertenagara, no doubt in a bid to further bolster his populist credibility and make claims of being a defender of the allegedly indigenous cultural heritage. However, this was not enough to hinder corruption charges being laid on him for misappropriating public funds earmarked for constructing an airfield (Tempo 1–7 January 2007: 36–37) and a subsequent conviction involving a jail term.

The general observation made by Malley mentioned earlier would appear to hold true as well in North Sumatra, where a considerable number of local heads of governments have been former New Order-era bureaucrats; sixteen of the twenty-two elected since the fall of Soeharto till 2002 were such individuals (Hadiz 2003). Thus, representatives of Savirani's 'bureaucrat model' are easily found here. The rise of bureaucrats with growing political ambitions arguably offers strong evidence of continuities with the New Order at the level of dominant interests in spite of the incredible changes that have occurred at the level of institutional frameworks of governance since 1998.

Still, it is important to point out that longstanding entrenchment as a bureaucrat will not always ensure victory in the electoral arena.

For example, in the Medan mayoral election of June 2005, former deputy mayor and long-time local career bureaucrat Maulana Pohan was defeated by his erstwhile boss, the incumbent Abdillah, a businessman in the contracting industry with huge political and economic resources who had the support of both Golkar and the PDI-P. In contrast, although a Golkar functionary during New Order times, Pohan was in fact nominated by an Islamic party, the PKS.29 Ironically, the PKS had achieved notable success in the 2004 national legislative elections by exploiting its image as a party of outsiders, untainted by corruption. This was not the first time the businessman Abdillah had defeated a noted bureaucrat in a mayoral election. In 2000, Abdillah was also able to muster the resources necessary to defeat another longstanding local career bureaucrat, Ridwan Batubara. This was achieved in a controversial process that, as we shall see later, involved blatant displays of both political intimidation and money politics.

Not surprisingly, the 'bureaucrat model' of rising local politico is to be readily found elsewhere in Indonesia. In East Java, one finds individuals like Wien Hendrarso, the bupati of Sidoardjo, who as 'regional secretary' (Sekretaris Daerah, or Sekda) was previously the locality's senior career bureaucrat. Hailing from a line of local officials stretching back to colonial times,30 he was first elected in 2000 before being overwhelmingly re-elected in 2005. Instructively, as another New Order-era career bureaucrat, he was a long-time Golkar stalwart and functionary, but his re-election was secured through the support of a coalition of political parties that consisted of the PKB, the PKS and PAN. One of the defeated rival candidates on this occasion was supported by a notionally powerful coalition consisting of Golkar and the PDI-P (Republika Online 12 September 2005)—two entities that formed the major rival blocs in the national parliament in Jakarta; although in the specific East Java context, PKB has been traditionally regarded as the strongest party.

Such outwardly 'strange' political party alignments in Medan and Sidoarjo are particularly instructive, even as they are replicated ad infinitum elsewhere in Indonesian local politics. They provide just two of numerous examples of the fluidity and temporality of party affiliations, which increasingly has little to do with official ideologies or programmes. They provide examples also of how old New Order elites—in these instances based in the bureaucracy—have repositioned themselves in Indonesia's competitive democratic system, and attempted to transform their long hold on the bureaucracy into a direct grasp of local political power. A key aspect of such a transformation involves latching on to political party vehicles, which increasingly function as key instruments through which the modes of distribution and allocation of political and economic largesse are being defined through intricate behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing, characteristically involving monetary transactions.

A noticeable related development is that, in spite of their origins in and long association with Golkar, bureaucrats will not necessarily turn to it as their chosen electoral vehicle when contesting public office. Though this may be attributable to the availability of other options in a democratised environment, it is also because local branches of Golkar have in specific instances championed other kinds of key local elites, especially from within business circles, over those bureaucrats who used to provide its major pillar of support during the New Order. Given such competition for the endorsement of Golkar—still well-endowed and comparatively impressive as a political machine many years after the demise of the New Order—formerly obedient and rigid local bureaucrats who harbour rising political ambitions have had to be extremely agile and creative in their attempts to thrive in the newer democratic political arena.

Given that bureaucrats' loyalties to Golkar were once cast in stone, they have been remarkably successful in finding new, accommodating vehicles through which they can forge new alliances and strategies of survival and advancement. Thus, it is common to find former New Order bureaucrats strewn across all kinds of post-Soeharto political parties, all over the vast Indonesian archipelago, regardless of their professed political platforms and philosophies.

=== entrepreneurs and politics ===
Businesspeople entering the arena of local politics directly have frequently emerged as the main rivals of former New Order bureaucrats in the battle for political ascendance, and they deserve some extra attention. In North Sumatra, an obvious example of the businessman-politician is offered in the person of Rudolf Pardede, the scion of a family business empire based on hotels, property, textiles and other industries. As the PDI-P boss in North Sumatra he was elected deputy governor in 2003 in a pairing with then incumbent governor Teuku Rizal Nurdin, a New Order-era appointee and retired general who managed to retain his position after the old regime's demise. Pardede, whose father was one of the most well-known figures of the non-ethnic Chinese North Sumatran business community that goes back to the 1950s and 1960s, notably ascended to the post of governor following Teuku Rizal Nurdin's death in a plane crash in September 2005, in spite of some strenuous opposition from the provincial parliament. Subsequently, however, Pardede was involved in decidedly ugly wrangling with the central leadership of his own party in Jakarta. In spite of the stature that he attained in the North Sumatra party branch since Indonesian democratisation, the PDI-P in Jakarta refused to endorse him for the gubernatorial elections-proper of 2008—and opted for a New Order-era general and party outsider instead (Detik.com. 25 January 2008).

Before such developments, the combination of Teuku Rizal Nurdin and Rudolf Pardede had been a particularly striking one for it appeared to perfectly synergise local political and business power. The former, as one-time chief of the military command in North Sumatra and with close family ties to the old Melayu Deli aristocracy based in Medan and its environs, had good claims to being a true New Order-era local notable who had risen to national prominence. While Pardede is a good representative of the rising ambitions of locally-based businesspeople, fuelled by the opportunities presented by political and administrative decentralisation, he was in fact no newcomer to politics. Pardede was no less than a member of the national parliament of Indonesia in the 1980s, representing the PDI-P's direct ancestor—the politically inconsequential PDI, the New Order-era party of so-called 'secular-nationalists.'31

Although no one as aggressively ambitious is immediately noticeable within the East Java business community, we encounter individuals such as Ridwan Hisyam, a real estate developer and former chairman of the East Java Branch of HIPMI, an association of 'young' Indonesian businessmen. Also no newcomer to politics, he sat in the Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, or People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), from 1997 until 2004 representing Golkar, thus straddling the very late New Order and early post-Soeharto periods as a national politician.

Pardede and Hisyam are obviously examples of a more established stratum of local businessmen who had managed to cross over into national politics during the New Order, latching on to vehicles like Golkar and the old PDI. With political bases beyond the sub-provincial, individuals such as these can be expected to be critical of decentralisation's emphasis on the level of cities and kabupaten. As chair of the East Java chapter of Golkar and an unsuccessful contender for deputy governor in 2003, Hisyam openly questions the idea that local autonomy, in the way that it had been framed by the 1999 legislation, has actually made business investments more practical or less costly.32

It is notable, however, that before being discarded by his superiors in the party hierarchy in Jakarta, Pardede had come to be deeply entangled in conflicts over the control of sub-provincial political machineries with PDI-P local bigwigs in North Sumatra. In these conflicts, Pardede was usually perceived as representing the interests of the Jakarta leadership of the party against those of local political operators (an irony given his subsequent abandonment by Jakarta). What is interesting here is that his political ambitions, which were once channelled through national-level political institutions, have since been diverted to regional and local level political arenas, where the potential prizes have been enhanced due to decentralisation. Thus the trajectory of Pardede's political career from the national to the regional/local is indicative of the growing importance of contests over local power in post-authoritarian Indonesia.

Only a notch or two below individuals like Pardede in North Sumatra's political ladder, we come across individuals such as Ali Umri, a local businessman/contractor and former Golkar parliamentarian. Mayor of the town of Binjai since 2000, he was re-elected in 2005 with Golkar support, after defeating, among others, fellow businessman Herman Manan, himself the son of a police lieutenant colonel who had served as a New Order-era mayor of the town.33 Another defeated contestant on this occasion was private businessman Indra Bungsu, who received the backing of the staunchly Muslim PKS, even though he is not a party cadre and in fact hails from a family of local aristocrats and supporters of 'secular-nationalist' Soekarnoism.34 The only non-business candidate in this particular race was Abdul Gani Sitepu, a long-time local career bureaucrat who was able to cobble together support from a range of diverse parties with very little ostensibly in common by way of official platforms or ideological positions.35 Subsequently, the fast-rising Ali Umri made an unsuccessful bid for the North Sumatran gubernatorial election of 2008.

In nearby Serdang Bedagai, we find Helifizar 'David' Purba, a contractor whose base has actually been in the local branch of the New Order-era youth/gangster organisation, the Pemuda Pancasila. A feared and respected local notable, he was instrumental in the establishment of Serdang Bedagai as a new kabupaten, separating from the economically strategic Deli Serdang, which envelopes the North Sumatran capital city of Medan. It is arguable that, spending more than billions of rupiah of his own money by his own estimate to lobby for the establishment of the new kabupaten,36 Purba had always cast his eye on the post of bupati. In fact, he was even the contractor for the erection of the new, quite impressive bupati office building in the main town of Tebing Tinggi.

In this connection, it should be reasserted that many local business figures who engage in politics have emerged from the contracting/construction industry, from which illicit profit could be readily made given the opportunities for skimming and marking-up the value of public projects. As pointed out earlier, Arghiros notes the same phenomenon occurring in Thailand (2001:24). This is likely to be more than mere coincidence; it strongly suggests that decentralised politics in the Southeast Asian post-authoritarian context is particularly appealing to those businesspeople who are at least partly dependent on access to public projects and funds. Kasian Tejapira, too, characterises businessmen-cum-local criminal bosses in Thailand who flourished initially in businesses where access to government was crucial to their success, and an environment in which non-transparency and even illegal activity were distinctive features (2006: 13–14).

Significantly, Serdang Bedagai is merely one of many new kabupaten that has been established in Indonesia since the fall of the New Order, creating ever newer arenas of contestation over local power and resources. By the end of 2003, there were 32 provinces as well as 416 kabupaten and municipalities in Indonesia, with the latter increasing in number at an annual rate of 10 per cent (Brodjonegoro 2003) before the scheduled legislative elections of April 2004 brought this development to a halt by virtue of administrative necessity. Today, new provinces like that of Banten, Bangka Belitung, Gorontalo, Riau Archipelago and North Maluku can be found on a map of Indonesia. Typically, local notables like Purba in Serdang Bedagai would have been instrumental in the establishment of such new administrative entities as they seek to carve out a more independent niche for themselves in the new struggles between competing with typically predatory local coalitions of power. Yusril Ihza Mahendra, leader of the Islamic-oriented Crescent and Star Party, as well as a former Soeharto speech-writer and member of several reformasi-era cabinets, is known to have been a major supporter of the establishment of Bangka Belitung as a separate province from South Sumatra. Erwiza Erman (2007) notes how in these tin-rich islands, local business interests, colluding with local officials and gangsters, have sought to wrest control of the tin industry from the state-owned tin company, and have profited from illicit trade. Likewise, Banten was established as a province separate from West Java with the support of a Banten native who served in the national parliament for Golkar. According to Syarif Hidayat (2007), 'project racketeering', especially in the area of construction, involving one of the area's leading entrepreneurs, as well as local thugs traditionally called jawara, has since become more pervasive.37

Instructively, in the case of Gorontalo, on the island of Sulawesi, the new governorship was to be filled by the Jakarta-based, Soeharto and Habibie-linked businessman Fadel Muhammad, who has strong family ties to the region. The initial victor in North Maluku's first ever gubernatorial election in 2001, in a controversial process marred by accusations of money politics, was the Soeharto-era former minister and parliamentary leader Abdul Gafur. The latter's victory, however, was overturned when the central government of then President Megawati Soekarnoputri intervened on behalf of Thaib Armayn (Smith 2006), who had close links to the local military (and Golkar). A subsequent and even more hotly contested election pitting the same two descended into farce when no victor could be named by the authorities, although at one stage Gafur seemed to have finally attained the post he coveted (Antaranews 11 February 2008). Yorris Raweyai, part Papuan and long-time number two man in the national Pemuda Pancasila, also made a highly publicised but unsuccessful bid for a newly created governorship (with Golkar support)—on this occasion in the controversially created province of Irian Jaya Barat, carved out of the resource-rich province of Papua.

It is interesting as well that such Jakarta-established political and business actors as Abdul Gafur, Yorris Raweyai and Fadel Muhammad have chosen to abandon Jakarta politics and move 'down' to a seemingly 'lower' arena. This shows too that the prize offered in lower arenas of politics may in some cases be more tantalising than those at the national level. In Thailand, Nelson notes as well that 'the decentralisation process has increased the prize of local executive positions to such a degree that some current and former MPs [members of Parliament] have their intention' of running at the level of the so-called PAO or Provincial Administrative Organisations. Nelson suggests that success at such a lower level may be better than 'languishing on the opposition benches' of the national parliament or of being completely subordinated to the prime minister (Nelson 2003: 8). Achakorn Wongpreedee (2007), studying Buri Ram and Pathum Thani provinces, sees another dynamic emerging from decentralization in Thailand: already powerful and wealthy local politicians are increasingly being provided with patronage and resources by the more powerful of national MPs who seek to expand their local vote base. The process frequently includes the securing of projects for local-level politicians who are often also contractors.

In Indonesia, individuals like Yorris Raweyai, Fadel Muhammad or Abdul Gafur (who is married to a well-known New Order-era businesswoman) are able to simultaneously exploit 'sons of the region' (putera daerah) sentiment, while harnessing considerable material resources to pursue success in their chosen new terrain of political conquest. In terms of the discussion in earlier parts of this book, such individuals are precisely the kind that could be best exploit localist populist sentiment at the same time that they selectively carve out niches through which local or regional engagement with external economic actors could be forged.

It should be pointed out that governorships will probably become increasingly attractive to individuals such as these, given the struggles over the institutional arrangements of decentralisation that have now resulted in more actual authority being shifted back to the provincial level of government, as opposed to the kabupaten and town. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggesting that less nationally known putera daerah of all sorts—formerly well-ensconced in Jakarta as politician, businessman, bureaucrat or political operator—have tested their fortunes as candidates in numerous elections for local office, most typically those of bupati or mayor. Many of these so-called putera daerah would actually have little intimate knowledge of local development issues, but a large number of them have been enticed by the new personal opportunities arising locally from political and administrative decentralisation. In other words, many are effectively Jakartans who would have very little to offer in terms of real claims of affinity and closeness to local communities.

Returning to the case of David Purba, his path to the top in Serdang Bedagai was to be obstructed. He was to lose the election for bupati in June 2005, despite considerable financial investment, to a formidable opponent, local businessman Tengku Erry Nuradi. The latter is no less than the brother of the late Rizal Nurdin. Displaying an interesting new pattern of forging alliances, the latter candidate was to join forces with sections of the NGO community by choosing as his running mate, Soekirman, a highly regarded, senior local NGO activist. Soekirman had failed in an earlier attempt to win a seat in the Regional Representatives' Council (DPD) representing North Sumatra.

It may be said that while Tengku Erry Nuradi provided the necessary political connections and funds for this political pairing, Soekirman provided the populist touch, supplemented by his ability to garner the support of grassroots-based organisations. It should be remembered that large sections of the Indonesia NGO community had gotten onto the decentralisation and good governance bandwagon because it appealed to their sense of local community and social justice (see Introduction and Chapter 1). On the other hand, Soekirman had also served as an advisor to his running mate's brother, the late provincial governor, so he was well connected to local elites. Though mindful of the possibility of being politically compromised, and expressing discomfort with money politics, Soekirman, like many of his NGO colleagues, expressed the belief that joining Tengku Erry Nuradi would help ensure a local administration more responsive to people's needs, despite the latter's business and aristocratic background and sensibilities.38 The combination of money, access to well-established local networks of power and populist credibility turned out to be too much even for the powerful Purba, who later challenged in vain the electoral results in court.

In East Java, one also comes across individuals like Masfuk, the bupati of Lamongan, who owns seven companies engaged in such diverse areas as the production of jewellery, and automobile and furniture parts. A leading member of the East Java branch of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and of HIPPI, Masfuk joined PAN after the fall of Soeharto and was elected bupati in 2000 with the support of a coalition of parties that included Golkar and the PDI-P (Kompas 15 July 2003). Re-elected in 2005 on the basis of popular vote, Masfuk had to repel a formidable challenge from a new coalition comprising the PKB and, this time, Golkar—again showing the highly fluid nature of political party allegiances. During the campaign, his supporters had to dispel claims that he had misappropriated large sums of the Lamongan local budget (Indo Pos Online, 18 June 2005), an accusation that incumbents routinely faced across Indonesia during their re-election battles.

Other businessmen-politicians in East Java notably include small- and medium-level businessmen like A. Wachid, son of a former soldier, small-scale businessman and NU activist; he describes his business as that of a 'supplier' for the hotel industry. A member of the New Order-created Islamic political vehicle, the PPP, since 1974 and also an Ansor and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) activist, he was only to enter the political big time in 1999 when he was elected to the Surabaya parliament. His main concern in relation to decentralisation, like that of many of his colleagues, is to ensure that it provides greater control on the part of local government over money-making economic activities and over such enterprises as the harbour at Surabaya. Full of ideas to increase local revenue, he suggests that Surabaya ought to be able to get a cut of the tax on cigarette sales collected by the national government, as there are several cigarette companies headquartered in Surabaya.39 Staving off arguments that this would only help fuel local corruption, he idiosyncratically insists that there has been no corruption in the local Surabaya parliament; this is in contradiction to widespread reports in the local press in 2002 and 2003 about the misappropriation of billions of rupiahs of the Surabaya government budget by members of its parliament.40

Again, similar developments are easily recognised elsewhere in Indonesia. In Bantul in Yogyakarta, for example, we come upon Idham Samawi, twice elected bupati in the post-Soeharto period under two different electoral systems. This particular local politician hails from a prominent family of newspaper publishers whose purview includes the daily Kedaulatan Rakyat, which is regarded to be Indonesia's oldest. The media tycoon turned politician is also well-connected to the family of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, whose father served as one of Soeharto's vice-presidents in the 1970s (Savirani 2004: 44). As mentioned earlier, Idham Samawi's tenure has been marred by claims of corrupt practices involving business kickbacks, though he is eager to project an image of technocratic professionalism underpinned by plans of raising local revenue, spearheaded by a number of new as well as reorganised local state enterprises.41

In Yogyakarta as well, one encounters individuals such as ethnic-Chinese businessman Budi Setyagraha, who became a member of the provincial parliament in 1999 for PAN. This was at first glance an odd vehicle for a Chinese businessman: locally in Yogyakarta as well as nationally, PAN is filled with Muhammadiyah activists who often quietly express anti-Chinese business sentiments. The Muhammadiyah is widely regarded as an organisation representing the 'modernist' stream of Indonesian Islam, traditionally underpinned by urban-based Muslim traders and businessman who, since the early twentieth century at least, often found themselves in competition with ethnic Chinese rivals. Setyagraha, however, was a convert to Islam and is in fact a leading figure in a national organisation of Muslim Chinese. More crucially, he was an activist of ICMI,42 the Association of Muslim Intellectuals once headed by Habibie and which functioned in the late Soeharto era to mobilise support for the New Order from the growing Islamic middle class and intelligentsia (Hefner 1993). Indeed, ICMI became a key conduit to power and patronage and a source from which New Order operators and apparatchik would be recruited in the 1990s. PAN was established in 1998 in the context of the fall of Soeharto by Amien Rais, a scholar-politician who was leader of the Muhammadiyah, from which ICMI garnered many key personnel during its heyday. Though he came to be known as a leading opponent of Soeharto in 1997 and 1998, Rais was in fact a key ICMI leader until he was ousted from the organisation. Thus, Setyagraha's ascension to a position of local political prominence expressed a particular kind of dynamic—that of the repositioning of those who had latched on to the all-pervasive New Order system of patronage, in this case through its ICMI element, in new 'reformist', post-authoritarian political parties.

It is certain that businesspeople will become increasingly involved in contests over local political office out of sheer necessity; thereby making the Thai model of businessmen-politicians increasingly relevant to Indonesia in many respects.43 For one thing, the process of being elected to local office has become increasingly expensive with the institution of direct polls.44 The well-known North Sumatra-based businessman and politician, Yopie Batubara, already estimated in 2001 that it was necessary to have a war chest of tens of billions of rupiah to successfully win a local election, referring quite specifically to the city of Medan where his brother, Ridwan Batubara, had been a defeated candidate the previous year.45 Another defeated candidate for electoral office in the immediate post-Soeharto years, this time for bupati of nearby Tapanuli Selatan, estimated that a successful bid there would require an investment of just Rp 2 billion.46 If these figures are to be accepted—given before changes to the electoral system were subsequently implemented—they indicate that the costs of waging a successful election bid will vary considerably even in locations of relatively close geographical proximity, partly depending on the economic stakes that are locally involved in relation to possession of political power. Similar observations are put forward by local political actors in East Java.47

Just as bureaucratic power does not guarantee electoral success, a background in the business world also does not ensure victory in electoral contests even if the proliferation of election-time money politics should be advantageous to businessmen-turned-politicians. In Sleman in Yogyakarta, Hafidh Asrom, a well-known businessman in the furniture industry who was able to garner the support of the local branches of several Muslim-oriented parties, lost a bitterly contested race for bupati of Sleman in 200048 against the PDI-P supported Ibnu Subiyanto; this defeat was repeated in 2005. According to Hafidh Asrom, his first loss, which was a particularly controversial affair that involved a bomb scare at the local parliament building, was attributable to intense pressure exerted on members of the NU-based PKB to desert him. Strangely, this pressure, which he says took the form of kidnappings and beatings directed at members of the local parliament, was supposed to have been exerted by Banser. This is the militia group also linked to the NU,49 thereby providing yet another seemingly inexhaustible illustration of the fluidity of party politics and allegiances. This kind of fluidity again raises questions about the basic nature, social role and functions of political parties in post-authoritarian Indonesia, especially because the same observation, as has been mentioned, has been applied to post-authoritarian Southeast Asian societies like Thailand (see Ockey 2003; Shatkin 2003) and the Philippines (see Abinales and Amoroso 2005).

=== political enforcers in the new local politics ===
As mentioned, also among the local elites of post-authoritarian Indonesia are the former enforcers and henchmen of the New Order, who had always straddled the criminal underworld and 'legitimate' economic, political and social activities. According to Ryter, members of organisations like the Pemuda Pancasila, which was feared despite the demise of the New Order that it had served so well, have pursued a twin strategy of survival in post-authoritarian Indonesia. The strategy has included involvement in party and parliamentary politics as well as efforts to 'maintain or expand' control over 'sectors of the informal and illegal economy' (Ryter 2002: 195) that provide their main sources of income. Clearly, their experiences under the New Order would have given them ample experience in pursuing these aims.

The case of David Purba in Serdang Bedagai in North Sumatra was already referred to in relation to the rise of political power and ambitions of local entrepreneurs; indeed, it is often difficult to extricate the goons and thugs of the New Order completely from its strata of local businessmen, who are often engaged in such activities as construction and contracting for government projects. Today, many who were nurtured within the structures of the New Order's state-supported youth/gangster organisations remain active in organised crime activities. Insofar as many of these were incubated within the state authoritarianism of the New Order, parallels can be found with some of the experiences of post-Soviet Russia. There, as Shelley notes, 'the origins of crime lie deep in the Soviet period', and it is the individuals who had 'access to the resource of the Russian state' that make up the most significant part of organised crime in Russia today (Shelley 2001: 249). As in post-Soeharto Indonesia, many of the most powerful Russian criminals get themselves elected to political office, including at the local levels of politics (Shelley 2001: 252), thus acquiring new levels of legitimacy and social status that they could not have previously enjoyed.

In North Sumatra, organisations of goons and thugs like the IPK and the Pemuda Pancasila have traditionally been dominant players in the underworld (Ryter 2002) and in the private business of providing 'security'. However, they have been challenged in the post-Soeharto era by the emergence of the militia arm of the PDI-P, known as the satgas or literally, 'task force', which nevertheless has been notoriously ridden with internal rivalries and conflicts.50 Members of the PDI-P satgas, moreover, appear to have been recruited from within such organisations as the Pemuda Pancasila (Ryter 2002: 196). Perhaps given its disparate components, the PDI-P satgas has been particularly conflict-prone internally; its different branches have been known to fight with one another in support of different political protagonists within the party. This was the case, as we shall see, during the period of conflict within the PDI-P over the mayoralty of Surabaya in 2002. Moreover, a number of 'rival' militias with claimed, if informal, links to the PDI-P have also emerged here and there51 to become immersed in intra-party conflicts. The most obvious role of organisations such as these is to provide muscle power and mass mobilisation services when they have been needed in some of the more intense cases of conflict.

In North Sumatra as well, Syamsul Arifin, who is a veteran of a number of New Order-era youth/gangster organisations, provides one of the better examples of those who rose from the ranks of regimist enforcers but who now thrive in the post-authoritarian environment; he was successfully elected bupati of Langkat in 1999, re-elected in 2004—and finally won the North Sumatran governorship in 2008. Admitting to adolescent dreams of becoming a 'godfather', he has had a curious personal history in both the Pemuda Pancasila and the Forum Komunikasi Putera-Puteri Purnawirawan Indonesia, or Communications Forum for Sons and Daughters of Indonesian Retired Servicemen (FKPPI), which have traditionally been rivals, and claims to be the son of a colonial-era intelligence operative. Indeed he is well connected: having risen through the ranks of various state-connected 'youth' groupings, he was also the head of the North Sumatra branch of the Komite Nasional Pemuda Indonesia, or Indonesian Youth National Committee (KNPI), the New Order's peak youth organisation. Not surprisingly, Syamsul Arifin was already a member of the Langkat local parliament during the rule of the New Order. With a range of business interests to boot, including in the timber industry, he boasts that eighteen generals attended his first inauguration ceremony in 1999.52 Given the history and political background of this particular individual, it is not surprising that his tenure has been, albeit not uniquely, coloured by allegations of violence and intimidation instigated against political opponents, as well as corruption and abuse of power.53 Interestingly, the staunchly Islamic PKS, which likes to project an image of political integrity, backed Syamsul Arifin in his eventually successful bid for the governorship of North Sumatra in 2008 (Republika Online 25 January 2008), after which he replaced Rudolf Pardede.

In East Java, the constellation of organisations of goons and thugs is rather different from North Sumatra. There, it is the Banser, the long-present and feared militia force linked to the NU, which is the dominant provider of services related to political muscle power and coercion. The IPK, largely a North Sumatran phenomenon, does not exist in East Java, though the Pemuda Pancasila and assorted gangs, including that of Madurese migrants, make up the rest of the constellation of gangland, especially in the bustling port city of Surabaya.

Individuals whose social base essentially lies in the array of organisations that provide muscle power and 'security' have not been so uniformly successful in the post-authoritarian context. In East Java, for example, the New Order's former enforcers have notably thrived less in their forays into local politics than their counterparts in North Sumatra. In fact, it is difficult to find an individual approximating the power and stature of Syamsul Arifin or David Purba in the East Java context, though one does encounter people like Lutfilah Masduki, a provincial parliamentarian and, simultaneously, head of the PKB satgas.54 One Pemuda Pancasila leader and contractor in Surabaya calculates, for example, that its cadres control less seats in local legislative bodies in East Java than they did under Soeharto, attributing this to a lack of swiftness on the part of local members in abandoning Golkar for other parties in the 1999 elections, in which the former New Order state party came second to the PDI-P. He claims this was different to the situation in North Sumatra, where Pemuda Pancasila members were more politically adroit and quickly latched on to new alliances. Nevertheless, he suggested in 2003 that the Pemuda Pancasila had a still considerable 10 to 15 members in sub-provincial legislative bodies in East Java but none in the provincial parliament, and around 400 across parliaments all over Indonesia. He also admits that no Pemuda Pancasila cadre had been able to make it to the level of bupati or mayor anywhere in East Java up to then.55

It is clear therefore that political gangsters and the like have only really encountered a mixed level of success in their efforts to reposition within Indonesia's democracy and local politics. This is in spite of the previously mentioned opportunities that they have been able to exploit as providers of muscle power. The challenges they face, and which may place a ceiling on how high their fortunes can rise, will be scrutinised further in Chapter 6.

In the meantime, what the present chapter has done is to identify some of the more salient types of elites in post-authoritarian local politics in Indonesia. It has presented some personalities who provide a good gauge of the kinds of social backgrounds and interests that are readily associated with such elites and the strategies they employ to maintain their political ascendance and to secure further advancement. These strategies invariably involve control of such newly important institutions of local governance as the offices of mayors and that of the bupati, as well as local parliamentary bodies. Also important has been access to material resources, and sometimes, instruments of coercion and selective mass mobilisations, especially in an increasingly rough-and-tumble world of local politics and of electoral contests.

Yet, the road to local power is hardly a smooth one. Contests for control over local institutions and their resources, over elected positions, party branches and militia groups are intense, costly, and more than occasionally violent. In itself, this ensures that the types of local elites identified above are especially well-placed to contest the arena of post-authoritarian local politics. Significantly, as discussed in the next chapter, such contests are also becoming increasingly costly, not in the least in straightforward monetary terms, thereby providing the impetus for officials and politicos to recoup their investment during their terms in office. The logical implication is that these contests also invariably pave the way for the further proliferation of predatory forms of power at the local level. As social and political ascendance are built on the success of shifting alliances and networks, they become contingent as well on the capacity to generate private accumulation on the basis of control over public institutions and resources.

Essentially, this has been a major problem for advocates of social change through institutional reform and engineering. The reality is that the 'right' institutions can hardly ever be supplied as a matter of policy choices only, no matter how seemingly 'enlightened' or well-intentioned. These institutions will have to operate within an existing context of social power and interests, which may drive them in directions that have little directly to do with the original intent.

This observation forms an important component of an explanation for the puzzle of 'unintended outcomes' of institutional reforms. In the gritty world of local politics in post-authoritarian societies like Indonesia—and quite clearly also in Thailand and the Philippines—it matters little that the originators of reform packages are state officials imbued with technocratic rationality or professional consultants and advisers perched in the mighty offices of international development organisations. Such is the case so long as the institutions, reformed or newly created, can be penetrated and appropriated by interests pursuing a wholly different kind of logic of power.

== Chapter 5: Money, Politics and Thuggery in New Local Democracies ==
This chapter focuses on the processes and mechanisms through which predatory local elites maintain and secure their position in the post-authoritarian context. As in the previous chapter, much attention is paid to the conflicts that have surfaced within arenas of electoral contests, or as epiphenomena, in the form of friction within political parties or between individual actors. But what are some of the more deeply-rooted, underlying social bases for such friction and conflicts, and how are they ultimately related to contests over the localisation of power? In answering this question, the chapter necessarily highlights the role of money politics, the selective use of political thuggery, and the changing position of an array of often uniformed gangster/youth organisations and civilian militia in the mechanics of electoral democracy. As in the previous discussion, the empirical material here is mainly taken from the contemporary experiences of North Sumatra and East Java, especially their capital cities of, respectively, Medan and Surabaya.

=== Local Money Politics ===
It has been noted by numerous observers that money politics and violence play a big part in local contests over power in the Southeast Asian societies of Thailand and the Philippines. In Thailand, the practice of money politics had already begun in earnest by the 1970s but became increasingly prevalent with the parliamentary politics and gradual democratisation of the 1980s. Demonstrating the appeal of possessing local political power here, the price of being elected into local office has been constantly rising for some time. Arghiros, for example, notes a local Thai politician's estimate that during the course of three elections, taking place between 1985 and 1995, his personal campaign expenses had grown by no less than twenty-five times (2001: 209). Clearly, such a development has had a distinct impact on the actual operations of democracy, nationally as well as at the local level. Much of this money goes to outright vote-buying; Shatkin (2003: 16) cites an estimate by one prominent Thai NGO that US$4 billion (at the time about 100 billion baht) was spent on vote-buying in the 1996 elections, and there is no reason to think that the amount has not been continuously rising, even with the recent turmoil in Thai democracy. In other words, the elections industry is one of considerable size, especially for a country of Thailand's socio-economic profile, as it is in the Philippines and lately in Indonesia too. In the Philippines, the operations of illegal lotteries known as jueteng—which can involve astronomical sums under the non-transparent control of politicians—play a critical role in funding especially local level contests (Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism 2001: 86–89; Co et al. 2007: 171). These effectively help to finance escalating campaign costs that could involve expenditures such as expensive television advertisements in the case of major politicians (Co et al. 2007: 157).

In post-authoritarian Indonesia, money politics—taking on a variety of forms—has become the main political game in town and village. In an analysis of legislative elections of April 2004, the daily Media Indonesia reported that the PDI-P charged individuals between Rp 200 and Rp 300 million to be included in the official list of candidates for provincial parliamentary seats and Rp 400 million for national parliamentary seats, as did Golkar (Media Indonesia 21 December 2003). One local parliamentarian from Medan claims that each prospective candidate for the April 2004 legislative elections had to personally allocate at least Rp 150 million just to ensure formal registration while describing, with notable exasperation, the growth of a financially-draining semi-underground elections 'industry'.1 It has now become accepted widely that prospective candidates for political office need to make hefty payments to party officials at various levels to ensure their presence on such lists. It is partly because of these payments that the issue of allowing non-party, independent candidates to contest local elections became a topic of public debate.

In fact, the practice of charging candidates for official political party endorsement was to occur with greater impunity in 2005, when the first batch of local elections for governors, mayors and bupati by popular vote took place. As Choi (2005) observed, the new electoral system, based on Governmental Regulation no. 6/2005, effectively transferred some of the money politics occurring in the institution of local parliament, formerly vested with the power to elect local government heads, to that taking place more patently in relation to political party branches and their executive bodies. According to the 2005 Regulation, only a party or coalition of parties in control of 15 per cent or more of seats in the relevant parliament has the right to nominate candidates for governor/bupati/mayor and their deputies, thereby making the executive bodies of local political party branches very strategic gatekeepers to power. Thus, large sums of payment from potential nominees to political party branches were typically necessary before any aspiring politico could even take to the electoral field in 2005.2 Rinakit (2005: 2) estimates that one-fifth of candidates' campaign funds go toward paying for their nomination. What in fact emerged, therefore, is a veritable auction house-like system where the highest bidder would likely win a party nomination—one that is obviously bereft of any mechanism of public accountability.

The revamped electoral system, moreover, helped to induce the monetary price of winning local office to spiral almost out of control, as the kind of mass vote-buying typically associated in Southeast Asia with elections in places like rural Thailand has become a more pervasive feature of local election contests. How much so is difficult to estimate with precision for obvious reasons, though Rinakit (2005: 2) suggests—on the basis of observations on ninety elections—that successful gubernatorial candidates would have to spend, on average, US$10 million dollars, and those for bupati and mayor, up to US$1.6 million. Again, such generalised figures must be approached with caution—in major cities like Surabaya or Medan, winning the mayoral position will likely cost much more than that, as discussed below.

Nevertheless, there were clearly good reasons—from a strictly technical, institutional reform point of view—for shifting to a system of popularly-elected heads of local government. In theory, the new electoral system would more likely result in local governments that are closer and more accountable to the ordinary people of local communities. Furthermore, the reform was also in keeping with the populist aspirations of local NGO activists across Indonesia who had been critical of the flaws of Indonesia's democracy and who wanted a system that would provide the conditions for more transparent practices of governance. In other words, direct local elections satisfied the good governance dispositions of state and international technocrats, while simultaneously satisfying the local community empowerment ideals of populist NGOs. So, what actually has been the problem?

Again, it is the broader terrain within which the electoral reform took place that needs to be taken into account, which ensured that the objective of curbing money politics, or of creating local governments that are more accountable and responsive to the needs of local communities, would not be achieved by this reform. Not only were the changed rules hijacked again by still-ascendant local predatory interests, they broadly conformed as well to the need of heads of local governments to free themselves from over-dependence on local legislative bodies, particularly at the onset of their tenure—and thus NGOs later pressed for the idea of independent, non-party candidates.3 It is well known that relations between mayors or bupati and local legislatures can frequently get strained (e.g. Lay 2002). The former typically accuse the latter of lacking in individuals with the required skills and intellect to monitor the workings of local government.4 Even this sort of friction has a more tangible, material basis; it is often alleged that heads of local government have to provide kickbacks to local legislators to ensure approval for new policies as well as acceptance of their all-important annual and end-of-term financial reports (see Kurniawan et al. 2003: 23). The system, however, effectively enhances the authority of local heads of government vis-à-vis local legislative bodies. Of potential importance for the longer term is that, freed to some extent from their previous over-dependence on parliament, the emergence of the kind of local 'strongman' or 'notable' more closely resembling that which Sidel (2004) associates with Thai or Filipino experiences may yet be facilitated in Indonesia.

In fact, contests for offices such as bupati and mayor in today's Indonesia have become ever more feverish and costly. This is not surprising as the potential economic gains to be accrued from heading local governments remain tantalising, as are the opportunities to build more personalised instruments of power and networks of patronage through control of local administrative and political machineries. Thus, it may not be necessary for ambitious local politicians to aspire to partake in 'higher' level politics and political struggles. What is on offer locally can be enticing enough and sufficient to form the building blocks for local coalitions of predatory power and to sustain them materially.

Not surprisingly, the first truly intense local election in post-Soeharto Indonesia occurred in North Sumatra, which even during the days of the rigidly-controlled New Order had a reputation for comparatively rough politics. Indeed, before the New Order, North Sumatra was a major site from which military-sponsored mass and youth organisations would begin to enter into open conflict with those affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party; this foreshadowed the open violence that would take place across many parts of the country during the military-led anti-communist pogroms of the mid-1960s.5

The election in question involved the mayoralty of the particularly tough North Sumatran capital city of Medan held in March 2000—the city's first after the fall of Soeharto. It was on this occasion that Abdillah (see Chapter 4), a former official of the North Sumatra branch of Gapensi, the Association of Indonesian Construction Businesses, reportedly paid off sixteen parliamentarians belonging to the PDI-P—the dominant faction in the Medan legislature—to ensure success in his first foray into electoral politics. Each of these parliamentarians, including local PDI-P notable and then head of Medan parliament, Tom Adlin Hadjar, was believed to have received a relatively meagre Rp 25 million for his or her support (Kompas 23 March 2000). This caused acute embarrassment for the national party leadership under Megawati Soekarnoputri, which had supported the aforementioned career bureaucrat, Ridwan Batubara.6 Though it is unclear why the choice of Batubara was made in Jakarta and whether it involved monetary transactions, what is certain is that the Megawati leadership's overlooking of party apparatchik and activists at the local level caused a great deal of discontent within the PDI-P's Medan branch.

One may already notice in this case the beginnings of a now growing impulse emanating from local coalitions of power to carve out a niche relatively free from the dictates of those based in Jakarta. Local PDI-P politicos went on to explain that they had refused to back Batubara as a mark of protest against the Jakarta leadership's perceived intrusion into local power contests, which in this case took the form of backing a bureaucrat who had little direct ties to local party cadres7—a decision that would conceivably have ramifications on the way that the spoils of power would be disbursed. Indeed, the scent of money politics in this particular occasion had been so strong that prior to voting day the Medan media had published admonitions from local notables that the election should be postponed, with one stating that the process was going to be akin to that of choosing between different 'mafias'.8

Subsequently reprimanded for not sticking to the official party line, the Medan legislators in question were in fact also the victims of physical intimidation carried out on behalf of Abdillah, the nominee of a Golkar-led coalition, by a motley group of supporters. The colourful and brazen Martius Latuperisa, then a Medan parliamentarian with close links to the military as well as leader of the local FKPPI, confesses to having abducted and threatened the PDI-P legislators into casting their vote for Abdillah. By his own admission, he made them choose between accepting 'the money or the gun'.9 The scandal that ensued caused a delay in the inauguration of Abdillah and his then-running mate Maulana Pohan. Their official inauguration (by governor Teuku Rizal Nurdin) as mayor and deputy mayor, respectively, only took place in April under circumstances that have been described as abrupt and secretive (Edison 24–31 May 2000).

Although well publicised, the events in Medan that have been described were hardly exceptional. In truth, reports proliferated at roughly the same time throughout many parts of Indonesia about the deployment of violence during local elections following the fall of the New Order, combined with monetary incentives, geared to influence the vote of local parliamentarians. In North Sumatra alone, thirty-seven local parliamentarians from different towns and kabupaten were investigated for involvement in scandals of money politics in 2000; this really should be viewed as only the tip of the iceberg (Media Anak Bangsa 7–8 September 2000). The intimidation and bomb threats in Sleman were already noted but in the kabupaten of Karo in North Sumatra, mass mobilisations by competing candidates were compounded by the mysterious razing of the local parliament house during the 2000 bupati election, in a prolonged conflict that lasted no less than eight months between the nominees respectively advanced by the PDI-P and Golkar.10

One particularly spectacular mass mobilisation in the early post-Soeharto period on behalf of the PDI-P was believed to have been orchestrated by Rudolf Pardede himself (see Chapter 4), in a move to stamp his authority over the party in North Sumatra soon after having taken over leadership of the provincial branch.11 The election of the bupati of Sampang in East Java in the same year was also a grim affair by any standard (see Tempo Interaktif 14 September 2000; Jakarta Post 8 October 2000; Lay 2002; Malley 2003: 113) and pitted the defeated supporters of then President Abdurrachman Wahid's PKB against a candidate backed by the PPP (Nurhasim 2005: 27–78). It must be remembered that rural East Java is the main stronghold of the PKB, and so the defeat was a particularly hard slap on the face. The Sampang election dispute took a full year to resolve but not before the local parliament house was destroyed in a mysterious fire similar to that in Karo.

One of the consequences of such tactics was that it became difficult for central party leaderships in Jakarta to force local politicos to hold to official party lines as demarcated from above during periods of crisis. This was evidently a particularly bad problem for the PDI-P, which had grown so rapidly within the first few years of Soeharto's fall and was the party 'in power' nationally during Megawati Soekarnoputri's presidency between July 2001 and October 2004. In July 2003, the party announced that it would replace twenty of its local legislators across the country for lack of discipline. Interestingly, the right of central party leaderships to recall 'rebellious' legislators had been reinstated in 2003 after it had been scrapped in 1999, when it was considered an undemocratic mechanism that had been used many times during the Soeharto-era to curtail parliamentary independence (Jakarta Post 16 July 2003). The re-instatement of the recall mechanism indicated the high level of tension emerging between central party leaderships and local politicos in the context of decentralisation.

Moreover, also in July 2003—at a time when many gubernatorial contests were being fought—the PDI-P central leadership fired the party chairman in the province of Central Java for having dared to announce his intention to contest the gubernatorial race that year, even though the party had formally endorsed someone else. This was merely a repeat of actions taken slightly earlier in the context of provincial-level elections occurring in Jakarta, Lampung and Bali (Jakarta Post 22 July 2003; Jawa Pos 28 July 2003). What this kind of development showed, in fact, was that central leaderships of parties—most obviously in the case of the PDI-P—were unable to 'trust' their local political operatives given the unpredictability of political contests where money politics and political thuggery were thrown into the equation. At the same time, local politicos who had made their careers and reputations by developing strong bases and networks of patronage at either the provincial or sub-provincial levels were getting increasingly aggravated that, again especially in the case of the PDI-P, non-party cadres were being promoted because of deals believed to have been made by such individuals with the central party leadership. As suggested earlier, such a tendency had potentially severe implications for the way that the spoils of political power were to be disbursed at sub-national levels.

Returning to the case of Medan, once in office in April 2000, Mayor Abdillah was to rule quite flamboyantly but adroitly as well. Given his background in the construction industry, it was no surprise that Abdillah was known to favour expensive though popular projects involving new lights to brighten up the city, as well as the development of flashy new shopping centres. So successful was he in placating potential rivals that for his re-election bid in 2005 the mayor was able to cobble together an impressive coalition of otherwise mutually hostile parties, including Golkar, the PDI-P and the PPP. Abdillah's social standing was further lifted when he was granted the traditional Malay noble title of 'Datuk' by the local notables of that community (Medan Bisnis 17 June 2005). He was only seriously challenged by the Muslim-oriented PKS, which had been emphasising, nationally and locally (Analisa 17 June 2005), a platform that placed importance on integrity and incorruptibility, as well as its image as rank outsiders in the electoral process.

Abdillah's re-election campaign in 2005 was said by insiders to involve a war chest of approximately 50 billion rupiahs,12 a royal sum that would have considerably dwarfed the resources available to career bureaucrat Maulana Pohan, the incumbent's own former deputy and rival for the top position in town.13 Pohan's running mate, Sigit Pramono Asri, a former HMI activist, was head of the PKS faction in the Medan parliament. From Pohan's point of view, the PKS connection and support provided the credentials for integrity that was obviously calculated to divert voters' attention from the fact that he was part of the same Abdillah administration of 2000–2005 that he was criticising for financial mismanagement. Indeed, the dividing line between the allegedly corrupt and the supposedly virtuous was much more blurred than would appear at first glance, in this particular case as well as often across Indonesia. Pohan and Sigit were in fact joined by low-ranking members of the PDI-P (Sumut Pos 15 June 2005), and some of its militia (Medan Bisnis 17 June 2005) who went against party discipline partly as a result of mobilisation by local political figure, Marlon Purba.14 A former North Sumatra provincial parliamentarian, he was also once head of the feared North Sumatra PDI-P satgas before he fell afoul of Rudolf Pardede. Rather less than an icon of incorruptibility, Marlon Purba was in fact a former policeman and convicted murderer, who admitted to having run illegal gambling rackets, and whose current businesses included the sale of firearms 'obtained from the police'.15

Contests over control of the mayor's office in the East Java capital of Surabaya have been only slightly less controversial. In fact, while the election of the mayor of Medan in 2005 proceeded relatively smoothly in the context of the new system of direct elections, in Surabaya it descended into a particularly bitter wrangle over the validity of results, which favoured the incumbent, the PDI-P's Bambang Dwi Hartono. Perhaps part of the reason was that the candidates in Medan were so obviously unequally matched; Abdillah's resources, for example, meant that he was able to 'buy' the support of the local press according to local media watchdogs,16 as well as engage the services of the city's gangs and militia groups to undertake mass mobilisations of support on his behalf.17 Furthermore, during his first term in office, Abdillah the businessman had stamped his authority over officialdom in Medan and procured the support of a disparate range of local politicos, in a way that Bambang Dwi Hartono was never able to do; the latter was to face constant challenges from within his own party relating to intense competition for control of the local party machinery. Still, Abdillah's freewheeling ways would eventually land him in trouble; he was to be the subject of a corruption investigation by the Indonesian Anti-Corruption Commission in early 2008 for alleged budgetary misappropriations (Waspada 7 January 2008) and was subsequently convicted.

Significantly, both Abdillah and Bambang Dwi Hartono had been regarded as virtual political party outsiders upon their initial ascension to power, though the latter was in fact already a junior pro-Megawati activist in 1995 (Nurhasim 2005: 104) and later served as an official in the PDI-P Surabaya branch. Still, Bambang Dwi Hartono hardly ceased to be seen as an imposition from 'above' by many local party cadres, especially within his own PDI-P. Many such cadres had grown ever keener to break free of the shackles imposed by the Jakarta leadership to take advantage of the local opportunities presented by decentralisation. As a result, the mayor was constantly under siege by the local parliament, in which his own party was the dominant force. For, example, Bambang Dwi Hartono was accused by a parliamentary commission of improprieties in the sale of land owned by the city to private investors (Surya 27 March 2002). He was also stridently opposed in his efforts to replace senior city government officials with new ones (Surya 24 August 2002).

Though he would not have likely survived for long if many local PDI-P politicos did not in fact tow the party line to support him,18 the Surabaya mayor was regarded for many years by a great number of his colleagues as either a relative lightweight or a Johnny-come-lately who did not suffer the worst of the repression the party had to withstand during the latter years of the Soeharto period. They refer therefore to the long bygone days when Megawati was considered by the New Order a dangerous possible rallying point for opposition groups due to her Soekarno family lineage. Indeed, the experience of having 'defended' the party against Soeharto's repression seemed to have become a 'badge of honour' among PDI-P local politicos, and not just in East Java or Surabaya, especially in view of the number of 'migrants' the party came to accommodate as soon as political circumstances had changed with the fall of Soeharto.

Given the internal dissent to his leadership in Surabaya, Bambang Dwi Hartono was later to be much assisted by the elevation of a distinctly non-party cadre as his running mate in 2005, Arief Affandi, chief editor of the flagship daily of the giant media conglomerate based in Surabaya, Jawa Pos. Arief Affandi was in a position not only to provide material resources but also, given the number of publications controlled by Jawa Pos, to secure a valuable instrument of election propaganda in a contest that was undertaken on the basis of direct popular elections (Jakarta Post 16 February 2005; Jakarta Post 27 June 2005).

In any case, it should be noted that Bambang Dwi Hartono's initial ascension to power took place under rather bizarre circumstances even in the context of the vagaries of Indonesian local political alliances. His immediate predecessor Sunarto Sumoprawirno was initially a New Order-era Golkar appointee (in 1995) better known as Cak Narto19 and had gone to Australia for medical treatment in October 2001. For reasons that remain unclear, he ended up being away and neglecting the responsibilities of his office for a prolonged time. It is widely believed that the mayor had in fact made a deal with Bambang Dwi Hartono that he would hand over power to the latter within two years as part of an effort to split the PDI-P vote and win re-election in early 2000 in the new post-Soeharto context. The alleged deal had already caused much bad blood within the local PDI-P, with rumours of bribes being paid to some PDI-P local parliamentarians also being rife (Nurhasim 2005: 100–112).

Upon Cak Narto's 'disappearance', the PDI-P faction in Surabaya's parliament then led an effort to topple Cak Narto, finally succeeding in January 2002 when local parliamentarians voted to appoint Bambang Dwi Hartono, then the deputy mayor, as replacement. In a move reflective of the continuing tug-of-war between nationally and sub-nationally based interests, the Indonesian minister of Home Affairs annulled the decision, stating that local parliaments could elect executives of local government but could not dismiss them, as that power was his. As a means of overcoming the impasse, the minister appointed the governor of East Java, retired general and New Order appointee, Imam Oetomo, as acting mayor. In June 2002, the governor appointed Bambang Dwi Hartono as the new mayor, a decision that was supported by the minister of Home Affairs under the Megawati government of the day, another New Order-era senior general named Hari Sabarno.

Even though the local parliament's original decision was in effect now upheld, albeit through a rather circuitous route, this was not to be the end of the highly unsavoury episode. Soon enough, the same parliament that had appointed him started new impeachment proceedings against Bambang Dwi Hartono, under the pretext that he was responsible for the unsatisfactory status of his predecessor's financial report to the legislature (Surya 12 July 2002). What had actually transpired behind the scenes was another major split within the Surabaya PDI-P. The rival groups were led by Armudji, head of the PDI-P faction in the Surabaya parliament, and Mochamad Basuki, speaker of the Surabaya parliament as well as the PDI-P branch in the city—backed by parliamentarian Isman, who laid claim to Armudji's post (Surya 23 March 2002, 2 April 2002).

Backed by party bigwigs in Jakarta, Armudji supported Bambang Dwi Hartono's appointment, while local party boss Mochamad Basuki viewed it as a manifestation of Jakarta's intrusion into the affairs of the local party branch.20 In other words, as local party boss, Basuki effectively wanted the right to have a major say in who would be mayor. Given the strategic position of mayor in such a major city as Surabaya in relation to the potential economic opportunities presented by decentralisation, this was to be expected. Basuki, moreover, laid claim to having been at the forefront of PDI-P efforts to defeat Golkar in Surabaya in the 1999 elections. Exasperated by incessant party bickering, however, Megawati Soekarnoputri put Basuki in his place and ordered the dismissal of the whole board of the Surabaya branch of the PDI-P. She also threatened local legislators that they would be written off the party list for the next elections if they did not behave (for details of the entire affair, see SCTV at www.liputan6.com 16 January 2002, 15 July 2002, 10 October 2002, as well as Gatra 18 July 2002).

This particularly extraordinary episode in Surabaya local politics would continue to have repercussions on patterns of conflict between local and central PDI-P officials over the control of local institutions and resources. Indirectly at stake were the real and material, rather than merely legal-formal, parameters of decentralisation and local autonomy. The outcome of the conflict would entail the political downfall of Basuki and his imprisonment for corruption as well as charges of corruption laid against a number of his parliamentary allies (Jawa Pos 17 July 2003: 25; Kompas 22 April 2003). The process also involved violent clashes between rival units of PDI-P militia forces21 for and against Mayor Bambang Dwi Hartono, thereby vividly illustrating the volatility of a system of power run by money politics and, when necessary, political thuggery.22 In the end, however, it was plain that the local politicos had in fact lost with the fall of Basuki and his allies. The centre had therefore asserted its authority over the local.

Notwithstanding the physical clashes involved in the case above, money politics rather than overt political thuggery has tended to be a more overt part of the political game as far as East Java is concerned, at least until the advent of local direct elections in 2005. It must have helped that the local business community, certainly in Surabaya, had been able to utilise money to buy security in exceptionally effective ways in the past. In May 1998, when many major cities in Java were rocked by racial riots while security forces mysteriously disappeared, the predominantly ethnic Chinese business community was reportedly able to guarantee relative peace in Surabaya by paying generous sums of money for the services of the local military (Dick 2002: 475).

The case of the gubernatorial election in East Java in July 2003 offers a good window into the workings of money politics and electoral contests in post-authoritarian Indonesia, particularly prior to the institution of direct popular elections in 2005.23 The run-up to this election—confined to voting within the chambers of the provincial parliament as under the old system—was not marred by any real outbreak of violence or demonstration of prowess through mass mobilisations, which had often accompanied the most controversial of recent local and regional elections by that time. Indeed, the entire process seemed almost anachronistically peaceful and orderly, though fraught with the kind of tension that suggested that the environment could have precipitously changed. The activists of youth/gangster organisations and civilian militia were actually largely conspicuous due to their absence; indeed, one suggested that they were paid not to create trouble on this occasion and told to remain as inconspicuous as possible.24 The underlying tense political atmosphere was revealed, however, as the 'safety' of the 100-member legislature was clearly in some doubt until the last minute. Most were holed up in hotel rooms and kept incommunicado for several nights before Election Day, protected by an assortment of goons and thugs employed to roam the hotel lobbies and surrounding areas. The fear was evidently that parliamentarians aligned to one candidate would be abducted by the toughs of another and then intimidated or bribed into changing their allegiance; this was the case, for example, in the race for the mayor's office in Medan in 2000.25

If more overt political violence was somehow avoided in this particular case, it is widely believed that money politics was instead especially rife and blatant. Subsequent to the election, some local political actors suggested that provincial legislators tasked with electing a governor were accepting financial bribes offered by both candidates.26 In fact, rumours had proliferated wildly in Surabaya just prior to Election Day that one legislator's vote was valued at between one to three billion rupiahs by each of the two rival candidate's camps.27 Months before the elections, a top NU executive in East Java explicitly stated that money would speak loudest in the election and that the winner would be the candidate with the most money (Kompas 7 March 2003). Moreover, the gossip mills were kept busy by additional rumours that the candidates' respective war chests were filled by, among others, two infamous ethnic Chinese gambling czars. One was allegedly a local businessman known locally as Wei Fan, while the other was reputedly none other than Tomy Winata, a notorious Jakarta tycoon with close links to major New Order elites; he was also allegedly by then the capital city's dominant force in the underworld.28 Some sceptical locals even went so far as to view the governorship contest as partly a proxy battle between racketeers for control of the lucrative illegal gambling industry in and around Surabaya.29

It should be noted that the eventual winner, retired general and incumbent Imam Oetomo, was backed by the PDI-P at the insistence of the Jakarta party leadership, in spite of vocal protests from East Java cadres who instead supported one of the local party bosses (Tempo Interaktif 7 May 2003). Significantly, General Oetomo had been commander of the Brawijaya Division based in East Java (Kompas 13 January 2003) during the New Order. His running mate notably was the top provincial bureaucrat, Soenarjo (Surya 27 March 2003), regarded as a long-time Golkar rather than PDI-P cadre.

The losing candidate was no representative of any reformist impulse in Indonesian society either; tellingly, neither was he well-rooted in local party machineries. He was Ahmad Kahfi, yet another retired general whose running mate was still another Golkar functionary, the real estate developer Ridwan Hisyam, who had earlier harboured ambitions of running for governor (Kompas 6 March 2003). This pairing was strenuously supported by the central leadership of the PKB in Jakarta loyal to Abdurrahman Wahid, at the expense of local cadres who regarded Kahfi, a former deputy governor of Jakarta (Kompas10 March 2003; Surya 11 March 2003) as an intruder.30 He was also viewed as one without an obvious background either in the NU, the East Java-based Muslim organisation that gave birth to the PKB, or the party itself.

Interestingly, Imam Oetomo earlier had failed to secure the support of Abdurrahman Wahid, the chief patron of the PKB, partly because the latter was reportedly displeased with the incumbent governor's interventions in a prior election for the bupati-ship of Probolinggo, which a rebel PKB candidate—Hasan Aminuddin—eventually won in what was supposed to be an area in which Gus Dur commanded loyalty (Kompas 19 March 2003; Surabaya Pos 19 August 2005). Hasan Aminuddin was a PKB functionary and local parliamentary figure whom Gus Dur had dismissed from the party, but who was still able to cobble together local support from party activists to win the election.

The overall composition of candidates in the case of the East Java gubernatorial contest—generals, top bureaucrats and Golkar functionaries, and the parties they had latched onto—is just one reminder of how difficult it is to draw the line between simple 'status quo' and 'reformist' interests in Indonesia today, and of the vagaries of local political alliances and coalitions. As pointed out in Chapter 4, all the major political parties in Indonesia today are inhabited to a significant extent by variations of old New Order elites who have now claimed reformist credentials (Robison and Hadiz 2004). They constitute fragile and tentative alliances that, in a sociological sense, draw on the same pool of predatory interests that had survived the demise of the New Order. This is the case nationally as well as locally, and it explains why two self-proclaimed 'reformist' post-New Order parties, the PKB and the PDI-P, are comfortable in backing old Generals and bureaucrats in major political contests.31

There is an underlying dynamic at work as well, which comes replete with new tensions and contradictions. One of the opportunities that came up in the current context is for deals to be made by particular powerful individuals with Jakarta-based coalitions of interests as represented in central party leaderships. A distinctive outcome has been the emergence of tensions within the often tenuous alliances that make up formal political party vehicles, as local cadres come to perceive that their entry into the gates of power in the towns and kabupaten, or even provincial government, is being blocked from above despite the supposedly rewarding opportunities offered by decentralisation. This was seen in Medan in 2000, Surabaya in 2002, the province of East Java in 2003, and replicated in numerous other cases.

=== Instruments of Coercion: Gangsters and Militia ===
If money politics is the cement that holds together political activity in post-authoritarian Indonesia, the use of political violence also became a notable part of the workings of Indonesian democracy, though so far not at levels often associated with Thailand or the Philippines—where political conflicts and electoral rivalries have cost the lives of democracy activists and local politicos alike. Goons and thugs associated with youth/gangster organisations or an array of civilian militia groups have played the role of providing muscle power and security-related services for contending elites. They have also been utilised in organising selective mass mobilisations when required by the exigencies of local contests over power.32 Still, as shown in Chapter 6, limits seem to be appearing in relation to the usefulness of muscle power, especially during election time, and therefore on the political opportunities open to goons and thugs.

In any case, political violence is far from new in Indonesia; indeed, its selective deployment was part of the way that the New Order maintained political stability for decades—through intimidation and the inculcation of fear. As is well known, from the promulgation of martial law in the late 1950s in the face of separatist rebellions in parts of Indonesia until the demise of the New Order in the late 1990s, the military played a formal, entrenched part in the social, economic and political affairs of local communities in the name of the so-called military dual-function doctrine. As Ryter (2000, 2002) has noted, the maintenance of political order and stability was not undertaken solely by the military/state security apparatus proper, but more typically involved the mobilisation of 'youth' gangs whose activities often blurred the difference between legal and criminal activity. In turn, as many have pointed out (see Lindsey 2001; Ryter 2002), the operations of these gangs could not be separated from the interests of the Indonesian military itself, whose local commanders provided the patronage, sponsorship and protection required by members of crime organisations to thrive in a rigidly controlled authoritarian environment.

The most important of New Order-nurtured youth-gangster organisation has always been the nationally-organised Pemuda Pancasila (PP) with its origins in North Sumatra in the 1950s. It was here that the military first decided to mobilise youths and local toughs to confront pro-communist party youth organisations in the context of escalating rivalry with the PKI.33 The PP was even instrumental in the election of a military-backed mayor of Medan in 1966 soon after the anti-communist pogroms that followed events in Jakarta the previous year and which accompanied the obliteration of the PKI (Ryter 2000). In Jakarta, the national PP is led by long-time chief Yapto Suryosumarno: a lawyer by profession, he is the son of a general and a close associate of the Soeharto family, and was a distant cousin of Soeharto's wife (Ryter 2002: 157). His own ascension to power within the organisation in the 1980s in many ways represented a process of more closely integrating the operations of the organisation with the political and business requirements of the Soehartos and other elite families of the New Order. Significantly, these families were then already beginning to actively colonise and appropriate the instruments of state power to further their own interests, which included the building of huge private business empires (Robison and Hadiz 2004). In this context, PP members under Yapto were effectively the personal henchmen and bodyguards of the elite families of the New Order.

Other important New Order-era 'youth' organisations include the FKPPI, the 'communications forum' of the children of retired military officers. It has since splintered badly between those with family ties to the military and those with ties to the police force. Once linked closely to the Soeharto family as well, this organisation still has a considerable presence throughout the country, including in North Sumatra and East Java. Its long-time leading figure in Medan in North Sumatra was Martius Latuperisa, who was once a Golkar operator and Medan parliamentarian for that party. He later joined the military-sponsored PKP (Unity and Justice Party) following the demise of the New Order and again managed to claim a seat in the local legislature.34 Circumstances, however, forced Latuperisa to attempt another transformation; in 2003 he joined the Medan branch of the PKB but failed to wrest control of it.35 As has been mentioned, he had played an important if controversial role in the initial rise to power of Medan's powerful mayor, Abdillah, in 2000.

Notwithstanding the status of the Pemuda Pancasila in Indonesia, the most important youth/gangster organisation in North Sumatra remains the IPK, the Association of Functional Group Youths (Ikatan Pemuda Karya). It is widely believed to dominate the lucrative illegal gambling industry in the city of Medan. The origins of the IPK lie in a split within the PP in the early 1980s, in which the soon to be dominant splinter group was supported by local Chinese businesspeople (Tempo Interaktif 14 October 2002) and sections of the local military command, which had developed an interest in organised crime activities and grown wary of the PP's then untrammelled dominance over the underworld.36 Interestingly, the supreme leader of the IPK, Olo Panggabean, simply known all around Medan and North Sumatra as 'Bang Olo',37 is often cited by residents as the city's 'night-time' or 'real' mayor—a testimony to his social and political stature in Indonesia's fourth largest city.

It should be noted that local security forces currently still have a strong presence in organised crime activity, as evidenced in a highly publicised gunfight between military and police units in Binjai, North Sumatra, in October 2002 that resulted in at least eight fatalities. The cause was allegedly competition between these forces over illegal drug trafficking in the area (Jakarta Post 2 October 2002). It would not be surprising, therefore, to find continuing links between the activities of local military or police commands and existing youth/gangster organisations.

Political gangsters, known by Indonesians as preman, arguably can no longer rely completely on military and police patrons of the past in the context of the changes that have occurred in the country since 1998. They have thus been forced to seek new strategies of survival, including providing political parties with a well-oiled apparatus of violence especially when necessary during election periods. Many have observed that the ranks of the PDI-P satgas had swelled, particularly during Megawati's tenure as president, from an influx of 'migrants' from organisations such as the PP (Ryter 2005: 22–23). These new members were looking for new patrons within the dominant political power at the time.38 By now, many leaders of such organisations have come to run local branches of political parties and/or hold important local and even national offices (see Ryter 2002: 195–196). PDI-P officials even admit that all kinds of unsavoury elements were admitted into the party because of the perception that it required muscle power to compete successfully in the new democratic politics of Indonesia. Indeed, one PDI-P national leader admitted that many have now taken up politically important positions within the party (Tempo Interaktif 5 April 2003). So bad was the reputation of the PDI-P members of the Surabaya parliament, for example, that they were ordered by their faction leader to undergo urine tests to prove that they did not consume illicit drugs (Surya 31 May 2002).

As a consequence, goons and thugs can play a substantial role in the process of settling political disputes and turf wars, including within political party machineries. In Medan, they played a major part in a protracted struggle over control of the local PDI-P branch, which pitted Rudolf Pardede—who had the support of the central party leadership—against an alliance put together by rebellious local politicos. This provided yet another example of local-central conflicts of the kind witnessed over the mayoralties of Surabaya and Medan. In this case, a local figure named Usaha Ginting, who was actually a former minor Golkar functionary and bureaucrat who had migrated to the party39—was forced to defend his leadership of the PDI-P branch in Medan against his rival, long-time party activist and operator, Doni Arsal Gultom. Interestingly, Pardede favoured the ailing Ginting over Gultom, whose own controversial election to the disputed post in 2000, involving the mobilisation of goons and thugs, was annulled by the party central leadership in 2003. This prompted a response in the form of a concerted campaign to oust Ginting, which included legal proceedings that were highly publicised in the Medan press.

More dramatically, Gultom's supporters failed to wrest control of the party's provincial branch office in an open show of defiance against both Pardede and the Jakarta central leadership when their 'invasion' was repelled in a bloody confrontation that left two people dead (Jakarta Post 27 September 2003). Significantly, given the previous discussion on local strongmen in Southeast Asia (see Chapter 2), Gultom claims that Pardede had him ousted because of his opposition to the businessman's attempt to build a political dynasty by promoting close friends and relatives in the party ranks and as legislative candidates.40 The failed attack itself was commonly understood to be at least partly the work of then provincial parliamentarian Marlon Purba, who had earlier been pushed out by Pardede as well as the head of the PDI-P's feared North Sumatran satgas in favour of a former Pemuda Pancasila thug.41 Thus, Pardede's retaliations were to be directed not just at Gultom but at Marlon Purba as well, through orchestrated mass mobilisations against him in the provincial parliament house.42

Essentially, however, while previously dependent on Golkar and the security forces for their social position, the preman have had to be flexible and agile in the current post-authoritarian environment. In this, the political gangster has been no different from the bureaucrat or the businessman. While providing their services, preman have simultaneously repositioned themselves and crossed over to various political parties according to local exigencies while abandoning past exclusive political loyalties. According to Ryter, the PP Congress of April 1999 decided that members would be free to join any political party vehicle they liked (Ryter 2002: 196). Thus, gangsters were instrumental in organising rallies for a variety of political parties they joined in the 1999 and 2004 elections (Ryter 2005: 22–23). It is for this reason that such individuals as long-time Pemuda Pancasila and Golkar notable in Labuhan Batu in North Sumatra, Haji Enteng, contested the bupati-ship there in 2005 as a nominee of its New Order-era competitor, the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, or United Development Party (PPP).43

More recently, the Pemuda Pancasila has even set up its own Pancasila Patriot Party to contest elections on its behalf, making use of its well-established national organisation and networks.44 According to Wilson, the cause was a sense of disenchantment with a lack of reward for loyalty to Golkar; he quotes Yapto Suryosumarno proclaiming the better choice of forming a new party compared to the option of sticking to a party that 'doesn't care' (Wilson 2006: 290)

Proof of the agility of the preman can also be seen in their forays in the media. It should be noted that since the fall of Soeharto, Indonesia has had one of the most liberal press scenes in Southeast Asia, and the number of print publications and electronic media has grown impressively in just a few years (see Sen and Hill 2000; Heryanto and Hadiz 2005). Moreover, the importance of the media is enhanced in the context of a changed political environment that emphasizes elections and political parties, as has been already alluded to in the above discussions on recent electoral contests in the cities of Medan and Surabaya.

In this connection, it is relevant that gangsters have developed an interest in wielding control over press publications, as well as associations of journalists. In both North Sumatra and East Java, for example, preman, who go back and forth between formal business and political spheres, and the shadowy underworld of organised crime, produce tabloids that appear only irregularly for extortion purposes and in connection with competition over contracts or local office.45 On the other hand, intimidation of the media by politically-connected goons has also become commonplace, replacing the New Order-era practice of muzzling the press through censorship, closures and rigid laws.

In all of Indonesia, it is undoubtedly North Sumatra and particularly Medan and its environs that display most clearly the presence of political gangsterism in post-authoritarian Indonesia. With their camouflage uniforms of distinct colours and regalia, they represent private armies that can be mobilised on behalf of the rich, the powerful and the ruthless. There is probably no other Indonesian city in which the signposts of these organisations are so prevalent and obviously placed, as if designed to demarcate territorial boundaries. Nevertheless, even here the situation can get quite unpredictable, as some of the organisations seem to lack the kind of discipline that is sometimes, though not always correctly, associated with the Nazi and fascist goons of Europe from an earlier time, which they might be compared to in some respects. We see this, for example, in the conflicts pitting members of the same civilian militia against one another. Some observers of gang activity in North Sumatra claim that members seem to literally change uniforms at will, and in spite of the efforts of local leaders, don the colours of whichever organisation is willing to mobilise them at any given time. This has given rise in everyday conversation to the notion of the PS, or pemuda setempat; essentially, this refers to local thugs available for hire by anybody and who do not have a particular sense of allegiance to any single organisation.46

Ostensibly, 'Islamic' hooligans have also emerged as organised under the banner of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) into which, according to Ryter, New Order-era members of youth/gangster organisations were recruited. Such thugs attack places of entertainment in the name of morality but are probably interested as well in turf struggles for the right to collect protection money (Ryter 2005: 22–23). Interestingly, the FPI has been linked strongly in the media with a range of top national political figures, from former Vice-President Habibie to retired General Wiranto to PPP leader Hamza Haz to PAN's Amien Rais. Another 'Islamic' group, which makes a special appeal to the ethnic sentiments of the 'indigenous' Betawi people of Jakarta, is the Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR).47 Engaged in similar activities as the FPI and populated by a number of well-known hoods based in the capital city, it also has links to New Order-era elites (Wilson 2006: 289). Indeed, the genesis of both the FPI and the FBR, and their subsequent development, appears inseparable from connections with the military and/or the police forces (YSIK 2004: 15; Wilson 2006: 285–286)—institutions that have been struggling to maintain their political relevance, as well as economic interests, in the post-Soeharto period.

Groups like the FPI, FBR and the individuals who serve as their leaders and patrons, have been able to bolster their populist credentials by making atavistic and vague references to Islamic morality. In the same vein, regional autonomy has been used as an opportunity by politicos in a host of localities to support bylaws that enforce adherence to a very conservative interpretation of appropriate Muslim dress and public behaviour (especially for women) (Pelita 26 May 2006). This is the case even though the decentralisation legislation stipulates that religious affairs continue to be the purview of the central government. Activists from Indonesian women's organisation recognise how the claimed return to local traditions of morality, citing culture and religion, can be severely detrimental to the freedom and rights enjoyed by women (Noerdin et al. 2005: 36-41). The case of such bylaws, therefore, provides a good example of how localism can be appropriated to further socially reactionary projects and agendas in some instances, as discussed earlier. Vulnerable to accusations that they regularly exercise power 'immorally', some local politicos have appeared to take the high ground on public morality issues, not in the least because it conveniently deflects attention from ongoing corrupt practices they may be implicated in. It should be pointed out that these local politicos are not necessarily members of political parties with Islamic or any other religious identity; thus the 'pragmatic' aspects of the call for stricter public observance of claimed Islamic precepts should not be underestimated.

As mentioned, in comparison to North Sumatra, groups of organised thugs have generally been less of a feature of struggles over local office in East Java, though prominent outbreaks of violence were to occur in the latter province upon the implementation of the system of direct elections in 2005. This is the case even in the harsh urban sprawl that is the provincial capital city of Surabaya, where the political enforcers and henchmen of the old New Order were once also cultivated, typically in close association with the military. The contrast with Medan/North Sumatra is partly reflective of the inability of organisations like Pemuda Pancasila to establish clear dominance over the underworld even during the New Order. In fact, the constellation of gangs appears to be somewhat 'egalitarian' and dispersed in Surabaya, a city renowned for the role of its street toughs in Indonesia's war of Independence in 1945–49, and in which small, diffuse criminal outfits are not clearly beholden to larger, nationally-established organisations. Moreover, it appears that the state security apparatus proper in East Java had come to develop a somewhat different kind of relationship with the underworld to that in North Sumatra—the original 'home' of the youth/gangster organisations (Ryter 2002). Largely bypassing the 'youth' organisations here, the military is said to have more direct links, for example, with lucrative ethnic-Chinese-controlled illegal gambling operations, acting as their immediate protectors and bodyguards.48 Not surprisingly, military and police units in the province have also been known to fight over control of criminal activity, as they did over the gambling industry in the town of Madiun (Gamma 12 October 2001). Moreover, the Indonesian navy and marine forces in the city of Surabaya are believed to have a direct stake in the city's illegal prostitution industry.49

In a nutshell, compared to the New Order era, the constellation of politico-gangster organisations in Indonesia has now become exceedingly complex; each of the major parties is equipped with a paramilitary arm that often interlinks with the criminal underworld. The most prominent of this type nationally is undoubtedly the paramilitary arm or satgas of the PDI-P, though smaller parties like PAN also come equipped with a small militia. As is well known, the PKB relies on Banser forces traditionally linked to the wider NU organisation that provides the party with its social base, especially in the rural hinterland of East Java. It also comes equipped with an ostensibly separate satgas of its own, as well as a special outfit made up of martial arts experts, the so-called Pagar Nusa.50

In his brief but useful analysis of the gangster and militia organisations in post-authoritarian Indonesia, particularly the array of satgas linked to political parties, King (2003) observes that: 'Essentially, reformasi was a liberalisation of both party politics and underworld criminal activities. The satgas have been the most astute beneficiaries of both processes'. Furthermore, according to King, the satgas 'are little more than private armies' serving the needs of the political parties and have an internal structure that 'replicates military orders of hierarchy from the regional commander down to the platoon'. Many satgas even have 'logistics and intelligence wings, fatigues and jackboots, and training drills'. King then suggests another strong link with the military and with the New Order: 'Commanders are often former military men or veterans from New Order mass organisations'.

Even in comparatively calm Yogyakarta, where locals are proud of the area's 'high' local traditions and culture, goons and thugs grouped under such organisations as the 'Islamic' Gerakan Pemuda Ka'bah operate under the co-ordination of elements of the local PPP leadership.51 Moreover, what appear to be newer gangs have emerged in economically and politically strategic places like the capital city of Jakarta (Wilson 2006). In spite of the military's general retreat since 1998, most of these will still benefit from close association with 'backers', especially from within the formal state security apparatus, including the police force.

Nevertheless, in what could be a sign of things to come, brakes have already appeared that have at least temporarily stalled the further rise of the preman and which may reveal the potential limits of political gangsterism as a base of social power in the future. Specifically, the self-confidence of activists of youth/crime organisations and of civilian militia group members seems to have dwindled somewhat as a result of being partly marginalised in the direct local electoral contests first held in 2005. By this time, competing political figures had developed an apparent interest in curbing instances of violence during election time. In 2004, many of their leaders failed to win seats in legislative elections, which must have also sapped morale.52 In general, individuals who are mainly hooligans and thugs appear to have found it difficult to find a niche in the context of a new electoral system based on the popular vote. No longer carrying out the vital role of coercing and intimidating legislators during elections for local heads of government, they are struggling to find new ones to remain relevant in the continuing jostle over power.53

Thus, in spite of the overwhelming authority of a towering figure such as Olo Panggabean, internal schisms have appeared even within the more centrally-organised IPK, in which tradition dictates that few subordinates are able to make major initiatives without the approval of the supreme patron.54 Rank-and-file IPK operatives now speak of the need for regeneration and change within the organisation, comments not directed at the irreproachable Olo, interestingly, but at the generation that had taken over the day-to-day activities and operations. They point to friction between supporters of a more 'professional' model of organisational activity based on engagement in more overtly legitimate business ventures that would provide employment opportunities to the rank-and-file, rather than one primarily based on the old-style model of racketeering and thuggery.55 The IPK also notably encountered problems in the immediate post-Soeharto period when its chief rival in Medan/North Sumatra, Pemuda Pancasila, apparently encouraged local police to crack down on Olo-controlled gambling operations, which are widely believed to be backed by the local military command. This instigated events in December 1999 that involved the shooting up of the IPK headquarters and even its supreme patron's private residence by members of the local elite police mobile brigade (Ryter 2002: 196).

Nevertheless, the more general rise of the former New Order's echelon of local apparatchik, operators, enforcers and entrepreneurs in post-authoritarian Indonesia could not contrast more starkly with the fortunes of those who were already politically marginalised during the rule of Soeharto. For example, in spite of the new freedoms concerning the right to organise, and successful demands for wage increases, labour remains largely a poorly organised social force. The legacy of systematic disorganisation of mass-based social groups and movements, like that of labour, during the New Order persists in spite of these new freedoms. As has been mentioned, labour activists and organisers are often the victims of goons and thugs, linked to youth-gangster organisations or civilian militia, hired to ensure industrial stability by local businesspeople. With such issues in mind, Chapter 6 will deal more closely with processes of political ascendance and marginalisation associated with the localisation of power in Indonesia.

== Chapter 6: The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion ==
It has been shown that the localisation of power in Indonesia, as expressed institutionally in decentralisation policy, has frequently resulted in outcomes unintended in the good governance blueprints drawn up by neo-liberal and neo-institutionalist technocrats. It has also proven not to be the bastion favoured by populist NGO activists who tend to seek local sites to produce genuine grassroots social organisations that empower local citizenries. Indeed, local citizenries have only been ambiguously empowered by decentralisation more generally in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia, whether in terms of having a greater presence in and influence over the operations of markets or from the vantage point of successful protection of local communities from the supposed corrosiveness of globalised markets (see Appadurai 2000).

What is less uncertain from the foregoing is that decentralisation in Indonesia has helped to further entrench the position of predatory local elites. The localisation of power has in fact provided a lifeline to a range of New Order-nurtured local elites who were, albeit temporarily, threatened by the unravelling of the centralised authoritarian regime that had fostered them. These have been provided with new opportunities to reinvent themselves according to the exigencies of change and to survive and thrive yet again. In the process, they have selectively latched on to the language and aspects of neo-liberal good governance, as well as localist populism, including the latter's atavistic tendencies when necessary, to carve out a measure of autonomy in relation to Jakarta.

The question that is to be examined further now has to do with how social forces with little access to power and resources, by contrast, have fared under decentralisation and democratisation. Even if there are more avenues for political participation, why are they not consequently better equipped to contest power and challenge the dominant social position of predatory local elites? The discussion strongly suggests that governance reforms technocratically designed to widen the scope of political participation have ironically provided even newer avenues for local elite interests to insulate themselves from challenges from broader civil society. In other words, another quandary has emerged in decentralised, democratised Indonesia: greater scope for political participation has resulted in little discernible empowerment of people who had already been marginalised under centralised authoritarianism.

This is not to say, however, that the unravelling of centralised authoritarianism in Indonesia has not benefited lower class-based social movements in ways that are otherwise quite tangible. Danzer (2006) as well as Affif et al. (2005) and Jeon (2005) firmly argue that democratisation has had noticeably positive effects on the organisational capacities of the peasantry and industrial workers in Indonesia. The main benefit of democratisation for marginalised and formerly politically suppressed social groups is that they can now organise more freely and with less fear of direct repression from the state's security apparatus. During the New Order, as is well known, attempts at independent labour organising or even the slightest hint of labour militancy was often met with the full force of the feared security apparatus of the state (see Hadiz 1997). These sorts of changes should not be taken for granted, as most on-the-ground activists who experienced New Order repression, no matter how disillusioned they may be with the outcomes of reformasi, would no doubt concede.

To gauge the situation more closely, along with the attendant tensions and contradictions, this chapter assesses the labour movement in Indonesia in the period of reformasi—following the end of the systematic suppression experienced under the authoritarian New Order. The chapter then goes on to take a brief look at social movements based on peasant or 'indigenous' land rights to ascertain whether there have been qualitatively different developments in areas outside labour organising.

The analysis in this chapter continues to go beyond the formal and institutional aspects of power in order to examine the underlying social basis for the further entrenchment of elite predatory interests in post-authoritarian Indonesia, on the one hand, and the continuing marginalisation of other social interests, on the other hand. It does so by further scrutinising the deeper significance of the advent of direct local elections in 2005. The latter could be held up as a prime example of how reformasi has produced a revamp of the institutional makeup of local governance in the direction of greater public participation, but with socio-political outcomes that are at best ambivalent, and at worst, contrary to the expectations of technocrats and localist-populists alike. The contrast between the fortunes of predatory elites and of social movements representing marginalised social interests within Indonesia's decentralised democracy underlines many of the arguments that have been put forward in this book thus far. It constitutes no less than a statement about the actual winners and losers in contests over power in post-Soeharto Indonesia.

=== Organised Labour and Local Politics ===
Developments in the area of organised labour are instructive in many ways of the ironies of Indonesia's democratised and decentralised politics. Even after the demise of authoritarianism, labour has been inhibited as an effective social force by the lingering legacy of repression and rigid controls exercised for over thirty years by the New Order, during which labour activism and militancy were often unhelpfully equated with communist resurgence. It must be recalled that as a consequence, a particular kind of labour activism was induced during the New Order, even that which was oppositional in its stance. As a strategy for coping with authoritarianism, labour was often only very informally and rather amorphously organised throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. When Indonesia's export-led industrialisation strategy on the basis of low-wage exports was proceeding at full speed, many workers who rejected state-sponsored trade unionism were organised through an array of disparate NGOs (Ford 2003) and other labour-based organisations that did not necessarily take the form of trade unions. In order to overcome institutional controls over independent organising, many such vehicles largely concentrated on organising activities at the community level rather than predominantly in the workplace, to steer clear of the state's repressive arm (Hadiz 1997: especially chapter 7). It is in this way that the trajectory of the labour movement in Indonesia has diverged much from that which is commonly associated with the historical experience of workers in the West or some important cases in Latin America.

Thus, the late Soeharto years saw the proliferation of small, often community-based labour-organising vehicles with no formal place in the official industrial relations system, and many of which worked in conjunction with labour-based NGOs (Hadiz 1997; Kammen 1997; Ford 2003). Notably, several independent, though technically illegal, unions were also established during this period; this represented a daring if largely ineffective challenge to the institutional arrangements then in existence that precluded unions apart from the state-sanctioned Federasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia (All-Indonesia Labour Federation, FBSI)/Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia (All-Indonesia Workers' Union, SPSI)/Federasi Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia (Federation of All-Indonesia Workers' Unions, FSPSI). Among the most important of these were the Setiakawan (Solidarity) Labour Union, the Serikat Buruh Sejahtera Indonesia (Indonesian Labour Prosperity Union, SBSI), and the left-wing Front Nasional Perjuangan Buruh Indonesia (Indonesian National Front for Labour Struggles, FNPBI), which had close links to the radical stream of the student movement. All were established in the first half of the 1990s and were almost immediately greeted with harsh reprisals from the authoritarian state. In spite of their endeavours, rigid controls were continually imposed on labour organising, legitimised ideologically in part through the past association of labour militancy with the banned Indonesian Communist Party and the claimed 'indigenous' cultural predisposition to eschew class conflict (see Hadiz 1997). Throughout the New Order, independent labour organising at the workplace level remained both difficult and dangerous.

The fall of the New Order resulted immediately in some positive changes for workers and labour organisations. Among the first steps that the Habibie government took to establish its reformist credentials, and distance itself from Soeharto's, was to annul a wage freeze enforced by the New Order's last minister of manpower (Jakarta Post 1 July 1998: 1). Thus, in Jakarta, the minimum monthly wage was set at Rp 198,500, although this was only US$ 14.10 according to exchange rates current at the time. Similar increases were to take place throughout Indonesia but against the background of a national inflation rate of around 80 per cent due to the ongoing deep economic crisis. Since then, labour organisations have been able to press for periodic minimum wage increases; this in itself is notable given continuing high unemployment and the protestations of employers against this form of state intervention in the workings of the labour market.

In 2006, the minimum monthly wage in Jakarta was about Rp 819,000, or roughly US$82, according to prevailing exchange rates. North Sumatra had a minimum wage of around Rp 737,000 while East Java's was a rather low Rp 390,000. It should be recalled, however, that these wage increases took place in relation to constant price hikes and the lifting of government subsidies on various basic services and goods that continually eroded their real value. The official inflation rate for 2005, for example, was in excess of 17 per cent (Waspada 17 December 2005; Jakarta Post 11 January 2006), when the Indonesian economy had for several years showed signs of partial recovery. Thus workers continue to claim, surely quite understandably, a lack of improvement in their general welfare, and to begrudge the perceived lack of responsiveness to their plight by those in authority.

In terms of the right to organise, it was significant that the Habibie government also ratified seven International Labor Organisation (ILO) conventions on basic labour rights, including Convention 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise. These were implemented through presidential executive decisions as well as by regulations set up by the minister of manpower soon after the fall of Soeharto. Later, a law on trade unions was passed that, remarkably given recent history, allowed as few as ten workers to form a union as well as the existence of more than one trade union in any single workplace. The government still maintained the right to withdraw official recognition of unions for administrative reasons, however, and the courts were empowered to dissolve unions whose activities were regarded as threatening to national security (Ford 2006: 4). In spite of such caveats, the institutional framework governing state-labour-capital relations had quickly become substantially different from that which had characterised the New Order.

It may appear to be another puzzle that the dramatic growth of labour-organising activities and vehicles after the fall of Soeharto has not translated into a significantly more effective labour movement than that which currently exists under the new democratic environment. A valid question to ask is why the labour movement has not been able to influence contests over power that take place within a much more participatory institutional framework than existed in previous times. In this connection, it should be pointed out first that workers continued to be constrained by massive unemployment levels produced by the 1997–1998 Asian Economic Crisis and its aftermath, and therefore were almost organisationally paralysed during many of the key struggles that took place in the early post-Soeharto period. During this time, only small radical student groupings briefly acted in proxy for the interests of marginalised sections of broader civil society in the absence of coherent movements representing the lower classes.

Over a million manufacturing jobs were lost as a result of the crisis, according to Ford (2006: 4), and the real wages of those who retained their positions actually dropped by 38 per cent in that economically devastating period. Unemployment (10.3 per cent) and especially underemployment (31 per cent) remained at excruciatingly high levels (Media Indonesia 2 July 2005) years after the height of the Asian Economic Crisis. Furthermore, in many large cities, the unemployment rate remained very high after almost a decade had passed; in Medan, it stood at above 19 per cent at the end of 2005 (Waspada 17 December 2005). The prevailing economic milieu alone goes a long way in terms of explaining the painfully slow development of labour's organising capacities in spite of the ostensibly more hospitable social and political environment.

There have been other equally important factors at work. While locally-organised, often community-based, semi-formal organising vehicles without clear structures may have been advantageous in avoiding the full brunt of state repression during much of the New Order, they are not necessarily ideal for the emergence of more sophisticated and effective vehicles in a post-authoritarian context. Attempts at developing nationally organised labour movements since 1998 have only met with limited success, partly due to the legacy of a highly fragmented labour movement. At the national level, though dozens of labour federations and a number of confederations were to be registered at the Department of Manpower within several years, a good many of these existed in name only and had a limited level of sustained activity at the level of workers' communities or the workplace.

Therefore, a different route that many organisers quickly adopted after 1998 was characterised by the establishment of what they termed 'local' labour movements or unions that operated in specific localities. This was in itself a tacit admission of the limited capacity to effectively organise nationally. As might be expected, the localities concerned were usually within or around the more industrialised cities of Java and Sumatra, and also on islands like Sulawesi, in which the city of Makassar had grown into a major industrial hub by the 1990s. Thus, in urban formations like Surabaya, locally-organised labour unions such as the Serikat Buruh Reformasi (SBR; Reform Trade Union) emerged within the first years of the post-Soeharto period, together with the Serikat Buruh Independen (SBI; Independent Trade Union); some workers in the Greater Jakarta-West Java area formed the Serikat Buruh Jabotabek (SBJ; The Jakarta-Bogor-Tangerang-Bekasi Trade Union). In Medan, the Serikat Buruh Medan Independen (SBMI; Independent Medan Trade Union) was established in 2003. These organisations were arguably the new institutional expressions of already existing local networks of labour organising that had been forced to keep a low profile during the Soeharto years.

Some of these local unions would prove to be rather militant in nature despite the generally inhospitable socio-economic terrain on which they operated. The SBMI in Medan, for example, was involved in September 2004 in a violent dispute with the management of PT Shamrock, an American-owned producer of rubber gloves for medical use that employed 1,700 workers, mostly young females. The situation became so serious that no less than 200 police personnel were eventually sent in to quell the unrest arising from various labour demands, including that the company adhere to the officially stipulated minimum wage level and improve work safety conditions (see <nowiki>http://www.umwaelzung.info/shamrock/shamrock-en.html</nowiki>.). With the dispute still unresolved a full days days later, it was reported that protesting workers were attacked yet again, this time by a gang of thirty thugs, under the direct gaze of police (see <nowiki>http://www.pkps.org/hotnews/detail.php3?itemid=h_1095488868</nowiki>). According to Wilson and other reports, these thugs were likely hired directly by the factory management (Wilson 2006: 27; also see Waspada 12 August 2004, 19 August 2004, and 11 September 2004).

As mentioned earlier, the tactic of hiring goons associated with youth organisations or party militia to intimidate workers during protests and at their homes has become quite prevalent, although workers sometimes report that state security forces will also be directly involved in labour disputes.1 It is alleged that there is even a satgas SPSI for hire in North Sumatra, believed by local workers and labour activists to be made up of moonlighting members of other organisations specialising in the service of intimidation.2

In spite of such developments, Jeon (2005) argues that labour's organisational capacities have been steadily rising after democratisation in Indonesia. He makes this contention on the basis of fieldwork from 2001 in East Java, especially on trade union-organising activities at Maspion, a giant, highly diversified company based in the province that is well known for producing household goods. Owned by the family of Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur Alim Markus, known to be well connected to local and national political elites, Maspion's array of factories has been notorious as a site of labour disputes since at least the early 1990s. Displaying the fact that the state security apparatus at times still involves itself in quelling labour unrest on behalf of business interests, a 2003 strike at one of Maspion's factories was accompanied by the abduction and assault of three workers by East Java police (Kompas 11 June 2003). Focusing on the recent experience of a specific Maspion factory in Sidoarjo, a major industrial enclave just outside of Surabaya, Jeon maintains that labour-organising activities and the experience of labour disputes are now giving rise to a generation of more solidly grassroots-based and competent leadership than ever before. For Jeon, the labour activism in the New Order, while often dramatic, took place with poor organisation and leadership. In contrast, the organisational capacities of workers are improving quietly at the factory level today as a direct result of the erosion of the authoritarian state.

Jeon's favourable prognosis may be supported by some notable, though still rather exceptional, achievements on the part of organised labour, nationally.3 One such instance was demonstrated when the central Indonesian government dropped its plans to enact labour 'reforms', reportedly due to fierce opposition from unionists to suggested stipulations regulating the firing of workers, outsourcing, and the setting of wage rates (Financial Times 13 September 2006). This case is particularly interesting because no less than vice-president and top businessman Jusuf Kalla had been brandishing the labour 'reforms' as essential in attracting foreign investment in resuscitating Indonesia's economy, which is still not yet fully recovered from the Asian Economic Crisis of the previous decade. Kalla was driven to lament, in what amounted to a huge exaggeration, that the power of unions in Indonesia was comparable to that of 'France or America'. He also suggested in apparent exasperation that democracy had gone too far in Indonesia and 'had come too early' (Financial Times, 13 September 2006), reflecting dismay that in this particular instance, Indonesia's 'reformed' governance institutions had failed to keep distributional interests at bay.

Senior business figures like Kalla have an interest in overstating the power and influence of Indonesia's labour movement. At the very least, their misrepresentations, which often go widely reported in the mass media, provide added legitimacy to any act designed to pre-empt its real emergence as a social force. In spite of Kalla's complaints, a study of labour relations in two localities, the highly industrialised Tangerang (in the new province of Banten and just outside of Jakarta proper) and Pasuruan in East Java show that workers do have a legitimate reason to be concerned with the increasingly pervasive practice of outsourcing and short-term contracts (Akatiga, TURC, Lab Sosio-University of Indonesia 2006). This is particularly so because the practice is taking place in the context of already widespread unemployment and underemployment.

Notwithstanding the publicised grievances of businesspeople, whether foreign or domestic, the labour movement remains essentially constricted in its capability to influence the fundamental agenda of social and political reform in Indonesia. Typically ignored at the national level, workers' organisations have been marginal in local contests over power in the context of decentralisation and local autonomy, where the reform agenda has been largely shaped by political and economic interests unconnected, and even hostile, to that of the labour movement. Apart from some well-coordinated mass mobilisations, notably those conducted on Labour Day on 1 May, cross-class alliances involving labour continue to be restricted to small segments of middle-class-based NGO and student movements. This was exactly the case before Soeharto's fall (Tornquist 2002). There are also few overt signs of sufficiently coherent working-class organising, or social alliances that prominently include workers, which would seriously trouble local elites and governments anywhere.

It follows that none of the newly salient coalitions of interest contesting political change in Indonesia, most overtly expressed in the form of political parties and the shifting alliances within and between them, has as yet seriously accommodated the interests of organised labour. In other words, organised labour has largely been left out of the hurly-burly world of post-Soeharto party and electoral politics, nationally and locally. Although including labour sections or 'departments', parties like PAN or the PKS have not shown serious interest in developing strong labour constituencies; thus, still no organic links exist between them and working-class organizational vehicles. At the level of local branches, for example, one would be hard pressed to find the functionaries of major political parties with interest and expertise in dealing with labour issues, even if they are located in industrial areas with large numbers of industrial workers and labour vehicles. More significantly, one would be even more hard-pressed to find major local political party leaders and functionaries with a serious background in labour organisations.

As in the national level, the representatives of labour remain excluded from leadership of parties and parliaments locally, although one minister of manpower hailed from the formerly state-sanctioned FSPSI. There is also no record of local elections that have produced candidates with overtly pro-labour platforms anywhere. Not surprisingly, a recent study found little difference in the attitudes toward labour of a local government controlled by Golkar (in Tangerang) and one controlled by the reform-era PKB (in Pasuruan) (Akatiga, TURC, Labsosio-University of Indonesia 2006). Such a situation is of potentially great importance if one takes into consideration the role posited for organised labour in democratisation processes as described by Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992) and Therborn (1977).

The problem at the core is that organised labour remains too organisationally weak and fragmented to be regarded a significant enough social force for elites to seriously co-opt, in spite of the occurrence of substantial Labour Day demonstrations and the like. Nevertheless, there has been some limited presence of elite interests in a few labour organisations with only dubious links with the mainstream of the emergent post-Soeharto labour movement. These, like the NU-linked Sarbumusi or the Persaudaraan Pekerja Muslim Indonesia (Brotherhood of Indonesian Muslim Workers, PPMI) appear to be no more than part of strategies of selective mass mobilisations related to narrow exigencies. The PPMI, for example, was closely aligned with ICMI leader and Soeharto successor B. J. Habibie, whose short-lived presidency was embattled and precarious.4 Its function during Habibie's tenure was to help demonstrate the muscle power of the then president's supporters and to provide the Soeharto protégé and long-time engineer-technocrat with simultaneously reformist and populist credentials.

Again, the Indonesian case is not entirely exceptional within the broader Southeast Asian context in terms of both relative marginalisation of labour in the midst of the rise of electoral democracy and the growing power of local elites. In 1990s post-authoritarian Thailand, Brown shows that 'lacking a strong organised voice, workers were isolated in a developing electoral political system dominated by big money, vote-buying and the entrenching of links between crime bosses and local and metropolitan business' (Brown 2004: 105). Similar to the Indonesian case, Ungpakorn notes the absence of a political party of the working class in Thailand in spite of the objective expansion of the wage labour force due to capitalist transformation (Ungpakorn 2003b: 20–24) and democratisation. He also identifies the emergence of gangster-unionists involved in extortion—a social category that has also made an appearance within the Indonesian labour movement.

In the Philippines, too, the labour movement cannot be said to be a major player in the post-authoritarian context. Like in Indonesia today, workers there have long been at the mercy of unleashed goons attached to paramilitary forces (see McCoy 1991: 131), though in this case such goons are likely to be more directly under the wing of influential political clans. Throughout post-authoritarian Southeast Asia, therefore, organised labour has remained only a marginal and ambiguous beneficiary of the democratisation process and the localisation of power.

How has the localisation of power in Indonesia affected the fortunes of organised labour according to its own activists? According to one such activist, S. Aminah (2005), organised labour has had little clout with local governments that are run by former bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and the like. In fact, she suggests that organised labour has been placed in an especially precarious position in relation to local governments because of some of the pressures exerted by the simultaneously expressed requirements of decentralised governance and that of economic globalisation. She argues that local government officials now have a growing stake in forging successful alliances with businesspeople and mobile investors to enhance rent-seeking possibilities. Once again, there is nothing distinctively Indonesian about this development. It has been noted in rapidly growing China, for example, that local governments tend to take the side of capital during labour disputes, because a veiled 'symbiosis' of interests has emerged between local officials and private business (Chen 2003: 57). Such local officials, whether in Indonesia or China, will almost naturally regard organised labour as a nuisance to the pursuit of their material advancement.

Local officials in Indonesia, too, according to S. Aminah (2005), are concerned with ensuring that businesses do not relocate elsewhere because of labour issues; they are therefore prepared to go to some lengths to ensure the continuing weakness of the labour movement. Insofar as this is true, the irony of course is that investors are at least as much put off by the lack of legal certainty that has accompanied decentralisation and local autonomy, as well as by the propensity of local politicos to impose levies on business activities. It has long been easier, however, and more politically convenient, for businesses to place the blame on labour demands for unattractive investment climates than to squarely challenge powerful state bureaucrats and politicians who may make exorbitant claims on their potential profits in the form of rents. The potential for the growth of locally based politico-business alliances opened up by decentralisation would make such confrontations still more costly than skirmishes with an underdeveloped, though sometimes vocal, labour movement.

Perhaps a preferred form of resolution of the situation for business is one that was explored in the Philippines. Here, in spite of national labour laws that uphold labour rights, special economic zones, such as in Subic, are created within which organised labour ceases to exist—leaving investors, domestic and foreign, to just deal with the local bureaucracy (Chan and Kelly 2004). Indeed, Indonesian officials have been speaking about setting up a number of new special economic zones within which national labour laws favourable to labour organisation would not apply.5

S. Aminah's contentions are largely supported by a separate study that found that decentralisation has meant that local notables and government officials have more direct dealings today with companies operating within their area of authority. This study especially demonstrates the importance of the informal role of local notables and officials in the actual exercise of labour relations today, notwithstanding the gains that workers have enjoyed in the area of legislation. It states that (Akatiga, TURC, Labsosio-University of Indonesia 2006: 6) 'Companies collaborate with the local elite', some of whom function as 'recruitment agents'. Such elites may also 'help in disciplining the workers' due to their high social standing. However, they can also ostensibly protect workers when disputes with management occur; 'a role which is double-edged because at the same time they prevent the emergence of workers' collective protest'.

This report, however, also points to the probable tensions arising from such collaboration. It notes that the role of local elites as labour recruiters potentially gives them considerable leverage in relation to businesses operating locally. Local officials, for example, might be tempted to make use of this leverage by introducing levies, fees and taxes, many of which may be non-transparent—thus, ultimately causing a new source of financial burden for enterprises. Intriguingly, the same report on Tangerang and Pasuruan suggests that one strategy that companies employ to deal with troublesome local elites is to provide support for their political rivals, thereby identifying one basis for the possible intervention of business into arenas of local power in which money politics have become increasingly prevalent.

There are yet other more historical and sociological reasons for the disinclination of political party elites to 'invite' labour into the formal political fold in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Significantly, the continuing salience of the interests that had been embedded in the New Order's patronage network re-appears in the worldviews of major political actors, both national and local. It must be recalled that the political genealogies of the majority of these actors can be traced to the parties and mass organisations that, in tandem with the military, instigated the destruction of the PKI, including its labour arm, Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia (All-Indonesia Central Labour Organisation, SOBSI), and were thus involved directly in the horrific massacres of the 1960s that continues to scar Indonesia's collective political memory. It is not surprising, therefore, that a range of local elites spread over an array of political party vehicles almost uniformly replicate New Order-era views about the dangerously subversive potential of strong labour movements, even today.

Thus, some local parliamentarians display an interesting mixture of condescension, paternalism and moral outrage when discussing the actions of 'uneducated' workers who engage in 'troublesome' protest activities. It should be noted that one form of labour protest has been for workers to demonstrate and express their grievances on the grounds of provincial or local parliamentary offices. This perhaps is not so surprising, given the context of decentralisation. In assessing this practice, one provincial-level parliamentarian in Yogyakarta argued that labour unrest is but the outcome of the self-interested manipulations of NGOs and of the small, Leftist student-led Partai Rakyat Demokratik (Democratic People's Party, PRD), which misleads 'impressionable young workers'. This is evident, he suggested, in the kinds of militant songs that workers sing in their demonstrations, which recall socialist-inspired struggles. The politician, an Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam (Islamic Students' Association, HMI) activist as a student, argued that such labour actions may create 'threats' to Indonesian democracy and must be mitigated by more moderate kinds of labour organising.6 The HMI, it must be recalled once again, was at the forefront of the anti-PKI student movement that aligned itself with the military in the mid and late 1960s. The politician's comments are interestingly reminiscent of the 'labour activism equals communism' formula that was favoured by New Order-era state officials, perhaps most notably the communist-phobe Sudomo, a Soeharto-era security chief and one-time minister of manpower.7 This parliamentarian's view was echoed in other comments made by a colleague, who argued that 'psychologically, the Muslim community still felt vengeful toward communists' and that the small PRD, often cited as being behind some of the more militant outbursts of labour unrest in the immediate post-Soeharto years, had the same 'basic ideas' as the long departed communists.8

In North Sumatra, local parliamentarians with links to such organisations as Pemuda Pancasila, which was also active in the military-led campaign against the PKI in the 1960s, exhibit the same dispositions toward organised labour. Speaking of Leftist infiltration of social movements, including that of labour, one such parliamentarian suggests that one should always be 'vigilant . . . because [communists] are shrewd, well-trained.' She adds that 'they do not only acquire this shrewdness from internal organising' but also through 'foreign contacts'.9 A slightly different slant on the same argument was put forward by one of her fellow Medan parliamentarians at the time, the FKPPI-linked Martius Latuperisa. He suggests that the labour movement can be manipulated by any contending elites, but that the real national threat was that of lingering communist influence.10

In East Java, the head of the PKB satgas, Lutfilah Masduki, is also concerned about the 'politicisation' and radicalisation of the labour movement. While he claims to have no objection to protests related to strictly labour-related issues, he is convinced that labour demonstrations that touch on open broader social and political controversies such as democratisation exhibit evidence of tampering by remnants of Leftist political forces.11 Not coincidentally, such a stark de-linking of economic and socio-political struggles was a major feature of New Order official discourse. The PKB is of course the offspring of the NU, which is also the parent of the Banser, the militia that played a leading role too in the massacres against real and imagined communists, especially in Java, in the 1960s. East Java Banser figure Jakfar Shodig, interestingly, admits that Banser forces have been used to apply pressure on striking factory workers on behalf of industrialists—a practice that has been widely reported by labour activists in Central and East Java but that has been, understandably, commonly denied by Banser officials.12

Thus, several major factors have combined to ensure the continuing marginalisation of labour in the post-authoritarian era and to inhibit its capacity to engage in local arenas of political conflict. First is the legacy of authoritarian rule, which was particularly harsh on organised labour in the first place—circumventing workers' organisational capacities through systematic, and often brutal, state repression. Quite simply, organised labour has not been able to overcome this legacy and re-learn the skills of effective organising and perhaps still needs to reclaim the tradition of political unionism that was so much a part of labour history before the New Order (Hadiz 1997, chapter 3). Second, the context of chronic massive unemployment and underemployment, especially in the wake of the economic crisis of 1997 and 1998, which Indonesia still struggles to overcome, is not particularly conducive to effective labour-organising efforts, even when their ambitions are confined to the local level only. Third, national and local elites continue to have political and ideological dispositions that are broadly anti-labour, which can be explained on the basis of their political socialisation and backgrounds in New Order-nurtured social organisations. S. Aminah's observations about the link between local officials and business in the context of certain decentralisation and globalisation pressures may also be added to this list.

Yet, it is not just organised labour that continued to be politically marginalised in spite of the widening of the scope of political participation in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Organisations representing the peasantry, for example, have hardly had it much easier. New, albeit sometimes very informal organisations representing local peasantries or 'indigenous peoples' movements had emerged during the first years of the post-New Order period, during the heady days of newfound political freedoms. For example, displaced peasants took unilateral action to gain control over land they believed traditionally belonged to them and from which they were previously banished for development projects, plantations, real estate development activities, golf courses and the like. Such actions clearly would not have been possible if not for the circumstance surrounding the abrupt unravelling of the highly centralised and authoritarian New Order (see Lucas and Warren 2000). Indeed, there were also reports of village chiefs, closely associated with oppressive New Order rule, being unceremoniously toppled in local peasant uprisings.

Peasants were so active in some places that elites momentarily paid attention as renewed debates took place about agrarian reform as a pressing issue. It was under these circumstances that Lucas and Warren speculated that it was possible that the management of agrarian issues might soon take a fairer and more equitable form than ever before (Lucas and Warren 2000: 235). The relatively high expectations that had been raised by largely spontaneous actions were perhaps destined to be dashed in many instances.

Wee, for example, reports that peasant action in Riau to demand proper compensation for land previously confiscated from them for the purposes of business activities has only been partly successful. Though Riau is oil-rich, the post-1999 revenue-sharing mechanism that has appeased local elites, according to Wee, has not guaranteed a 'trickle down' process to satisfy demands at the grassroots level for such things as adequate compensation for land dispossession (Wee 2002: 59). Thus, local peasants have resorted to acts of ransacking the offices of companies such as Caltex, the major U.S.-based oil concern operating in Riau. In Bintan in the Riau Archipelago, thousands of peasants protested to receive proper compensation for land they claimed was virtually stolen from them under the New Order to build an industrial park on the northern part of the island. Their efforts were thwarted by local authorities, however, given that powerful interests have long been entrenched in the tourism and industrial sectors of Bintan, including those of the Soeharto family; their main crony and ally, Liem Sioe Liong; as well as investors from Singapore (see Kompas 21 January 2000).

In North Sumatra, a peasants' movement predicated on claiming customary rights for 'indigenous' ethnic Melayu peasants to a huge amount of land formerly controlled by Dutch plantations and then Indonesian state-owned plantations has existed since 1953. Led from 1969 by Abnawi Nuh, an activist of the old Soekarnoist PNI, and before that by his brother, the lands claimed by the community of some reportedly 70,000 peasants span large portions of at least two kabupaten, Deli Serdang and Langkat. According to Abnawi, the conflict over the years has involved fighting with the security apparatus and more lately, members of preman organisations, resulting in fatalities. For Abnawi, the reality is that democratisation has not produced any progress in the realisation of peasant demands—not surprising, perhaps—given the current value of the lands in question and given that local political elites have offered little more than rhetorical support.13 To his vexation, local governments endowed with greater powers since 2001 have been no more responsive to the aspirations of his movement than those of the previous authoritarian and centralised era.

On the other hand, movements predicated on 'indigenous' or local cultural identity may be supported at times by sections of local elites. Such movements have had high hopes about regional autonomy's capacity to deliver more rights over land and other natural resources to indigenous, often ethnic minority communities in specific localities (see Nababan 2002). Especially predisposed to support these movements are local nobilities who had been forced to retreat to a position of relative political marginality during the New Order. This, however, creates a new set of problems for those interested in more genuine empowerment of local communities, including NGO activists, partly on the basis of protecting local cultures. Van Klinken's observation on the 'return of Sultans' through local politics has already been noted. Here, the issue is that such nobilities/aristocracies or other traditional elites have been prone to manipulate atavistic sentiments (see Dwipayana 2005) to bolster their bargaining positions vis-à-vis others, and have no abiding interest to alter the basic nature of the allocation of economic and political resources. In fact, Nababan (2002) expresses fear that regional autonomy will hurt the most marginalised of local communities as local governments develop the need to intensify exploitation of natural resources and land in order to boost local revenue.

As noted in Chapter 4, the atavistic turn in some local Indonesian politics frequently relies on calls for the upholding of adat (customary law) as a sign of acknowledgement of and respect for local community traditions within the framework of decentralisation. By definition, customary law almost always favours traditional local elites who are in many instances also deeply involved in the post-authoritarian competition for access and control over natural resources. Bubandt's (2004) observation that the resurgence of traditional elites has sometimes sparked ethnically-defined social conflicts, rather than lead to the re-establishment of some sort of idealised, pre-modern, peaceful state of nature, is not surprising when one considers what is at stake in concrete struggles over land and other resources.

In conflict-ridden North Maluku, for example, the Sultan of Ternate and his family have made, though only partly successful, bids to regain the local aristocracy's former position within Indonesia's decentralised democracy. A former senior member of the local and national Golkar political juggernaut during the New Order who had subsequently moved to another party, the Sultan was 'only' successful in winning a national parliamentary seat in 2004, and one for his wife in the DPD in the same year. Unlike in the Philippines, where national congressmen with local political bases often vie with mayors and the like for political ascendance, such positions in Jakarta do not entail access to local resources and institutions that could form the foundation of local networks of patronage. Other bids by the Sultan and his wife to win the governorship of the newly-created province of North Maluku and the mayoralty of Ternate, respectively, failed in the face of opposition from other past and present senior national and local Golkar figures—displaying the salience of actors' old links to the New Order across the board (Smith 2006). In spite of these failures, the Sultan's strategy of reclaiming old powers and privileges was clearly partly based on a call to 'tradition' and the manipulation of local identity and pride.

In a nutshell, the experience of organised labour in general and that of some peasant movements in the post-authoritarian period shows that democratisation and decentralisation have not produced an environment in which the interests of those who had been suppressed in the first place under authoritarian rule can now thrive. Although a certain amount of euphoria accompanied the fall of the New Order, workers and peasants have found that the institutions of decentralisation and democracy—parties, local parliaments and the like—continue to be inhabited by the kinds of powerful interests with few organic links to peasant or labour movements. Instructively, similar to post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines, there is no major political party that claims to represent the interest of the working class14 or the peasantry. Indeed, those presiding over mutually competing local predatory coalitions of power have few reasons to set a course for social and political reforms entailing a substantial degree of redistribution of economic and political resources. Consequently, the new salience of electoral politics has been of only limited use to lower-class interests and social movements in post-authoritarian Indonesia.

=== Electoral Democracy: More Participation, but Little Contestation? ===

==== the social outcomes of direct elections ====
In contrast, electoral politics have been exceedingly useful for Indonesia's local elites once nurtured within a centralised system of authoritarian rule. This is so even though they have had to adapt quite adroitly to changing social and political circumstances. For example, Law no. 32/2004 and Governmental Regulation no. 6/2005 have created the setting for a new system within which heads of local government are directly elected by the local citizenry instead of by parliamentarians in the closed chambers of parliament house. While the change was broadly in the interest of local politicos who needed to bolster their position in relation to local legislative bodies, the system obviously entailed new political strategies of winning public office. The most tangible change was the dramatically escalating cost of winning electoral contests, as money politics was diverted from a concentration on local parliamentary bodies to the public at large.

Local politicos were obviously not responsible for drafting the legislation that made possible these local direct elections. This task was undertaken in Jakarta, where policy-making is at least partly influenced by ideas of good governance reforms. The institution of local direct elections may have been at least partly premised on the assumption that direct elections, being more participatory in nature, will result in governments more accountable to the local citizenry. According to Mietzner (2006: 17), 'the new system of direct elections was' even 'designed to close the door to excessive money politics in local legislatures and introduce transparency and accountability to the electoral process'. The expectation might have been that local predatory interests would be defeated; thus, the road would be paved for forms of local governance that would be more rational in the technocratic mould. Indeed, Mietzner points out that some observers had hoped that a new crop of leaders would somehow emerge 'to break the grip of entrenched bureaucratic elites on local government' (ibid). Quite remarkably, no less than 248 elections for sub-provincial and provincial heads of government were already undertaken approximately between June 2005 and June 2006, out of a total of 472 that were scheduled until 2008–2009 (Asia Foundation 2006), across the expansive Indonesian archipelago.

There remain strong reasons, however, for being sceptical of this institutional innovation. For one thing, instead of curbing money politics, it has transferred the practice to domains beyond that of legislative chambers. The resultant dramatically rising cost of winning office may, in the long run, help to tighten the grip on local power held by some of the best-positioned of predatory elites, as explained below. This is the case even though nearly 40 per cent of incumbents—elected on the basis of the prior system of voting by legislative bodies—were estimated to have lost office (Gross 2006; Pratikno 2006) in local electoral contests from mid-2005 to early 2006. For reformers within Indonesia, the defeat of so many incumbents was greeted as a positive indicator of potential for change and, importantly, the limitations of the advantage of holding office.15 The fear, naturally, was that incumbency meant the capacity to influence the workings of a range of local institutions engaged at various stages of the electoral process. Especially where powerful incumbents did win (for example, in Kutai Kertanegara or in Medan), however, there continued to be major questions about the neutrality of local electoral commissions. Equally significantly, there were issues about the neutrality of lower-ranking members of the local civil service, such as the camat and the lurah, whose own fortunes will tend to be closely intertwined with that of a presiding bupati or mayor and, therefore, will have reasons to oppose change. Local activists supporting Abdillah's challenger in Medan, for example, were allegedly assaulted by the underlings of certain lurah in the city (Analisa 15 June 2005). A particularly thorny issue concerned the integrity of the voter registration process involving lower-level officials.16

In fact, there are good reasons to question the above mentioned interpretation of the only mixed success that incumbents enjoyed in local electoral contests, as local elections were invariably tarnished by the prevalence of money politics. Therefore, in spite of the defeats that many individual incumbents suffered, there is little evidence that they have been replaced by essentially different kinds of interests. These remain the sort whose genesis ultimately cannot be separated from the exercise of predatory, albeit much more centralised, power during the New Order. This is indicated in the continued successes of former New Order bureaucrats, and Golkar-linked functionaries and activists almost all in direct electoral competition, and the absence of candidates with organic links to social movements that could represent challenges to such social interests.

Mietzner, for example, estimates on the basis of fifty local polls he analyzed that 36 per cent of the victors were career bureaucrats. Another 28 per cent were entrepreneurs (again showing the increasing appeal of direct hold of political office to many local businesspeople), 8 per cent were retired police and military officers, 22 per cent were party officials and only 6 per cent were academics or civil society leaders. It is likely that a large portion of the 'party officials' cited will include those whose political socialisation had taken place in one of the New Order-era electoral vehicles or through the select number of mass organisations through which the Soeharto regime recruited functionaries and operatives. Although Mietzner sees the broadening of available choice to voters and speculates that voters consciously threw out some local leaders with the worst of reputations, he also observes that 'the direct elections did not facilitate the rise of new political elites; instead, they simply forced the old elites to play by new rules' (Mietzner 2006:17–18).

It is significant that prior to the institution of direct local elections, Indonesian reformers of different political stripes had been grappling with the issue of how to make use of the potential opportunities provided by democratisation and decentralisation. Aware of their inability to challenge political party machines based in Jakarta, some NGOs were supportive of the idea of developing local political parties that would only contest elections in particular localities.17 In this, they appear to be following the line of thought apparent among Filipino activists such as Rocamora (2000). The belief was that local political parties would allow them to channel activities into building viable, albeit smaller 'genuinely reformist' electoral vehicles on the basis of earlier vast experience in grassroots social work through which access to local communities had been established during the New Order.

Such a strategy, if taken, would have had to address some obvious obstacles. Given the increasingly considerable resources necessary even to win local office, there would have been little guarantee that local parties would not just become the instrument of local notables who fail to win support from the major political parties. This is perhaps a rather moot point, for the plan was pre-empted by other electoral law reforms that were aimed at simplifying Indonesia's political party system.

Interestingly, this system had been long regarded in technocratic quarters as exceedingly unwieldy because of the sheer number of participants in elections. Forty-eight parties contested Indonesia's parliamentary elections in 1999, and while only 24 contested them in 2004, political parties and the hurly-burly of electoral competition have been increasingly portrayed as dysfunctional to technocratic good governance. Because few if any reformers fitting a technocratic profile have been produced by such electoral contests, political parties seem to be increasingly viewed as a necessary nuisance that can get in the way of the stability and predictability that is understood to be required for investment and the flourishing of markets (Jakarta Post 22 January 2003; Kompas 5 May 2003). In spite of such criticism of party politics emerging from state technocrats (for example, academic and Minister of Defence Juwono Sudarsono claimed that Indonesian democracy was impaired, see Tempo Interaktif 19 May 2006), few would be unwilling to put up with them. The alternative would be an even more unwieldy and chaotic system that technocratic reformers dread, characterised by a plethora of local political parties.

This is the case even though it is clear that political parties have not had the 'aggregating' and 'articulating' roles traditionally associated with them but, in the context of electoral democracy, functioned increasingly like auction houses for the rich and powerful. As was described in Chapter 5, candidates for local office have had to pay off political parties to obtain the position of official party nominee. This is partly because a law states that only a party or combination of parties that have 15 per cent or more of seats in any legislature possesses the right to advance candidates for local government head, whether bupati or mayor. If the aim of the technocratic restriction was to create a semblance of order in electoral competition, the real effect has been to induce political parties to simply auction off nominations and support to the highest bidder, almost regardless of programme or ideological issues.

The end product has been a very rambunctious system in which prospective candidates negotiate 'prices' with various parties before a 'sponsorship' deal is made, even though they have no connection whatsoever to the party of choice. Even people who are known as cadres of Golkar or the PDIP—the two largest parties with the broadest followings and notionally, therefore, the best possible electoral vehicles in many contexts—would easily jump ship when convenient. This will happen if the asking price of the parties they belong to in a particular locality is too high or if these parties had already made a deal with someone else, not infrequently, a party outsider. Observing local elections in Gowa, South Sulawesi, Buehler and Tan (2007: 65) conclude that 'As a rule, candidates originated from outside the parties that nominated them', and moreover, that relationships between candidates and parties were formed on an ad hoc basis.

Another obvious consequence is that campaigns are never fought primarily according to party programmes or ideology even though candidates typically produce vague statements of their election platforms. Instead, these are done in very ad hoc and opportunistic ways where alleged 'charisma', connections with fellow local notables and capacity for vote buying and influencing media reporting are important factors for success. Anyone remotely familiar with the vagaries of power in Southeast Asia's other major post-authoritarian societies, Thailand and the Philippines,18 will no doubt find the above description eerily familiar in many respects. Therefore, in spite of its potential contribution to 'messiness', a further reform in the making—already supported by the Indonesian Constitutional Court in 2007—is to allow for independent, notionally non-party affiliated candidates to contest local elections—though strict criteria on eligibility are expected to be applied.19

Again, it is necessary to reassess the conventional rendering of what political parties are supposed to do and look like in a democracy, as if all democracies operated according to the same principles and served the same kinds of interests. It is hardly useful to succumb to the temptation to label Indonesia's political parties as 'immature', 'irrational' or not 'modern' on the basis of idealised notions of party roles in Western liberal democracies. In the context of many contemporary post-authoritarian societies like Indonesia, where money politics and, to varying extents, political thuggery are the major games to play, political parties as they are today are quite well-suited for the purposes and aims of the predatory interests that preside over them. In other words, there is an internal logic to political party life and electoral competition in post-authoritarian Indonesia that does not lend itself easily to transformation in a neo-liberal, technocratic mould that have to do with the kinds of social interests that predominate. Indeed, the Western liberal-pluralist model of the political party may be viewed as being increasingly exceptional given the experience of the democracies, such as those in South and Southeast Asia, which have actually emerged in the past decades.

This does not mean that 'successful' elections cannot take place. Local direct elections were on the whole successfully implemented in Indonesia from mid-2005. Most took place quite smoothly in spite of a host of technical problems, and conflicts arising here and there that sometimes led to outbreaks of violence (see Barron, Nathan and Welsh 2005). The level of violence and intimidation, however, was quite minimal in most cases, especially given the emergence of organised groups such as thugs as major players in local politics, as described earlier. Indeed, violence seemed to be less a feature of local elections in general than it had been in the earlier part of the post-Soeharto period, when cases such as the mayoral election in Medan in 2000 came to the fore. Even in areas previously torn apart by ethnic or religious strife, such as in North Maluku, Poso in Sulawesi and in West Kalimantan, elections proceeded in a relatively orderly manner with no fatalities. For a huge, diverse archipelago like Indonesia—often portrayed by Western media pundits and academics alike as a violence-prone, fragile entity following the demise of authoritarianism—this was indeed a significant achievement.

It is a different matter, however, to suggest that the successful implementation of the elections in Indonesia signalled the 'consolidation' stage of Indonesia's democracy, in the sense more or less inherent to the 'democratic transitions' literature more broadly. It had earlier been assessed that the 2004 legislative elections and/or the ensuing direct presidential poll of the same year marked the end of Indonesia's 'transition', thereby suggesting the beginning of democratic 'consolidation' (Aspinall 2005b, 2005c; Barron, Nathan, Welsh 2005). It should be recalled that an otherwise sympathetic analyst like Carothers (2002) has warned against the excessive acceptance of the assumptions of the transitions literature discussed previously in Chapter 2, because these tend to underplay the complex and messy process of political and institutional change. With this objection in mind, perhaps it is better to view the newly instituted local direct elections as a potentially important part of the broader process of development of a distinctly illiberal form of democracy related to the workings of Indonesia's predatory form of capitalism. As put forward by Robison and Hadiz (2004), this predatory capitalism essentially rests on the appropriation of public resources and institutions for the purposes of private accumulation.

==== towards local oligarchies? ====
The view put forward by Robison and Hadiz is premised on particular kinds of political participation and contestation far removed from the jargon of good governance often heard from technocrats or of populist politics as espoused typically by a variety of NGOs. Still, the rules of the game by which elites maintain their ascendance have been changing dramatically since 1998—including with regard to those that govern political participation and contestation. These will change again to some extent should independent candidates begin contesting these local elections (Antaranews 17 November 2007). The further point to emphasise, however, is that these local elites have been very adept at dealing with changing circumstances, and they have come out on top repeatedly in spite of various governance changes that were supposed to provide opportunities for more genuine reformers to take power in the local arena.

This is the case even if a fairly large proportion of individuals in local office failed to get re-elected under the system of direct local elections first practiced in 2005, which typically bloated the amount of money required to win electoral contests. Nevertheless, it is not true that the candidate who spends the most money will always win. Thus in West Sumatra, PDI-P candidate Gamawan Fauzi, who had built up a reputation for honesty as the bupati of Solok, defeated candidates that included a wealthy Jakarta-based businessman supported by a coalition of parties (Kompas 10 July 2005). However, it is highly unlikely that a winner, almost anywhere, would have been able to free him- or herself from utilising tactics involving money politics. Mietzner's (2006) conclusions on these direct elections, cited earlier, suggest that—as a rule—they have not produced outcomes that alter the basic nature of the social backgrounds and interests represented by those who have emerged victorious in them.

The increasing importance of money politics could have a direct bearing on the relatively diminishing importance of overt violence and intimidation in winning local electoral contests. It is arguable that local elites have now developed an interest in the peaceful running of elections, in order to safeguard the legitimacy of the political process that ensures their ascendant social position, and that this objective is now best served by emphasising money politics over political intimidation. Thus Barron, Nathan and Welsh (2005: 11) point out that in many places, local elites made public appeals to supporters to refrain from practicing overt violence.

This would appear to substantiate the claim made by political gangsters in North Sumatra that they have been asked by candidates to adopt a lower profile in electoral campaigns, to the point of sometimes being asked not to appear in their menacing organisational colours during public mobilisations of support.20 The hope was that in this way, large-scale clashes between rival groupings of enforcers and thugs could be averted. Still, if outbreaks of conflict and violence, such as between rival groups of thugs, are essentially detrimental to the interests of many such elites today—the ready availability of instruments of coercion still can be subsequently useful in the everyday business of running the government after election time.21

Such developments must be viewed in relation to a basic interest to prevent any return to a centralised authoritarianism that would warrant a larger role for the Indonesian military. Significantly, major outbreaks of disorder would not only damage the standing of Indonesian democracy and the actors presiding over it but could also entice the military to demand a more significant part in the workings of politics, whether local or national, in the name of national stability. As an institution, it is the military that is poised to restore order should the competition involved in electoral contests heat up to levels that give rise to acts of violence and destruction on a large scale. Obviously, civilian politicians who have benefited from electoral democracy do not want a situation where the military's bargaining position could be enhanced—even if military commands are already involved in local business activities—much less a move toward a military-led form of centralised authoritarianism.

Thus, a statement by Indonesian military commander, General Djoko Santoso, on local elections, must have had a chilling effect on local politicos of all stripes all over Indonesia. Commenting on (and rather exaggerating) the violence that accompanied these elections, the general suggested that Indonesians were not truly ready for democracy. More disconcertingly, he added that the military had to take responsible action if national unity and stability were ever threatened by the impact of local elections (Kompas 24 January 2008).

General Santoso was evidently referring to some of the more notable eruptions of violence in some places, which did at least indicate considerable tensions brewing beneath the surface of relative calm. In Binjai, North Sumatra, for example, where the incumbent mayor, Ali Umri (see Chapter 4) was victorious, followers of losing candidates contested the poll results of 27 June 2005, and protests on their behalf led to attacks on the offices of the local electoral commission. Moreover, the supporters of all four competing candidates mobilised by youth/gangster organisations came to be involved in violent brawls—something that had been avoided throughout the electoral campaign period. The three defeated rivals, all New Order–era local notables, unsuccessfully brought their grievances to court, pleading that the local electoral commission's twice rescheduling of polling day, which allegedly involved 'pressure and threats' from Ali Umri's camp, was detrimental to them.22

Indeed, the rejection of poll results occurred in many areas. In North Sumatra alone, where twelve local elections took place on 27 June 2005, eleven produced disputed poll results (Republika Online 18 July 2005). In Sibolga, polling day was also delayed by several days because of alleged technical irregularities. The sole exception was in the North Sumatran capital city of Medan; ironically, an area where politics has been particularly rough-and-tumble over the years. There, the dominant position of Abdillah, as described previously, was unassailable. Another controversial outcome occurred in a later poll conducted in Central Tapanuli, where allegations of 'dirty politics' being practiced were prevalent. In this case, protest actions were directed against the victorious incumbent; he was accused of benefiting from the favouritism allegedly displayed by the local elections commission—whose disqualification of a rival ensured that the bupati had run unopposed (Kompas 16 December 2005; Jakarta Post 18 May 2006).

Of course, it was not only in North Sumatra that disputed poll results emerged. In fact, the most nationally celebrated case was perhaps that of Depok, a town on the outskirts of Jakarta where the prestigious University of Indonesia is located, and from which state technocrats, especially in the area of economics, have been traditionally produced. There, the former national leader of the PKS initially lost to a Golkar candidate in yet another controversial poll before intervention by no less than the Supreme Court finally saved him from a possibly embarrassing defeat in a 'mere' local contest (Suara Merdeka 17 December 2005). That a renowned national politician turned to a local level electoral contest provides yet another indicator of the perceived heightened importance of local office since decentralisation.

East Java, however, where politics had been more orderly than in North Sumatra, displayed notable instances of election-related violence—again having to do with disputed poll results. No less than in the provincial capital city of Surabaya, mobs protested under the banner of an ad hoc grouping called the People's Movement for Democracy and Justice against the victory of the incumbent mayor, Bambang Dwi Hartono. The protest took a notably violent turn as supporters of the mayor's rivals inflicted serious damage on the local parliament building (Suara Merdeka 14 July 2005). Again, the main gripe was alleged irregularities occurring on Election Day, to the extent that a repeat poll was demanded (Bali Post 13 July 2005).

In the case of Banyuwangi in East Java, local parliamentary elites and religious figures tried to oust incumbent Ratna Ani Lestari, another victorious incumbent, who was supported by a host of small parties; they claimed vaguely that her administration was incompetent. Mass rallies were organised by religious leaders tied to the PKB and NU—traditionally dominant in this area and stunned by their defeat—and unsuccessful appeals were made to higher levels of government to annul electoral results that returned her to power.

In Tuban, also in East Java, the situation got particularly ugly when protesters burnt down the local election commission office as well as property belonging to incumbent Haeny Relawati, who won re-election with Golkar backing on top of allegations of vote rigging (Jakarta Post 18 May 2006). The violence, instigated by supporters of a losing candidate backed by the PKB and PDI-P, became so widespread that a curfew was put in place along with 'shoot to kill' orders handed to the security apparatus. The Tuban case is particularly interesting because it is an area that has recently been developed industrially and in terms of infrastructural projects, and one which will likely grow because of the Cepu oil field located within its boundaries. It is notable that much of the anger expressed against the incumbent is believed to be actually directed against her husband, a prosperous local businessman who critics accuse of abusing the power of his wife to win business contracts (Marijan 2006).

Though it should be reasserted that direct local elections have been carried out in most cases without violence reaching alarming levels, similar instances to the ones described above occurred in many places across the archipelago, from West Sumatra to Bengkulu to Sulawesi. This is in many ways perfectly understandable given the stakes involved in any single electoral contest. As a result of the high cost of engaging in direct polls, the amount invested in losing candidacies can be quite astounding and financially ruinous. This fact alone will tend to further ensure that local electoral contests will, in the future, mostly be the purview of those particularly well endowed with material resources. In other words, the process of further entrenchment of a class of local politicos over the arena of sub-national politics seems to be well under way.

The further question for the near future is whether this process of entrenchment leads in the direction of the formation of more distinct local political oligarchies centred on individuals and groups of more genuine 'strongmen' or dominant local notables. The experiences of post-authoritarian Thailand and the Philippines, and arguably more distant places as post-totalitarian Russia, show that this is a possibility. A thriving locally-focused electoral democracy—within which coherent and genuinely reformist forces able to challenge the dominance of established predatory elites are largely missing—is conducive to the emergence of local oligarchies. Such local oligarchies have an abiding interest not just to maintain their position vis-à-vis potential challenges, but also to safeguard a substantial degree of autonomy for local arenas of power. It is true that any further erosion of central state authority will likely benefit would-be local oligarchs. In spite of some recentralising tendencies already mentioned, which will impede those already harbouring grandiose local visions, it is highly unlikely that the general shift toward the localisation of power can be fundamentally reversed in the foreseeable future.23

== Chapter 7: Conclusion (Decentralization, Recentralization and Globalization) ==

=== Contesting the Local ===
Local politics—just like politics at any level—is an arena of contestation between competing coalitions of social interests. The most contentious aspects of local politics, it should come as no surprise, are commonly those that—directly or not—have to do with struggle for access to tangible, concrete resources. Decentralisation policy thus embodies struggles over the setting of the parameters of local power and the establishment of the kinds of social interests to preside over it. What is at stake is no less than the shaping of the rules and regulations to govern the exercise of local power and allow it to be of service to particular sets of social interests, while erecting barriers to others. In other words, contests over decentralisation policy in Indonesia, so often couched in the apolitical, technocratic language of good governance, represent a protracted and continuing struggle over the kind of localisation of power that takes place and its set of main beneficiaries.

The danger thus lies in failing to grasp the nature of the fundamental tensions and contradictions within the localisation of power as they pertain to such issues as development, democracy and political participation and contestation. The conflict over local power in Indonesia, and in the post-authoritarian Southeast Asian cases more generally, has not been about 'rational' developmental technocracy attuned to the requirements of global markets and pitted against the 'irrationality' and insularity of predatory politics. Nor has the conflict been about local communities and citizenries struggling against the purportedly homogenising globalisation juggernaut, thereby somehow resurrecting the 'authentic' or 'indigenous' in the process.

This book has shown that the main contenders in the contest in Indonesia are essentially shifting locally-based coalitions of predatory power rooted in the now demised New Order. Such coalitions have selectively latched on to both the agendas of technocratic good governance and that of localist populism—perhaps infusing the latter with more statist-nationalist elements from time to time—to ideologically legitimise their social ascendance. Interconnected with local conflicts are the interests of Jakarta-based coalitions that otherwise have their own motives for containing local power or shaping it in certain ways—often with considerable success. Such containment may be imposed institutionally in the form of laws pertaining to the exercise and scope of local governance, but also in the form of centralising impulses within such instruments of contestation (associated with electoral democracy) as political parties. As a general rule, what is at stake are access to opportunities for private accumulation on the basis of control over public resources and institutions; such are the foundations for the development of localised alliances of predatory power and patronage.

While general observations about the nature of the localisation of power are useful for analytical and comparative purposes, acknowledgment of difference—in historical legacies for instance, and of the precise ways in which societies are actually integrated into the global capitalist economy—is also necessary. It has been pointed out that the concrete manifestations of the localisation of power can be quite different in some important respects. A salient example given was the different legacies of previously centralised authoritarian rule in the different societies, as well as the divergent social bases and characteristics of what is often dubbed local 'bossism' (Sidel 2004). These differences have had consequences for the specific outcomes of the localisation of power in post-authoritarian Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

But experiences further away from Southeast Asia may also shed some light on what is occurring in Indonesia. In an article on decentralisation and globalisation in China, Breslin (2000: 205–206) observes that the 'dual processes of decentralisation and globalisation are reconfiguring loci of decision making and authority'. Thus, the rise of provincialism and of local power vis-à-vis the centre has resulted in situations where the policies of the latter are not always followed in the way intended at the lower levels of governance. In some ways such developments are reflective of some of the conflicts described in this book between coalitions of power based at different levels of governance in Indonesia.

Breslin also notes the regional differences stemming from the uneven impact of globalisation—so much so that one challenge faced by China's national elites has been to respond to calls from local leaders in less developed areas to redress developmental imbalances (Breslin 2000: 219).1 In the case of China, the uneven impact of globalisation in spatial terms is clearly linked to its recent history of fairly long seclusion from the world capitalist economy that was followed by a form of reintegration that was focussed on the south-eastern coastal provinces. Sharp regional inequalities exist in Indonesia too, however, which are reflective of the uneven nature of the rapid capitalist development presided over by the New Order. The consequence is that the nature of 'things at stake' in local contests over power will be different according to distinct local socio-economic profiles and levels and ways of integration with the global economy.

In East Kalimantan and many other particularly natural resource-rich regions, it is easy to imagine that the stakes are tangible in terms of opportunities for predatory forms of private accumulation, as they are as well in economically more diversified North Sumatra and East Java. This is not to say that struggles over local power in more economically backward or less strategic parts of Indonesia will necessarily be less intense. As mentioned in earlier chapters, even relatively minor kingpins in such areas will have a stake in carving out a realm of autonomous power; given the obvious advantages of more direct control over local budgets or of revenue-generating activities, for example. Vel (2005: 106) observes that all the candidates in the 2005 local election in East Sumba district, on the island of Sumba, were involved in money politics 'to some degree', noting how they all required funds given openly or behind the scenes by businessmen; and that the 'position of district head has become a very attractive and powerful bureaucratic post . . . so that candidates for the post can attract investors who hope to profit from their loyalty in the future'. East Sumba is certainly no Kutai Kertanagara, but there, too, local elections were vigorously fought.

It is in many of the areas where the struggle over local institutions of governance, and their resources and authority that involve the most tangible of possible rewards, however, that the emergence of viable local oligarchies is promised most strongly. In these areas, wars of attrition in the form of future electoral contests could well weed out those with less capacity to mobilise the financial and other resources necessary to fight the battles in a sufficiently ruthless fashion.

The cases of North Sumatra and East Java have been analytically useful for the purposes of this book for a number of reasons. Because of their socio-economic profiles and histories, they have been sites for the emergence of numerous instructive cases of fierce competition among competing local elites who seek to establish local hegemony. The establishment of the parameters of local power in North Sumatra and East Java has been especially marked by strenuous efforts on the part of local elites to carve out a realm of autonomy from Jakarta in ways that from time to time have involved head-on collisions. We have seen these in the wrangling over political party candidates for local office, as described in Chapter 5, and in other instances. Furthermore, North Sumatra and East Java provinces—unlike East Kalimantan, for example—have long been the homes of active, though not consistently effective, civil society-based movements and organisations, including those premised on trade unions and NGOs, thereby potentially providing a further complicating factor. This, too, reflects a degree of social differentiation that is more advanced in these two regions than in most other parts of the immense Indonesian archipelago.

Insofar as the localisation of power was expected to produce the impetus for greater political participation, these two provinces would have been among the prime candidates to deliver on either the promises of neo-liberal good governance or, conversely, that of localist populism. The outcomes associated with either sets of promises, however, would have required a profound transformation in the kinds of social interests that preside over local power; and as has been argued, this is precisely the missing element in the local political equation in both cases. In the absence of such a transformation, the outcomes have been predominantly those described in this book.

=== The Limits of the Local ===
Decentralisation in Indonesia as understood in the original 1999 set of legislation provided greater autonomy to authorities at the sub-provincial level: the kabupaten (regency) and kotamadya (city or town), at the expense of both national and provincial levels of governance. A few years after their implementation in early 2001, the pendulum swung back partially in the direction of the provinces and away from the sub-provincial level, thereby potentially undermining or at least affecting the strategies of ambitious local politicos who had thrived since the advent of democratisation.

Some of these ambitious local politicos would have been put back in their place by attacks taking the form of corruption investigations. No less than ten bupati in Kalimantan alone, for example, were prosecuted in late 2005 for alleged involvement in illegal logging and the embezzlement of government reforestation funds (Jakarta Post 5 December 2005)—an activity in which interests centred in Jakarta were more prominent players during the New Order. As already mentioned, hitherto successful local politicos like Abdillah in Medan and Syaukani in Kutai Kertanagara have also been embroiled in serious corruption cases. The fact that such local bigwigs were investigated with the approval of the government in Jakarta no less, it is suggested, can be read as a message that local elites would not be allowed to run roughshod in spite of the expanded powers formally accorded by decentralisation.

Powerful individuals at the provincial level also have had to take caution in spite of greater authority headed in their direction. In West Sumatra, almost the entire provincial legislature was convicted of graft (Kompas 11 June 2004); at the time, this helped to infuse a measure of credibility to the central government's stated aim to crack down more seriously on corruption. Nevertheless, even this initially lauded move proved to be tentative. Though the legislators were initially convicted in court by mid-2004, none actually landed in prison, at least for quite some time.2

In spite of the inconsistent nature of the Jakarta-pushed campaign against local corruption, a large number of cases involving members of legislatures and executive bodies at local and provincial levels has been reported in the national media (see Jakarta Post 24 July 2004; Tempo 27 February 2005: 26–35). While the widespread reporting is clearly reflective of the freedom of the press in post-authoritarian Indonesia, it is also an indicator of the extent and scope of decentralised corruption today (Tempo Interaktif 4 November 2004). From just 2003 to 2006, 967 local and provincial parliamentarians and some 8.06 per cent of local executive heads in the country were named suspects in corruption cases according to the Jakarta Post. Most of the parliamentarians were charged with violating a government regulation on budgetary spending (Jakarta Post 11 October 2006)—an act that may involve diverse practices including the tendering of projects, the keeping of fictitious accounts, and outright embezzlement of centrally allocated assistance funds (Tempo Interaktif 4 November 2004). It should be pointed out, however, that the government regulation concerned, no.110/2000, was later annulled by the Supreme Court, leaving many corruption investigations potentially in legal limbo.

In spite of this kind of inconclusiveness, anti-corruption campaigns emerging from the centre could be viewed as a useful tool of checking the power of ambitious local political actors. Even in the one-party state that is Vietnam, the much publicised pursuit of corruption cases can be fruitfully understood in terms of the political centre's efforts to maintain control over individuals at the lower levels of the party and state, prone to exercise higher degrees of independent action in the context of doi moi (Gainsborough 2003: 71). As in Indonesia, such anti-corruption campaigns are not only about establishing transparent governance but are part of the political dynamics of establishing the parameters of local power. In other words, they are at least partly about the reassertion of the power of the centre over the local.

As alluded to earlier, a process of undermining local power had also taken place in Thailand. Before its sudden fall from grace, the Thaksin Shinawatra-created Thai Rak Thai party (see McCargo and Ukrist 2005) had acted to bring to fruition a stronger and more centralised government, despite the tentativeness of the country's actual process of decentralisation (for example, as indicated in the transfer of budgetary authority and revenues) that is mirrored in some respects in Indonesia and the Philippines. Thus the power and authority of centrally appointed governors—effectively running regional appendages of the central bureaucracy in the Thai model (and in reality, working as little more than the prime minister's personal assistants)—was enhanced in relation to that of elected local officials.3 These 'CEO-governors', as they were called, for instance, were given more say in important matters like budgetary spending and the signing of contracts (Nelson 2002), which in the exercise of local power could make or break local networks of political patronage.

In the Philippines, in the meantime, legislators appear now to have only a limited interest in further decentralisation initiatives. Thus, new legislation proposed to further the scope of decentralisation—advanced primarily by a group of technocrats associated with long time decentralisation advocate Senator Aquilino Pimentel, Jr.—failed to take off in 2006. According to one 'insider' explanation, the root cause is the growing rivalry between national politicians armed with pork-barrel funds who are so instrumental in cobbling together local alliances and the executives of municipal bodies who have been arguably among the main beneficiaries of decentralisation up to now. This is the case even though many congressmen, senators and local executives are similarly members of local elite families due to the particular nature of so-called bossism in the Phillipines.4 As Hedman and Sidel note (2000: 89), in the Philippines, a 'multi-tiered hierarchy of elected executive and legislative offices encourages the aspiration to boss-hood of municipal mayors, congressmen, and provincial governors but complicates their efforts through overlapping or cross-cutting jurisdictions, resources, and prerogatives'.

The reversion to centralisation rhetoric or sentiment, moreover, has not been confined to Southeast Asia. Outside of the region, in the case of Russia, the Putin government that took over in late 1999 essentially forced a reversal of the strong decentralisation tendency that characterised the tenure of Boris Yeltsin. It did so when placing governors and 'republic leaders' in a powerful position over mayors and local district chiefs who had been gaining political ascendancy since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Significantly, governors were given the authority to dismiss mayors and district chiefs who refused to obey directives emanating from higher levels of government (Slider 2001: 68), thereby curtailing the relative autonomy they had previously enjoyed. Looming in the background throughout these changes were fights against secessionist rebellions in various parts of the country.5

The above are not cases that show the inevitable swinging back of the pendulum toward recentralisation once the decentralisation course had been somehow exhausted, so that some sort of imaginary state of 'equilibrium' or 'ideal' balance is achieved through the innate wisdom of technical decision-making. It is also not the case that 'the degree' of decentralisation can simply be chosen by autonomous actors in a social vacuum. What these cases reveal is that decentralisation, like any other policy agenda, cannot be extricated from existing political topographies, which in some circumstances may induce varying degrees of recentralisation as an outcome of struggle.

Nevertheless, any renewed centralising impulse can be beset by its own internal contradictions. It was mentioned earlier that political parties in Indonesia today represent tactical alliances among actors, national and local, that largely emerged from the much more centralised, but extensive, predatory network of patronage that had been a defining characteristic of the New Order. They are the vehicles through which repositioned predatory interests now maintain their social ascendancy in the context of an electoral democracy. As tenuous alliances these parties would often fracture, as local-level alliances—frequently cross-party in nature—take shape quite independently of any central party directive. Such local alliances are formed on the basis of local exigencies, which is itself an indication of the often distinct imperatives of local power. Central party structures, however, do have an interest in safeguarding local party branches that will have a crucial role when mobilisations of support bases and networks are required during national elections. Such an interest may sometimes override the interest to rein in local politicos.

Thus, the Indonesian National Parliament, in a highly controversial move in 2006, recommended the dropping of prosecution cases against local officials implicated in corruption cases linked to abuse of local budgets. It even suggested that the government 'rehabilitate' the names of regional heads and local parliamentarians involved in these cases. Why was such a blatantly unpopular move undertaken, given the widely-held disdain for corruption on the part of the powerful? The answer is fairly simple. As one Indonesia Corruption Watch activist remarked at the time, the prosecuted members of local parliaments are 'the peers' of national parliamentarians through their political party affiliations (Jakarta Post 11 October 2006). To crush these local parliamentarians so unflinchingly would be akin to obliterating the local political machineries and networks that national politicians need to rely upon during such times as national elections. Of course, national parliamentarians would also have an interest in insulating themselves from the snowball effects of a strong anti-corruption campaign.

In fact, local politicos were as often rewarded as they were penalised: a particularly controversial government edict of 2006 was understood to have increased the salaries and perks of local parliamentarians in a particularly obscene way in the context of an Indonesian nation still struggling to economically re-emerge one decade after the devastations of the Asian Economic Crisis. The most contentious parts of this edict came to be withdrawn, though not before they came to be seen as symptomatic of the 'legalised robbery' of the people; in this case, that would have had severely negative repercussions on the finances of many struggling regions (Media Indonesia 6 January 2007).

Given the constant tug-of-wars, to what extent will local predatory interests become more successful in the future than they have been so far in carving out greater domains of autonomy from Jakarta to pursue their rent-seeking activities? Or will they have to lower their sights after all? This is an important question that already has been raised in this book. Some observers have suggested that such success is quite unlikely (Choi 2006; Pratikno 2006) given the more recent backlash resulting in calls for a measure of recentralisation. No less than President Yudhoyono, for example, declared that regional autonomy has 'gone too far' in Indonesia, that it has scared off investors rather than attracting them, and failed to result in improved public services (Jakarta Post 24 August 2006). His assessment on the quality of public services after decentralisation was supported by a report compiled by a group of NGOs in twenty kabupaten and ten municipalities across the archipelago which suggested that local governments did not prioritise spending in areas like health and education (Jakarta Post 9 December 2007).

Ultimately, however, those interests that preside over local power are by now so well-entrenched that they cannot be ignored or simply wished away, as such diverse actors as investors and organised labour alike have discovered. Their subjugation would require a struggle that would certainly have some violent and unpredictable consequences given the concrete and tangible interests at stake. Thus, it is necessary to take local power seriously as a longer-lasting post-authoritarian social phenomenon, including its predatory characteristics, even while recognising that local power-holders confront limits to their ambitions.

=== The Poverty of Technocracy ===
The empirical analysis of the possible outcomes of the localisation of power provided here shows that, under particular circumstances, the widening of political participation (even through electoral democracy), may not entail a greater scope for more fundamental kinds of political contestation. Some interests are simply better positioned to take advantage of the opening of politics, and these may be the sorts that have nothing to gain from rocking the boat more than is necessary for their immediate and tangible purposes. A fundamental source of challenge, it needs to be reasserted, to predatory power remains absent in the Indonesian case, in spite of technocratic attempts at social engineering through institutional tinkering.

Again this is but an Indonesian manifestation of a phenomenon that has been evident globally, as other experiences in Southeast Asia show. Thus, even Grindle, who writes on local governments in contemporary Mexico from a broadly neo-institutionalist perspective, recognises that the range of incentives that institutionalised, competitive electoral politics was supposed to provide toward the development of accountability have been only ambiguously effective. The institutional crafting of local democracies has frequently given rise instead to highly conflict-ridden local governments pre-occupied with resource distribution and allocation in relation to old-style patronage politics (Grindle 2007: chapter 3).

The problem confronted in all of these cases is that dominant local elites have an abiding interest to resist neo-liberal, good governance reforms, even when they simultaneously have a stake in engagement with some aspects of economic globalisation and marketisation—if only to broaden rent-seeking opportunities with the expansion of markets. The pressures exerted by globalisation, which might induce economic competition among different localities, thus do not seem to inevitably result in the demise of predatory coalitions of local power in any predetermined way. This is so even if local government officials in Indonesia, such as the bupati, are now being encouraged by Jakarta technocrats to train in the art of attracting investors, and therefore to exhibit more technocrat-like sensibilities.6

The evidence so far suggests that the appropriation of state power by its officials to further their predatory interests will continue to be the main theme of Indonesian political economy albeit in an environment that is more democratised and more localised. Such an observation accords with the conclusions reached by Robison and Hadiz (2004) on the reorganisation of economic and political power in Indonesia after the fall of Soeharto. It does not bode well, however, for the advocates of technocratic good governance (or for the aspirations of localist populists within the NGO community in Indonesia and elsewhere). In particular, there is a huge disjuncture between the theoretical assumptions of good governance as consumed by elites and intellectuals and what is then practiced as a matter of interest (Orlandini 2003) in many societies that have jumped on the decentralisation bandwagon.

This should direct us to consider seriously the diversity of ways in which separate parts of the geographical territory that national states claim authority over can be engaged with the global economy without entailing a radical redrawing of their internal political topographies. It has been pointed out that the shift of focus to the local in neo-liberal thinking on globalisation was premised on the view that larger national states posed a barrier to the efficient workings of the market, as illustrated by experiences with protectionist or rent-seeking oriented national elites. Now, however, we see that particular trajectories may produce such outcomes as local arenas of power that exhibit distinct sources of resistance as well to many aspects of neo-liberal reform and whose strength, ironically, can actually be augmented by efforts to institute them. The homogenising effect that the pressures of economic globalisation impose on socio-political phenomena has, once again, proven to be rather greatly exaggerated by the champions of neo-liberal transformation.

== Notes ==

=== Introduction ===
1. This contradicts Huntington's view (1996: 28) that local politics is about 'the politics of ethnicity', while 'global politics' is a much grander 'politics of Civilizations'. His characterisation is misleading as it is unclear why contests over power at the local level should have primary driving forces and logic that are distinct from those at the national or supranational levels.

2. Though utilising a different approach in her book on decentralisation in Africa, Boone emphasises the kinds of competing social interests on the formation of state institutions governing central-local relations in different countries.

3. Indonesia thus seemed less likely to produce what Tornquist called 'bad guy democracy' (2002), in reference to cases like the Philippines.

4. In spite of the complicating factor of the 2006 coup in Thailand (see Ungpakorn 2007; also see Kasian 2006) and its aftermath.

5. See the World Bank's Decentralisation Homepage Library (n.d.) at <nowiki>http://www1.worldbank.org/wbiep/decentralization/regions.htm#europe</nowiki>.

6. The most influential work on Philippines local politics is arguably Sidel (1999); while the most thorough on Thailand is arguably Arghiros (2001). For Thailand also see the collection edited by McVey (2000), which contains a number of illuminating articles by seasoned Thai experts, though mainly in relation to the chao pho or 'local godfather' phenomenon. Also see the recent work by Nishizaki (2002, 2006) and various pieces by Nelson (e.g. 2002, 2003, 2005) on decentralisation. Due to the resurgence of Thailand's 'southern violence' there has been some attention recently devoted to the predominantly Muslim provinces of the restive South. A collection edited by McCargo (2007) offers the best and most well-rounded view of local politics in Southern Thailand. The recent work of the young Thai scholar, Achakorn Wongpreedee (2007), is especially useful in understanding how entrenched local political interests, as in Indonesia, have successfully utilised decentralisation to protect their social power and position. On the Philippines, besides in Sidel, the phenomenon of 'bossism' is examined in five case studies edited by Lacaba (1995). For a discussion of post–Marcos era political change from the point of view of local politics, see Kerkvliet and Mojares (1991). Abinales's (2000) local political-historical study of the state in Mindanao is useful too. In addition, a fine historical background to the emergence of local oligarchic families in the Philippines is provided in Cullinane (2003).

=== Chapter 1 ===
1. Some of these questions were raised as well in Hadiz 2004a.

2. The same observation has been advanced with regard to the Philippines. A document produced by the Development Academy of the Philippines (2005: 7) argues that the country's ethno-linguistic diversity and geographical features logically support the advancement of a decentralisation agenda.

3. The authors are staff of the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR), in Jakarta.

4. Interview with Professor Eduardo Gonzalez, former president of the Development Academy of the Philippines, Quezon City, 6 June 2006. Also see Abueva (2005) for a proposal for a federalist structure to help end conflict in Mindanao.

5. Also, interview with Chaiwat Satha-Anand, academic and member of National Reconciliation Commission, Bangkok, 28 September 2006.

6. See the World Bank's 'Decentralisation Net' at: <nowiki>http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/decentralisation/Different.htm</nowiki>

7. See the further discussion in Chapter 3.

8. The term federalism, however, raised alarm bells among Jakarta's political elites, largely because it is associated with late Dutch colonial efforts to maintain a measure of power in the archipelago and to disrupt the emergence of a unified Indonesian republic.

9. In practice, aspects of the law were also the result of work of another team based at the Ministry of Home Affairs as well as one in the Ministry of Finance. See Turner and Podger (2003: 14–15).

10. Not surprisingly the World Bank and other donor organisations have invested a lot of resources into decentralisation programmes around the world and have an ever-growing institutional stake in their success. According to Litvack, Ahmad and Bird, a growing number of World Bank-funded projects have been in effect supporting decentralisation schemes worldwide as part of the neo-liberal good governance agenda. Twelve per cent of Bank projects completed between 1993 and 1997, for example, is said to have involved decentralising responsibilities to lower levels of government (Litvack, Ahmad and Bird 1998: 1). There is no reason to believe that there has been a massive reduction in the intervening decade. In 2003, the German aid organisation, GTZ, which along with the World Bank has been a leading actor in the decentralisation push in Indonesia, estimated that no less than US$2.9 billion were being expended by funding agencies on decentralisation-related projects in Indonesia, the vast majority of which was accounted for by the World Bank and the ADB (Asian Development Bank) (Turner and Podger 2003: 130). In addition, a UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) report in 2002 estimates that 50 per cent of the organisation's financial allocation in the area of 'decentralisation and local governance' has been to the programme 'sub-area' of 'decentralisation policies', compared to just three per cent for 'alliances by the poor' (UNDP 2002: 10).

11. Interview with Eduardo Gonzalez, former president, Development Academy of the Philippines, Quezon City, 6 June 2006. For a different reading on the role of international donors in the Philippines' decentralisation process, see Hutchcroft (2004: 303–311).

12. Interview with Professor Somkhit Lertpaithoon, vice-rector of Thammasat University and member of the 1997 Constitution Drafting Assembly as well as Decentralisation Committee. Bangkok, 28 September 2006. He was particularly influenced, he says, by the French model of decentralisation and general French thought on public administration.

13. Interview with Dr. Orathai Kokpol, King Prajadhipok's Institute and Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University, 28 September 2006; and with Professor Somkhit Lertpaithoon, 28 September 2006.

14. See Rodan, Hewison and Robison (2006), for an exploration of historical and economic institutionalist accounts of Southeast Asian economic growth and crisis.

15. This is so even though, in the case of sociology, new institutionalism (or new economic sociology) was at least initially a reaction to the incursions of economics into the discipline. The passage of time, however, has resulted in commonalities in terms of concerns, concepts and methodologies.

16. See the World Bank's 'Decentralisation Net' at: <nowiki>http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/decentralisation/Different.htm</nowiki>.

17. The hijacking of the institutions of governance at the local level by 'special interests' is actually a theme to be found in some neo-institutionalist and public choice theories (Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000), and is expressed as 'elite capture'. The problem with this type of theorising, however, is that it remains trapped in the worldview of rational choices being taken by individual actors whose behaviour is largely determined by such factors as different levels of political awareness and access to information, rather than by structural imperatives. This is because actors are not placed firmly within the context of broad social processes and historically entrenched structures of social interest and power—all of which clearly affect the viable options available to actors at any given time and place.

18. Interview with Joel Rocamora, executive director, Institute for Popular Democracy, Quezon City, 2 June 2006; and Professor Eduardo Gonzalez, former president of the Development Academy of the Philippines, 6 June 2006.

19. Interview with Wuthisarn Tanchai, director of the King Prajadhipok's Institute and long-standing member of the Thai Decentralisation Committee, Nonthaburi, 26 September 2006.

20. This has been sometimes similarly claimed in Thailand and the Philippines, where local politics has been understood to be the province of relatively autonomous local politicos for a longer time. For example, see the interview with Professor Somkhit Lertpaithoon, vice-rector of Thammasat University and member of the 1997 Constitution Drafting Assembly as well as Decentralisation Committee. Bangkok, 28 September 2006; and with J. Prospero De Vera, senior consultant, Office of Senator Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., Quezon City, 5 June 2006.

21. For example, see Ito (2006), who argues for the importance of civil society participation and pressure, but without much discussion of civil society's structural incoherence.

22. A third case that was more optimistic (perhaps much more contentiously so)—in the midst of notably pessimistic accounts of various localities given in the edited volume—was West Kalimantan.

23. Recently, more interesting and complex understandings of social capital have emerged. Though still writing in a Putnamian vein, Anirudh Krishna (2007) follows Berman's (1997) analysis of Nazi Germany, in the sense that he pays at least as much attention to 'social capital' that can give rise to reactionary and undemocratic social movements in India.

24. Such groups are dismissed by Diamond as not being part of civil society—though it is unclear why they should be excluded except for ideological reasons.

25. There are certain historical quirks in the evolution of Thai governance that have amounted to the seeming institutionalisation of the tensions between the legacy of the bureaucratic authoritarian state and more recent democratic aspirations. In practical terms this has meant the existence of separate administrative bodies effectively responsible for the same territorial areas, one linked and responsible to the Ministry of the Interior, and the other considered a unit of elected local governments. Thus, provincial governors are basically functionaries of Bangkok and head organisational units that are vertically integrated to those in the capital, recalling the centralising tendencies of the military-dominated bureaucratic authoritarianism of the past. Provincial Administrative Organisations (PAO), on the other hand, are elected bodies that are typically inhabited by local politicians and entrepreneurs, the dynamics of which are a clear product of democratisation. Moreover, there exist different types of municipal administrations governing urban areas as well as the rurally-based Tambon or sub-district or Administrative Organisations (TAO), which is the lowest level of local administrative structure. Given this context, decentralisation in Thailand notionally involves the reduction of powers and responsibilities, including over budgets and personnel, from the apparatus of administration vertically linked to Bangkok in favour of the various local governments headed by elected officials (Nelson 2005; UNESCAP n.d. at: <nowiki>http://www.unescap.org/huset/lgstudy/country/thailand/thai.html</nowiki>; Weist 2001).

26. Corruption, broadly defined as 'the use of public office for private gain in ways that contravene declared rules' (Hamilton-Hart 2001: 66) or, more specifically, 'political corruption' defined as 'the abuse of entrusted power by political leaders for private gain, with the objective of increasing power or wealth' (Hodess 2004: 11; also see Harris 2003) remains a major source of worry for development planners globally. The main concerns are that 'corruption affects investment and economic growth', 'influences governments in choosing what to spend their money on', and 'discourages investment, limits economic growth, and alters the composition of government spending, often to the detriment of future economic growth' (Mauro 1997: 3–4). Moreover, it is said to undermine 'development by distorting the rule of law and weakening the institutional foundation on which economic growth depends' (see World Bank Group, n.d. 'Anticorruption').

27. For the full set of data, see Internet Center for Corruption Research at: <nowiki>http://www.icgg.org/corruption.cpi_2006.html</nowiki>.

28. The total Indonesian national budget for 2003 was Rp 231 trillion. Republika Online 12 August 2004.

29. Many observers have noted, however, that the World Bank was inclined for decades to 'tolerate' corruption in Indonesia prior to the Asian Economic Crisis. Dick (2002: 71) reminds us that the World Bank used to dismiss widespread Soeharto-era corruption by euphemistically, and perhaps quaintly, referring to it as 'common local practices'. Wee (2002: 6) argues that the Bank believed the growth generated by the New Order 'outweighed any leakages from graft', resulting in loans of about US$25 billion over thirty-two years, in spite of the clearly rapacious and predatory nature of the Soeharto regime. The view is perhaps repeated today in McLeod's (n.d.) assessment that in spite of rampant corruption, the Soeharto regime remained 'effective'—in the sense of doing what was needed to achieve economic growth.

30. This statement is attributed to Indria Samego, a political scientist at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) who was also a close adviser to the Habibie government. See 'Autonomy Benefits Officials, But Not People', The Jakarta Post, 21 August 2002.

31. For more details, see World Bank Group, n.d. 'Anticorruption' at: <nowiki>http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/anticorrupt/index.cfm</nowiki>.

32. It should be pointed out that culturalist arguments about corruption have frequently been made (e.g. Co et al. 2007: 139), but they are clearly inadequate analytically (see Dick 2002; Hadiz 2004b). Obviously, societies with very different cultures around the world also suffer from the same chronic disease. Within the confines of Southeast Asia few would seriously suggest close affinities between classical Javanese culture and pre-colonial Visayan even if certain features of these are alleged to persist into the modern era. At the same time, corruption in the post-authoritarian Southeast Asian context is not due primarily to the failure to design institutions that would facilitate the ascendance of market rationality. Again the core problem lies in the nature of the interests that appropriate and ensconce themselves in the institutions of state power (and the market) following the fall of authoritarian regimes. Lindsay's reminder that anti-corruption campaigns are essentially ideological as well as political in nature (Lindsey 2002: 19)—and so too, logically, is successful resistance to them—accords very well with this point of view.

33. The Thaksin government represented the interests of a section of the bourgeoisie that survived the Asian Economic Crisis and then exerted its dominance over the state (see Pasuk and Baker 2004; McCargo and Ukrist 2005; Hewison 2006).

34. Interview with Nakharin Mektrairat, Dean of the Faculty of Political Science, Thamamasat University, 28 September 2006.

=== Chapter 2 ===
1. For example, a workshop on 'Political Transition and Political Change in Southeast Asia' was held by the Singapore-based Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, premised on the assumptions of the transitions literature, from 28–29 August 2006.

2. Even before the fall of Soeharto, Uhlin (1997) had invoked Samuel Huntington's (1991) Third Wave of Democratisation thesis, a work that can hardly be reconciled with his notorious 'Clash of Civilisations' (1996) thesis. Uhlin concentrated on the activities and concerns of identified networks of pro-democracy actors in Indonesia, mostly based in Jakarta, paying particular attention to the diffusion of 'Western' values, and ideas of rights and democracy. Jetschke (1999) had a similar concern for the diffusion of ideas and values and attributes democracy in the Philippines to a deep and long process of westernization.

3. See USAID (2005) at <nowiki>http://www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2005/ane/pdf/497-007.pdf</nowiki>.

4. While many of the Communist Party elements of the ancien regime also reinvented themselves both as democrats in post-communist Eastern Europe, the process is somewhat different in Indonesia. Former East European communists have had to transform themselves not just into democrats but also into pro-capitalist market actors. This they did so successfully that in one observer's (Shelley 2001: 247) summation, 'the political losers of the Soviet era were the financial winners of post-Soviet Russia', giving rise to 'a rare case in history in which the discredited elite of the old political system enhanced their financial power after the collapse of the system they had operated'. In Indonesia, capitalism has of course long been entrenched, and the issue is more about the persistence of the fundamentally predatory relations of power of the Soeharto-era political economy, albeit within institutional arrangements that are more decentralised and democratic.

5. See Retnosetyowati (2006) for a discussion of New Order figures in currently powerful national positions.

6. See Thayer Watkins (n.d.).

7. In Russia too, former military men have played a key role in criminal organisations that have thrived in the context of democratisation and decentralisation, leading to a virtual integration of crime into the state (e.g. Shelley 2001: 249). One report suggests that up to half of the post–Soviet Russian economy is in some way connected to organised crime, which controls about 60 per cent of state enterprises and 50 to 85 per cent of banks (see Members of the Speaker's Advisory Group on Russia 2000, chapter 7). Armed with such resources, criminals have been able to buy election into local and national office (Shelley 2001: 252). In China, too, local politics have inspired the notion of 'gangsterisation' in rural villages, where officials regularly employ thugs to maintain order and collect taxes (Economist 15 October 2005: 28–30).

8. The link between the middle class, modernisation and democracy is actually a subject with a long history and is perhaps best represented in its earliest forms in the work of the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (1959). More recently, an apologia for this type of modernisation theory was offered by no less than Francis Fukuyama (1995: 21), the 'prophet' of the 'End of History' that was supposed to have occurred as the Iron Curtain fell in Eastern Europe. Concerned with confirming the wisdom of mainstream 1950s and 1960s modernisation theory, he offers insights into the driving forces of democratisation in newly emerging market economies. He highlights the idea that in the 'Chinese and Thai cases, in particular, the leaders of the prodemocracy movements tended to be relatively well educated, "middle-class", and cosmopolitan citizens', in other words, 'the type of individual that began to emerge during earlier periods of rapid economic growth'. Nevertheless, many (including Robison and Goodman 1996; Hatori, Funatsu and Torii 2003) have pointed out that the values and political dispositions of the Asian middle classes are substantially different than what was imagined by early modernisation theorists, owing to the 'late timing' of their emergence and the economic and political contexts in which they took place. Robison and Goodman, in particular, have argued that these middle classes have a far more ambiguous interest in free markets, democracy and human rights than, for example, their historical counterparts in the period in which Europe was industrialising and later, democratising.

9. Hewison (2001: 6) notes the resurgence of modernisation theory in Thai studies in the guise of social capital arguments. He cites a work that explains the Thai economic crisis of 1997 as being the result of a lack of social capital among non-Chinese Thais, as opposed to the abundance of it among their ethnic counterparts. This explanation, which recalls the most culturally determinist of old-fashioned modernisation theory, suggests that social capital is responsible for the Chinese economic drive, and that the lack of it among Thais in general made it difficult for state bureaucratic elites and technocrats to foster social change and adopt rational pro-market policies. According to this explanation, the economic crisis in Thailand was essentially culturally rooted.

10. For example, see Sjahrir, republished in Chalmers and Hadiz (eds.) 1997, p. 156.

11. On Thai capitalism, capitalists and the state, see, for example, Hewison (2006).

12. See chapter 4 in Chalmers and Hadiz (1997).

13. A recent newspaper report discussed the longevity of the Ortega clan of La Union and their dominance there for over century, while discussing other enduring clans in Northern and Central Luzon (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 12 May 2007, pp. A1 and A22.

14. See the essays, for example, in Trocki (1998).

15. Some of the basis for this is found in the preceding Spanish period of colonialism in the Philippines.

16. That is, kabupaten.

=== Chapter 3 ===
1. The immediate stimuli for Thaksin's sudden downfall were alleged irregularities in the sale of his company, Shin Corp., to the Singapore government's Temasek.

2. Notably absent were the annihilated and outlawed PKI and the Indonesian Socialist Party, which was the vehicle of social democratic and liberal urban-based intellectuals that Soekarno had forcibly closed down. Absent too was the Islamic-oriented Masyumi party, which was also banned during the Soekarno period.

3. For example, Rozy Munir, a close Wahid confidante, was installed in the powerful position of Minister of Investment and State Enterprises (Kompas 29 April 2000), replacing the PDI-P's Laksamana Sukardi.

4. This was stipulated under the legislation governing political parties and mass organizations passed in 1985 (Bourchier and Hadiz 2003: 14).

5. Pancasila is the Indonesian state ideology made up of the five principles of 'Belief in One God, Humanitarianism, National Unity, Social Justice, and Consultative Democracy.' Originally formulated by Soekarno, it was elevated to the realm of the near-sacred by Soeharto. From the mid-1980s, all parties and social organizations were forced to adopt Pancasila as their ideological basis. This was part of the Soeharto-era efforts to enforce strict controls over the political process. Under Soeharto's interpretation of Pancasila, opposition to the government was ideologically unacceptable as well as culturally unsuited to the Indonesian character, which was supposed to privilege harmony and mutual co-operation. See Bourchier (1996) and Hadiz (2004c).

6. Tempo Interaktif 3 May 2000; Kompas 18 April 2000. Factory owners frequently hired local military units in the past in this role.

7. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the problem presented itself as that of sustaining the political reality of the Indonesian nation-state, which suddenly appeared fragile (Kingsbury 2003).This was the case after resource-rich provinces like East Kalimantan, Riau, and Irian Jaya demanded in 2001 that the constitution be replaced to enshrine the federal system. This reportedly prompted MPR Speaker Amien Rais to respond that federalism was 'the golden bridge between centralism and separatism', even though his own political party, PAN, had in fact placed federalism on its party platform in 1999 (Guerin 2002). But the prospects of Indonesia's break up were probably greatly exaggerated.

8. From this point of view, the Indonesian case diverges from that of the Philippines, where the decentralisation push of the late 1980s and early 1990s, while related to democratisation, had little to do directly with strong local demands outside such chronic 'problem' areas as Mindanao and Cordillera. Interview with Eduardo Gonzalez, former President of the Development Academy of the Philippines, Quezon City, 6 June 2006. In Thailand, too, decentralisation was a project designed by domestic technocrats after the discrediting of military rule in 1992, but to which established local politicos quickly latched on to.

9. This is reformulated with additional comments from the synopsis of the law as provided by Turner and Podger (2003: 23–27).

10. Interview with T. Rizal Nurdin, governor of North Sumatra, 7 July 2001.

11. In Sidoarjo, the bupati was derisive about the intellectual capacities of members of the legislature, many of whom, he said, did not have good educational backgrounds, interview on 13 February 2003. The same argument is put forward by numerous local heads of government, including Marin Purba, then mayor of Pematang Siantar, North Sumatra, 7 September 2001.

12. For details, see World Bank (2003b).

13. See UNESCAP, n. d., at <nowiki>http://www.unescap.org/huset/lgstudy/country/thailand/thai.html</nowiki>.

14. Interview with Wuthisarn Tanchai, King Prajadhipok's Institute and Thai Decentralisation Committee member, 26 September 2006.

15. Interview with Wuthisarn Tanchai, King Prajadhipok's Institute and Thai Decentralisation Committee member, 26 September 2006.

16. See UNESCAP, n.d., at <nowiki>http://www.unescap.org/huset/lgstudy/country/thailand/thai.html</nowiki>.

17. Interview with J. Prospero de Vera III, Senior Consultant, Republic of the Philippines Senate, Office of Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr, Quezon City, 5 June 2006.

18. Interview with Joel Rocamora, Executive Director of Institute for Popular Democracy, Quezon City, 2 June 2006.

19. See Singh (2007) on how some issues pertaining to regional inequalities have appeared in the discussion on decentralisation in China and India.

20. Such was the timid nature of the Thai associations that there was little response when the military group that overthrew Thaksin in 2006 banned their political activities (The Nation 26 September 2006).

21. For example, interview with Wien Hendrarso, bupati of Sidoarjo, East Java, 13 February 2003. In this case, he complained about authority over land registration.

22. Interview with Mohammad Idham Samawi, Bupati of Bantul, 12 December 2000.

=== Chapter 4 ===
1. Yogyakarta was, for a brief period, the capital city of fledgling independent Indonesia during the Republican struggle against the Dutch in the 1940s.

2. Arguably, these are the main questions that would or should accompany an examination of the salience of local politics anywhere. See, for example, Kerkvliet (2004: 2) on post-doi moi Vietnam.

3. Interestingly, examining parliamentary bodies following the PDI-P victory over Golkar in 1999, Shiraishi (2003) suggests that PDI-P local parliamentarians, nevertheless, were generally younger than Golkar ones. This did not seem to affect their political and organisational background.

4. See City Population, 'Indonesia', at <nowiki>http://www.citypopulation.de/Indonesia.html</nowiki> for details on these population figures.

5. Interview with Rusdiansyah, Surabaya, July 2003.

6. Compiled from official data and provided by Elfenda Ananda.

7. See the results as tabulated by the Indonesian Electoral Commission, at <nowiki>http://www.kpu.go.id</nowiki>.

8. Data from Surya daily, 26 October 2002.

9. See the results as tabulated by the Indonesian Electoral Commission, at <nowiki>http://www.kpu.go.id</nowiki>.

10. For example, I was intrigued to find that former members of the hard-line radical student-based organization, the PRD, were acting as field operators and advisers of several local politicos in North Sumatra during election period. Their contribution to the campaigns, waged by mostly bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, ranged from conceptualising campaign platforms and strategy, all the way to mobilising people to attend rallies.

11. Interview with Vincent Wijaya, Medan businessman, 13 June 2005.

12. Interview with Seno Prabowo, then PDI-P parliamentarian in Gresik, East Java, 18 December 2002.

13. Congressional, senatorial and local governmental polls held in May 2007 in the Philippines resulted in over 100 cases of murders officially deemed related to election issues (The Philippine Star, 11 May 2007, pp. 4 and 8). These political murders followed a longer period in which Leftists, critical journalists or NGO activists were also killed (or disappeared) in the hundreds (Tolentino and Raymundo 2006).

14. The Soekarno-era Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) and its descendents, the New Order-era PDI and now, former President Megawati Soekarnoputri's PDI-P, have been their traditional vehicles.

15. See for a comparison, Nijehhuis (2003), who in a study of the effects of decentralisation on political conflicts in a village in Mali suggests that political polarisation has resulted there, but that migrants who had settled in the village are now the main victims of the struggle.

16. Other analysts might include religious notables in this list of salient local elites, given the sometimes blatant deployment of religious sentiment and symbolism in electoral contests. Local religious leaders, often linked to nationally-organised religious associations such as the NU, or its rival, the Muhammadiyah, are frequently called upon by candidates for electoral office to bolster their legitimacy and standing in the community. Interview with T. Indra Bungsu, candidate for mayor of Binjai, North Sumatra, 15 June 2005. Others have tossed their hats into the ring and latched on more strongly to specific coalitions of power as expressed by local political party vehicles. These and similar kinds of observations often surfaced in interviews in discussions with local political actors in North Sumatra and East Java.

17. Interviews with Akhyar Nasution and O. K. Azhari, both members of the Medan parliament for the PDI-P, on 15 December and 20 December 2003, respectively.

18. Interview with Isman, then Surabaya member of parliament, 15 July 2003. He was a former leading figure in the local PDI-P, but lost out in a particularly vicious internal party squabble involving the positions of mayor of Surabaya and the party leadership in the city. The significance of this conflict will be discussed later.

19. Interview, 9 December 2000. Riyadi Gunawan, in fact, had an interestingly rich family background—his father was active in the Soekarnoist PNI, and his mother was active in its women's branch and hailed from a family of minor colonial-era bureaucrats. The grandson of a kyai—founder of a Muslim boarding school—he could count among his uncles and other relatives, noted activists of such organisations as the NU, PNI, Muhammadiyah and Masyumi. He also claimed that one such uncle was a founder of the Masyumi.

20. Interview, 7 September 2001.

21. Interview, 16 July 2002.

22. Although discrimination against Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority has been reduced through legal reforms since the fall of Soeharto, its members remain vulnerable to political extortion. In Medan, for example, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs made the rare public announcement that they were being forced to contribute to the campaign funds of major political parties that were gearing up for the 2004 national and local parliamentary elections (Jakarta Post 31 July 2003).

23. Interviews respectively on 8 September 2001 and 6 July 2001. Bakrie was to be appointed Coordinating Minister of the Economy under the Bambang Yudhoyono presidency in 2004, and he subsequently became Coordinating Minister of Social Welfare. His family owns the giant and diversified Bakrie conglomerate.

24. See 'Mengubah DPRD Sumut Jadi Ring Tinju', Parliament Watch, January 2000, pp. 4–5.

25. Interview with Rinto Andriyono, Institute of Economic and Development Analysis, based in Yogyakarta, 17 December 2002.

26. Interviews, respectively on 7 September 2001 and 7 July 2001. Following my interview with him, the bupati of Deli Serdang was scheduled to meet a group of potential Japanese investors.

27. PT Bosowa is owned by Aksa Mahmud, brother-in-law of Jusuf Kalla and a prominent businessman from South Sulawesi, Kalla's main base of power. Aksa Mahmud is also a national politician.

28. Both views are represented in numerous interviews with local political figures in North Sumatra and East Java.

29. Interview, 17 June 2005.

30. Interview, 13 February 2003.

31. Written interview with Rudolf Pardede, July 2002.

32. Interview, 11 February 2002.

33. Information provided by FITRA, Medan, 7 July 2005.

34. Interview, 15 June 2005.

35. Interview, 15 June 2005.

36. Interview, 14 June 2005.

37. For a detailed look on the role of the jawara, and their alliance with Golkar, in Serang, Banten, see Alamsyah (2007).

38. Interview with Soekirman, 14 June 2005.

39. Minister of Finance Yusuf Anwar estimates that the tax could be worth up to Rp 30 trillion nationally. See 'Negara Rugi Rp 150 Miliar Akibat Cukai Rokok Palsu', Tempo Interaktif, 5 March 2005.

40. Interview, 16 December 2002.

41. Interview, 12 December 2000.

42. Interview, 10 December 2000.

43. This is the case nationally as well. It is claimed that thirteen cabinet ministers in 2005 were formerly businesspeople. See Hendardi (2005).

44. Interview with Abdul Gani Sitepu, 15 June 2005, in which he concurred that local elections in 2005 were likely to cost candidates three to five times more than it did five years earlier.

45. Interview, 8 September 2001.

46. Interview with Sotar Nasution, 3 September 2001.

47. Interview on 13 July 2003 with Jalil Latuconsina, political, business and press figure in Surabaya, with long-time links to a number of 'youth' organizations. He had made a quickly aborted entry into the gubernatorial contest in East Java in 2003.

48. Interview 9 December 2000.

49. Interview 9 December 2000.

50. Interview with Marlon Purba, former PDI-P parliamentarian in North Sumatra and former head of the PDI-P militia in the province, 19 July 2002.

51. Interview with Marlon Purba, 19 July 2002; and with O. K. Azhari, Medan parliamentarian for the PDI-P, 5 July 2001.

52. Interview 5 September 2001.

53. See LSM Mail Archive 'KKN Bupati Langkat-Sumut (Kisah Nyata)', at <nowiki>http://www.mail-archive.com/lsm@terranet.or.id/msg00055.html</nowiki>.

54. Nevertheless, with relatively minor interests in the press industry, Masduki does not appear to have the personal material resources comparable to his North Sumatran counterparts and claims to be dependent on party allocation of funds to finance the operations of his satgas. Interview, 19 July 2003.

55. Interview with Agus Muslim, Pemuda Pancasila secretary in Surabaya, July 2003.

=== Chapter 5 ===
1. Interview with Akhyar Nasution, member of Medan parliament for the PDI-P, 15 December 2003. References to a lucrative elections 'industry' were also made by local businesspeople in Labuhan Batu, North Sumatra, Haji Masulung and Haji A. Silitonga. Interview, 11 July 2005. Included in this industry are activities such as producing T-shirts, banners, pamphlets, 'souvenirs' and various other goods.

2. Interview with Ahmad Amin Lubis, businessman and brother of a candidate for deputy bupati of Serdang Bedagai, 14 June 2005.

3. The idea was supported by a decision made by the Constitutional Court in 2007. However, the decision did not clarify what the criteria of individual eligibility would be (See SCTV, at <nowiki>http://www.liputan6.com</nowiki> 23 July 2007).

4. Interview with Marin Purba, 7 September 2001.

5. Interview with Amran Y. S., a veteran Pemuda Pancasila leader in North Sumatra and member of the North Sumatra parliament for PAN (the National Mandate Party), 4 July 2001.

6. It should be noted, however, that the local Medan publication, Edison, furnished evidence that at least some of these parliamentarians were in fact paid a more substantial sum of Rp 125 million. It did so by actually reproducing the receipts the parliamentarians were supposed to have signed upon accepting the money! See Edison, 24–31 May 2000, pp. 3 and 11. It should also be noted that Abdillah's opposing camp was not beyond similar tactics. Ridwan Batubara's brother, the businessman Yopie Batubara and then head of the North Sumatra Chamber of Commerce and Industry, claims to have also bribed the same parliamentarians and was in possession of the receipts to prove it. Interview, 8 September 2001.

7. Interview with Akhyar Nasution, member of Medan parliament for the PDI-P, 15 December 2003; and Doni Arsal Gultom, ousted former leader of the PDI-P Medan branch, 16 December 2003.

8. See, for example, Perjuangan, 18 March 2000.

9. Personal communication, 19 December 2003, and interview, 6 July 2001, Martius Latuperisa. Also see the chronology of events provided in 'Kronologis Kasus Money Politics Pemilihan Walikota Medan', Sumatera Corruption Watch, n.d. Here, it is noted that fourteen of the sixteen PDI-P parliamentarians were, after Ridwan Batubara's defeat, held against their will in Parliament House by other PDI-P members who were furious with the result and demanded an explanation. On this occasion, they reportedly admitted that they had been bribed.

10. Interview with John Andreas Purba, PDI-P member of Karo sub-provincial parliament (with a background in the KNPI), 6 July 2001. On the fire, see 'Selamat Pagi Pembakar', Otonom, 13–21 December 2000, p. 8.

11. This was, for example, alleged in 'Momentum Show of Force Rudolf', Otonom, 22–29 November 2000, p. 13.

12. This is an estimate given by two members of his 'success team', Medan parliamentarian Yunus Rasyid, interview 16 June 2005; and Hendra D. S., Medan parliamentarian from the Pancasila Patriot Party and a leader of the local Pemuda Pancasila.

13. Maulana Pohan estimated that he only had about one-tenth of the financial resources available to Abdillah, though it must be noted that he had an interest in portraying himself as the underdog.

14. I attended a meeting of local PDI-P cadres and the Pohan-Sigit team (13 June 2005), in which Purba played a prominent role.

15. Interviews on 19 July 2002 and 15 December 2003. It should be noted that Purba denies involvement in the lucrative trade in illegal firearms, which is alleged to involve the military and police forces.

16. Interview with Darma Loebis and Bambang Soed, the North Sumatra Alliance of Journalists, 16 June 2005. During fieldwork, I observed that the Medan station of the Metro TV network—owned by New Order-nurtured businessman Surya Paloh—was running a half-hour programme every evening lavishing praise on the successes of the Abdillah administration and reporting on his daily activities. Major newspapers in the city, such as Waspada and Medan Bisnis, were also running news articles that were heavily tilted in favour of Abdillah and cast him in a favourable light.

17. In relation to the media, Abdillah's alleged actions do not depart from similar developments seen in many post-authoritarian or post-totalitarian situations. Outside of Southeast Asia, Oates (2001: 261–262) notes in the case of Russia, for example, that politicians often buy 'secret advertising' in the print and electronic media and regularly offer bribes to journalists during electoral contests.

18. Interviews with Nanang S., PDI-P parliamentarian for Surabaya and a supporter of the mayor within the party, 16 December 2002 and 14 July 2003.

19. Cak Narto held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Indonesian army's Special Forces, the Koppasus (Nurhasim 2005: 104).

20. Interview with Nanang S., PDI-P parliamentarian for Surabaya, 16 December 2002 and 14 July 2003.

21. Interview with Bedjo, head of the Surabaya PDI-P paramilitary force, 16 July 2003.

22. Interview with Tito Widji Prijadi, East Java PDI-P satgas, 20 December 2002.

23. Some of the observations were raised as well in Hadiz 2004b.

24. Interview with Gatot Sutantra, a veteran local leader of a number of New Order-cultivated 'youth' organizations, 18 July 2003.

25. I observed this during fieldwork in Surabaya/East Java in July 2003. In the Medan case, FKPPI and other goons were supposed to have threatened local parliamentarians with physical violence.

26. Interview with M. Jakfar Shodig, deputy head of the local Banser, 18 July 2003.

27. Interview with Gatot Sutantra, a veteran local leader of a number of New Order-cultivated 'youth' organization, 18 July 2003. Also see 'Madu di Balik Kursi Gubernur', Sapujagat, 1–15 April 2003, p. 3; and Jawa Pos 17 July 2003, p. 26; as well as Ali Aspandi, 'Siapakah Gubernur Jatim 2003–2008', Surya 25 November 2002, p. 21.

28. Interview with Lutfilah Masduki, East Java provincial member of parliament for the PKB and head of the East Java PKB paramilitary force.

29. Interview with Lutfilah Masduki, member of the East Java parliament and head of the PKB satgas, 19 July 2003.

30. Initially, there were moves to put forward a party man as candidate, most prominently Saifullah Yusuf, the PKB secretary general who was often at odds with former President Wahid. Interview with Lutfilah Masduki, who supported Kahfi in the internal conflict, 19 July 2003.

31. The PDI-P policy of backing incumbents and generals for top regional and local positions was epitomised by its backing of General Sutiyoso as governor of Jakarta in 2002, even though the latter, as Jakarta military commander in 1996, was partly responsible for the brutal attack on then opposition leader Megawati's supporters at the party headquarters.

32. Interview with Usaha Ginting, head of the PDI-P branch in Medan, 19 December 2003.

33. Interview with Amran Y. S., 4 July 2001. Also see Ryter (2002) for a detailed historical study.

34. Interview with Martius Latuperisa, 6 July 2001.

35. Personal communication, Martius Latuperisa, Medan member of parliament, 19 December 2003. It is rumoured that the failure was due to the objections of Abdurrahman Wahid. Latuperisa takes great pride in the fact that as the son of a mere corporal, he was able to order around the sons of officers in the FKPPI.

36. Personal communication, Martius Latuperisa, Medan member of parliament, 19 December 2003.

37. Literally, 'Elder Brother Olo'.

38. Also, interview with Topan Damanik, North Sumatran academic, 17 July 2002.

39. Interview with Usaha Ginting, 19 December 2003.

40. Interview with Doni Arsal Gultom, 16 December 2003. This claim was vehemently rejected by Ramses Simbolon, a top aide of Rudolf Pardede in an interview on 17 December 2003. Ginting himself claims that he also rejected Pardede's attempt to place cronies in the Medan party leadership; interview on 19 December 2003.

41. Purba, also the former head of the PDI-P faction in the North Sumatran parliament, had since departed from the PDI-P and joined a smaller party espousing a form of Soekarnoist ideology. Interview 15 December 2003.

42. One such mass mobilization, involving sections of the urban poor, took place on 15 December 2003. Ramses Simbolon, a key lieutenant of Rudolf Pardede, denied that his camp was behind the action, though this was the widely-held view among local politicos. Interview, 17 December 2003.

43. Interview with Haji Enteng, 10 July 2005.

44. Interview with Agus Muslim, East Java Pemuda Pancasila secretary, 16 July 2003. Also see 'Partai Patriot Pancasila Bisa Jadi Pilihan', Sapujagat, 1–15 July 2003, p. 12.

45. Interview with J. Anto, media activist, Medan, 17 July 2002; interview with Jalil Latuconsina, publisher, Sapujagat, Surabaya, 13 July 2003. He is also linked to 'youth' and business associations in the city.

46. Interview with Topan Damanik, 17 July 2002.

47. The Betawi people have long felt that they have been marginalised in 'their own city'—left behind by the process of modernisation and the wealth created for others.

48. Personal communication, Agus Muslim, East Java Pemuda Pancasila secretary, 16 July 2003.

49. Personal communication, Dede Oetomo, lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Airlangga University, Yogyakarta, 17 July 2003.

50. Interview with Kusen Dimyati, Pagar Nusa chief in Tamaksari, Surabaya, 6 February 2003. The name of the organization evokes a sense of a protective fence around the islands of Indonesia, thus the Pagar Nusa is a protector of the Indonesian archipelago.

51. Key among these is Syukri Fadholi, a former Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam, or Islamic Students' Association (HMI), activist, and once head of the PPP faction in the Yogyakarta provincial parliament. He was later to be elected deputy mayor of the city of Yogyakarta. Interview 15 December 2000.

52. As pointed out by Tengku Erry Nuradi. Interview, 14 June 2005.

53. This observation contrasts with that put forward by Wilson (2006: 290), who quotes an unnamed political gangster as suggesting that smaller scale elections allow greater opportunities for victories won by intimidation.

54. Interview with Zainal Abidin, secretary general of the IPK in Medan, 18 June 2005.

55. Interview with Sahat Simatupang, IPK member, 18 June 2005. It should be noted that members of such organisations are traditionally recruited from Indonesia's masses of urban poor. This would be the case in spite of Zainal Abidin's claim that large numbers of intellectuals and people in middle-class professions now make up the membership of the IPK. Interview, 18 June 2005.

=== Chapter 6 ===
1. Interviews and discussions with workers and labour activists in Medan/North Sumatra, 8 July 2001 and 18, 20 and 21 July 2002.

2. The use of hoodlums to deter workers is denied by the SPSI leadership in North Sumatra. Discussion, 19 July 2002.

3. Still, there have sometimes been exceptions to this rule. In 2006, worker protests in Jakarta in particular, organised to mark International Labour Day, were successful in pressuring the government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to delay the implementation of labour law 'reforms' that would have made the position of workers in companies even more precarious because of new stipulations about dismissals and short-term contracts favourable to employers.

4. Interview with Eggi Sudjana, founder of PPMI, 20 November 1998.

5. See a critique of this idea by Batam Island-based trade unionist Thamrin Mosii (2006).

6. Interview with Budi Dewantoro, Justice Party member of Yogyakarta legislature, 13 December 2000. The party later became the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS).

7. Interview, 9 May 1994.

8. Interview with Budi Setyagraha, Yogyakarta provincial parliamentarian from PAN, on 10 December 2000.

9. Interview with Elvi Rahmita Ginting, Medan parliamentarian and a local Pemuda Pancasila women's section leader, 6 July 2001.

10. Interview, 6 July 2001.

11. Interview, 19 July 2003.

12. Interview, 18 July 2003. The factory in question was the New Era shoe factory on the outskirts of Surabaya. It should be noted that Jakfar initially denied that this had happened until he later stated that Banser personnel allegedly involved were being investigated.

13. Interview. 18 July 2002.

14. Aware of problems such as these, there was some debate within the labour activist community for a short while in the immediate aftermath of Soeharto's fall about the need for labour parties. In a bizarre twist of events, it was the New Order-sponsored trade union, the FSPSI, or figures associated with it, that took the initiative by forming the Indonesian Workers Party (PPI) a day prior to Soeharto's resignation on 21 May 1998. Another labour party, the so-called SPSI Party, was later formed by a different group within the union, while long-time non-state labour activist Muchtar Pakpahan established his own National Labour Party (PBN). In addition, the Labour Solidarity Party (PSP) was formed with alleged financial assistance from a leading member of the Soeharto family. Muhammad Jumhur Hidayat—a former student activist turned late New Order-era political operator—at one time also expressed the aspiration of eventually forming a labour party on the basis of his fledgling GASPERMINDO. Nonetheless, all of the parties were unsuccessful in making a dent on Indonesia's electoral contests (see Ford 2005, at <nowiki>http://airaanz.econ.usyd.edu.au/papers/Ford.pdf</nowiki>). They failed to win any seats in national or local parliaments in 1999 and were even a lesser presence in the 2004 legislative elections.

Given the absence of a real labour party, and the array of labour organisations in existence, no single labour organisation today has the clout to 'bargain' on behalf of workers in relation to other social forces.

15. Interview with Indonesian political scientist Syamsuddin Haris in Suara Karya, 29 June 2006.

16. Various interviews, including with the camat of Tebing Tinggi and Pantai Cermin, and the secretary for the camat in Binjai, all in North Sumatra; the lurah of Sei Kera, in Medan; with the head of 'Kesbanglinmas' or office of public security, Serdang Bedagai, North Sumatra—all in June 2005.

17. Statements made at a seminar on the 2004 elections in Indonesia organised by NGOs in North Sumatra, 22 July 2002.

18. Ufen (2006), for example, notes how political parties in Indonesia are coming to resemble those in the Philippines in their character.

19. It is too early to definitively state what the real effect of the court ruling might be. It could be the case that some local bigwigs who have enough personal resources and networks will seek to by-pass parties and spend more money, for example, on direct vote-buying—a situation which would again dishearten the NGOs. However, political parties would have an interest in keeping the criteria for eligibility of independent candidates in the future at a fairly high level to maintain their relevance and grip on power. See Antaranews 17 November 2007.

20. Interview with Sahat Simatupang, IPK member, Medan, 18 June 2005; Hendra D. S., Pancasila Patriot Party and Pemuda Pancasila official, Medan, 16 June 2005.

21. Interview with Hendra D. S., Pancasila Patriot Party and Pemuda Pancasila official, Medan, 16 June 2005.

22. According to a local electoral commission member in Binjai, his office was initially pressured to delay the poll. Kompas 28 June 2005.

23. Interview with Professor Somkhit Lertpaithoon, vice-rector of Thammasat University and a member of the 1997 Constitution Drafting Assembly as well as Decentralisation Committee, Bangkok, 28 September 2006.

=== Conclusion ===
1. Of course, authors on market-preserving federalism (e.g. Qian and Weingast 1996) tend to emphasise the idea that these differences spur healthy competition between regions to do well economically.

2. Communications with Luky Djani, Indonesian Corruption Watch, March 2006.

3. The re-centralisation effort was helped by 'deceleration of Southeast Asia's globalisation' due to the Asian economic crisis, which had slowed 'the explosion of real estate values and government infrastructure investment that secured the conditions for the rise of local political bosses' in Thailand (Shatkin 2003: 31).

4. Interviews with J. Prospero De Vera, senior consultant, Office of Senator Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., Quezon City, 5 June 2006; and with Professor Eduardo Gonzalez, former president of the Development Academy of the Philippines, Quezon City, 6 June 2006.

5. This essentially reflected conflict between the centre and regions about the distribution of wealth. Of course, many such conflicts have been expressed in ethno-nationalist (or religious terms), as has been the case in Indonesia in the post-Soeharto years. As Wee (2005) argues, however, ethno-nationalist or religiously expressed local discontent will commonly have a strong material basis. In the case of Russia, where the issue of Chechen separatism is notable, Hughes (2001: 135) has observed that distributive issues had helped to foster regionalist and separatist sentiment, especially where there has been long-standing resentment over modes of revenue sharing. He also notes (2001: 134) that the 'single most important common factor among the four most "secessionist" or autonomy-seeking republics . . . is that they all have significant economic resource endowments'.

6. Indeed, Indonesia ranked a lowly 135 out of 175 countries surveyed in the World Bank's 2007 Doing Business report (Jakarta Post 6 November 2006).

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<nowiki>*</nowiki>The Nation*. 3 October 2006.

<nowiki>*</nowiki>The Philippine Star*. 11 May 2007.

<nowiki>*</nowiki>Waspada*. 12 August 2004.

<nowiki>*</nowiki>Waspada*. 19 August 2004.

<nowiki>*</nowiki>Waspada*. 11 September 2004.

<nowiki>*</nowiki>Waspada*. 17 December 2005.

<nowiki>*</nowiki>Waspada*. 7 January 2008.
[[Category:Indonesia]]

Library:Localizing Power in Post Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asian Perspective

2026-08-04T14:42:10Z

AngTeh:

Library:The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

2026-08-03T06:24:14Z

AngTeh:

{{Library work
| title = The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
| written by = [[Karl Marx]]
|author=Karl Marx| written in = 1851—1852
|published_date=1852| type = Essay
| source= [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm Marxists Internet Archive]
| image =
| image_size =
| image_upright =
| image_alt =
| caption =
| summary = explores the rise of Louis Bonaparte to power in France in 1851, examining the role of social classes, political factions, and historical circumstances in shaping his ascent to authoritarian rule and the consolidation of the Bonapartist regime

}}

== Prefaces ==

=== Preface to the Second Edition ===
My friend Joseph Weydemeyer, whose death was so untimely, intended to publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852. He invited me to provide this weekly with a history of the coup d’etat. Down to the middle of February, I accordingly wrote him weekly articles under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile, Weydemeyer’s original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, whose first number consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting into the actual book market. A German bookseller of extremely radical pretensions to whom I offered the sale of my book was most virtuously horrified at a “presumption” so “contrary to the times.”

From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does not extend beyond the month of February, 1852. Its republication now is due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urgent requests of my friends in Germany.

Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoleon le Petit and Proudhon’s Coup d’Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d’etat. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’etat as the result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however, his historical construction of the coup d’etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.

A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its particular coloring. Accordingly, I have confined myself to mere correction of printer’s errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible.

The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,” have already been fulfilled. Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit. Outside France, this violent breach with the traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been little noticed and still less understood.

Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel.

=== Preface to the Second Version ===
The fact that a new edition of ''The Eighteenth Brumaire'' has become necessary, thirty-three years after its first appearance, proves that even today this little book has lost none of its value.

It was in truth a work of genius. Immediately after the event that struck the whole political world like a thunderbolt from the blue, that was condemned by some with loud cries of moral indignation and accepted by others as salvation from the revolution and as punishment for its errors, but was only wondered at by all and understood by none-immediately after this event Marx came out with a concise, epigrammatic exposition that laid bare the whole course of French history since the February days in its inner interconnection, reduced the miracle of December 2 to a natural, necessary result of this interconnection and in so doing did not even need to treat the hero of the coup d'état otherwise than with the contempt he so well deserved. And the picture was drawn with such a master hand that every fresh disclosure since made has only provided fresh proofs of how faithfully it reflected reality. This eminent understanding of the living history of the day, this clear-sighted appreciation of events at the moment of happening, is indeed without parallel.

But for this, Marx’s thorough knowledge of French history was needed. France is the land where, more than anywhere else, the historical class struggles were each time fought out to a decision, and where, consequently, the changing political forms within which they move and in which their results are summarised have been stamped in the sharpest outlines. The centre of feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model country of unified monarchy, resting on estates, since the Renaissance, France demolished feudalism in the Great Revolution and established the unalloyed rule of the bourgeoisie in a classical purity unequalled by any other European land. And the struggle of the upward-striving proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere. This was the reason why Marx not only studied the past history of France with particular predilection, but also followed her current history in every detail, stored up the material for future use and, consequently, events never took him by surprise.

In addition, however, there was still another circumstance. It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science - this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.

== February 1848 to December 1851 ==
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the resurrected Romanism – the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle.

But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.

Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.

From 1848 to 1851, only the ghost of the old revolution circulated - from Marrast, the ''républicain en gants jaunes'' [Republican in yellow gloves], who disguised himself as old Bailly, down to the adventurer who hides his trivial and repulsive features behind the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole nation, which thought it had acquired an accelerated power of motion by means of a revolution, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch, and to remove any doubt about the relapse, the old dates arise again – the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had long since become a subject of antiquarian scholarship, and the old minions of the law who had seemed long dead. The nation feels like the mad Englishman in Bedlam ] who thinks he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard labor he must perform in the Ethiopian gold mines, immured in this subterranean prison, a pale lamp fastened to his head, the overseer of the slaves behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a confused welter of barbarian war slaves who understand neither the forced laborers nor each other, since they speak no common language. “And all this,” sighs the mad Englishman, “is expected of me, a freeborn Briton, in order to make gold for the Pharaohs.” “In order to pay the debts of the Bonaparte family,” sighs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he was not in his right mind, could not get rid of his ''idée fixé'' of mining gold. The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10, 1848, when Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the French Republic by plebiscite.] was proved. They longed to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt ], and December 2, 1851 [The date of the coup d’état by Louis Bonaparte], was the answer. Now they have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he would have to be in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.

The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a seizing of the old society unaware, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away as a cardsharp’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung from it through centuries of struggle. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state has only returned to its oldest form, to a shamelessly simple rule by the sword and the monk’s cowl. This is the answer to the ''coup de main'' [unexpected stroke] of February, 1848, given by the ''coup de tête'' [rash act] of December, 1851. Easy come, easy go. Meantime, the interval did not pass unused. During 1848-51 French society, by an abbreviated revolutionary method, caught up with the studies and experiences which in a regular, so to speak, textbook course of development would have preceded the February Revolution, if the latter were to be more than a mere ruffling of the surface. Society seems now to have retreated to behind its starting point; in truth, it has first to create for itself the revolutionary point of departure – the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone modern revolution becomes serious.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:

''Hic Rhodus, hic salta!''

[Here is the rose, here dance!] [NOTE]

For the rest, every fair observer, even if he had not followed the course of French developments step by step, must have had a presentiment of the imminence of an unheard-of disgrace for the revolution. It was enough to hear the complacent yelps of victory with which the democrats congratulated each other on the expectedly gracious consequences of the second Sunday in May, 1852. [day of elections – Louis Bonaparte’s term was expired] In their minds that second Sunday of May had become a certain idea, a dogma, like the day of Christ’s reappearance and the beginning of the millennium in the minds of the Chiliasts ]. As always, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, believed the enemy to be overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in an inactive glorification of the future that was in store for it and the deeds it had in mind but did not want to carry out yet. Those heroes who seek to disprove their demonstrated incapacity – by offering each other their sympathy and getting together in a crowd – had tied up their bundles, collected their laurel wreaths in advance, and occupied themselves with discounting on the exchange market the republics ''in partibus'' [i.e., in name only] for which they had already providently organized the government personnel with all the calm of their unassuming disposition. December 2 struck them like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, and those who in periods of petty depression gladly let their inner fears be drowned by the loudest renters will perhaps have convinced themselves that the times are past when the cackle of geese could save the Capitol. ]

The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, ''liberté, egalité, fraternité'', and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that exists deserves to perish.” [From Goethe’s ''Faust'', Part One.]

It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them. Such turns of speech do not solve the riddle but only formulate it differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without resistance into captivity by three knights of industry.

Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases that the French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848, to December, 1851.

Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; the period of the constitution of the republic or the Constituent National Assembly - May 1848 to May 28 1849; and the period of the constitutional republic or the Legislative National Assembly – May 28 1849 to December 2 1851.

''The first period'' – from February 24, the overthrow of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly – the February period proper, may be designated as the prologue of the revolution. Its character was officially expressed in the fact that the government it improvised itself declared that it was provisional, and like the government, everything that was mentioned, attempted, or enunciated during this period proclaimed itself to be only provisional. Nobody and nothing ventured to lay any claim to the right of existence and of real action. All the elements that had prepared or determined the revolution – the dynastic opposition, the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, and the social-democratic workers, provisionally found their place in the February government.

It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an electoral reform by which the circle of the politically privileged among the possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however – when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no serious resistance, and the monarchy ran away – the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party construed it in its own way. Having secured it arms in hand, the proletariat impressed its stamp upon it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. There was thus indicated the general content of the modern revolution, a content which was in most singular contradiction to everything that, with the material available, with the degree of education attained by the masses, under the given circumstances and relations, could be immediately realized in practice. On the other hand, the claims of all the remaining elements that had collaborated in the February Revolution were recognized by the lion’s share they obtained in the government. In no period, therefore, do we find a more confused mixture of high-flown phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more enthusiastic striving for innovation and more deeply rooted domination of the old routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole of society; and more profound estrangement of its elements. While the Paris proletariat still reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it and indulged in seriously meant discussions of social problems, the old powers of society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected, and found unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed onto the political stage after the barriers of the July Monarchy had fallen.

''The second period'', from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic. Immediately after the February days not only had the dynastic opposition been surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the socialists, but all France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met on May 4, 1848, had emerged from the national elections and represented the nation. It was a living protest against the pretensions of the February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately grasped the character of this National Assembly, attempted on May 15, a few days after it met, to negate its existence forcibly, to dissolve it, to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form in which the proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the nation. As is known, May 15 had no other result but that of removing Blanqui and his comrades – that is, the real leaders of the proletarian party – from the public stage for the entire duration of the cycle we are considering.

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck. It seems to be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it succumbs with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian party.

The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had now prepared, had leveled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of “republic or monarchy.” It had revealed that here “bourgeois republic” signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life – as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world of its own, has neither time nor opportunity left for abolishing the old world of ghosts.

During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” And finally the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski [a character from Heine’s poem “The Two Knights,” a dissolute aristocrat.] installs himself in the Tuileries as the “savior of society.”

== Downfall of the Republicans ==
Let us pick up the threads of the development once more.

The history of the ''Constituent National Assembly'' since the June days is the ''history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie'', of the faction known by the names of tricolor republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc.

Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe it had formed the ''official'' republican ''opposition'' and consequently a recognized component part of the political world of the day. It had its representatives in the Chambers and a considerable sphere of influence in the press. Its Paris organ, the ''National'', was considered just as respectable in its way as the ''Journal des Débats''. Its character corresponded to this position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a faction of the bourgeoisie held together by great common interests and marked off by specific conditions of production. It was a clique of republican-minded bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers, and officials that owed its influence to the personal antipathies of the country to Louis Philippe, to memories of the old republic, to the republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, above all, however, to French nationalism, whose hatred of the Vienna treaties and of the alliance with England it stirred up perpetually. A large part of the following the ''National'' had under Louis Philippe was due to this concealed imperialism, which could consequently confront it later, under the republic, as a deadly rival in the person of Louis Bonaparte. It fought the aristocracy of finance, as did all the rest of the bourgeois opposition. Polemics against the budget, which in France were closely connected with fighting the aristocracy of finance, procured popularity too cheaply and material for puritanical leading articles too plentifully not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defense of the French protectionist system, which it accepted, however, more on national grounds than on grounds of national economy; the bourgeoisie as a whole, for its vicious denunciation of communism and socialism. For the rest, the party of the ''National'' was purely republican; that is, it demanded a republican instead of a monarchist form of bourgeois rule and, above all, the lion’s share of this rule. About the conditions of this transformation it was by no means clear in its own mind. On the other hand, what was clear as daylight to it, and was publicly acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is indeed the way with pure republicans, were already at the point of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans when the February Revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government. From the start they naturally had the confidence of the bourgeoisie and a majority in the Constituent National Assembly. The socialist elements of the Provisional Government were excluded forthwith from the Executive Commission which the National Assembly formed when it met, and the party of the ''National'' took advantage of the outbreak of the June insurrection to discharge the Executive Commission also, and therewith to get rid of its closest rivals, the petty-bourgeois, or democratic, republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the general of the bourgeois-republican part who commanded the June massacre, took the place of the Executive Commission with a sort of dictatorial power. Marrast, former editor in chief of the ''National'', became the perpetual president of the Constituent National Assembly, and the ministries, as well as all other important posts, fell to the portion of the pure republicans.

The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had conceived as the most revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.

The new constitution was at bottom only the republicanized edition of the constitutional Charter of 1830. The narrow electoral qualification of the July Monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of the bourgeois republic. In lieu of this qualification, the February Revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage. The bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content themselves with adding the limiting proviso of a six months’ residence in the constituency. The old organization of the administration, the municipal system, the judicial system, the army, etc., continued to exist inviolate, or, where the constitution changed them, the change concerned the table of contents, not the contents; the name, not the subject matter.

The inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848, personal liberty, liberty of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform which made them invulnerable. For each of these liberties is proclaimed as the absolute right of the French ''citoyen'', but always with the marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the “equal rights of others and the public safety” or by “laws” which are intended to mediate just this harmony of the individual liberties with one another and with the public safety. For example:

“The citizens have the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed assembly, of petition and of expressing their opinions, whether in the press or in any other way. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit save the equal rights of others and the public safety.”

“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.”

“The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law.”

The constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws which are to put into affect those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these unrestricted liberties in such manner that they will collide neither with one another nor with the public safety. And later these organic laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those liberties regulated in such manner that the bourgeoisie in its enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the other classes. Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of “public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life.

This constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was nevertheless, like Achilles, vulnerable in one point – not in the heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads it wound up with: the Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other. Glance through the constitution and you will find that only the paragraphs in which the relationship of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined are absolute, positive, noncontradictory, and cannot be distorted. For here it was a question of the bourgeois republicans safeguarding themselves. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove the President constitutionally, whereas the President can remove the National Assembly only unconstitutionally, only by setting aside the constitution itself. Here, therefore, it challenges its forcible destruction. It not only sanctifies the division of powers, like the Charter of 1830, it widens it into an intolerable contradiction. The play of the constitutional powers, as Guizot termed the parliamentary squabble between the legislative and executive power, is in the constitution of 1848 continually played ''va-banque'' [staking all]. On one side are seven hundred and fifty representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage and eligible for re-election; they form an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the last instance on war, peace, and commercial treaties, alone possesses the right of amnesty, and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and disposing thereby in France of the livelihoods of at least a million and a half people, for so many depend on the five hundred thousand officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal, and municipal councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries. While the Assembly constantly performs on the boards and is exposed to daily public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the Elysian Fields, and that with Article 45 of the constitution before his eyes and in his heart, crying to him daily: “''Frere, il faut mourir!''” [‘Brother, one must die!’] Your power ceases on the second Sunday of the lovely month of May in the fourth year after your election! Then your glory is at an end, the piece is not played twice, and if you have debts, look to it quickly that you pay them off with the 600,000 francs granted you by the constitution, unless, perchance, you prefer to go to Clichy4] on the second Monday of the lovely month of May! Thus, whereas the constitution assigns power to the President, it seeks to secure moral power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President elected by all Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a single individual. While each separate representative of the people represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that bridgehead, or even only the mere necessity of electing someone as the seven hundred and fiftieth, without examining too closely either the cause or the man, he is the elect of the nation and the act of his election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people.

Thetis, the sea goddess, prophesied to Achilles that he would die in the bloom of youth. The constitution, which, like Achilles, had its weak spot, also had, like Achilles, a presentiment that it must go to an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, as well as their own discredit, grew daily in the same measure as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art, without Thetis on this account having to leave the sea and communicate the secret to them. They sought to cheat destiny by a catch in the constitution, through Article III according to which every motion for a revision of the constitution must be supported by at least three-quarters of the votes, cast in three successive debates with an entire month between each, with the added proviso that not less than five hundred members of the National Assembly must vote. Thereby they merely made the impotent attempt to continue exercising a power – when only a parliamentary minority, as which they already saw themselves prophetically in their mind’s eye – a power which at that time, when they commanded a parliamentary majority and all the resources of governmental authority, was daily slipping more and more from their feeble hands.

Finally the constitution, in a melodramatic paragraph, entrusts itself “to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people and every single Frenchman,” after it has previously entrusted in another paragraph the “vigilant” and “patriotic” to the tender, most painstaking care of the High Court of Justice, the ''haute cour'' it invented for the purpose.

Such was the Constitution of 1848, which on December 2, 1851, was not overthrown by a head, but fell down at the touch of a mere hat; this hat, to be sure, was a three-cornered Napoleonic hat.

While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence. The forefathers of the “respectable republicans” had sent their symbol, the tricolor, on a tour around Europe. They themselves in turn produced an invention that of itself made its way over the whole Continent, but returned to France with ever renewed love until it has now become naturalized in half her departments – the state of siege. A splendid invention, periodically employed in every ensuing crisis in the course of the French Revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid on French society’s head to compress its brain and render it quiet; saber and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and administrators, as guardians and censors, to play policeman and do night watchman’s duty; mustache and uniform, which were periodically trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as its rector - were not barrack and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform finally bound to hit upon the idea of instead saving society once and for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest and freeing civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself? Barrack and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform were bound to hit upon this idea all the more as they might then also expect better cash payment for their higher services, whereas from the merely periodic state of siege and the transient rescues of society at the bidding of this or that bourgeois faction, little of substance was gleaned save some killed and wounded and some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should not the military at last one day play state of siege in their own interest and for their own benefit, and at the same time besiege the citizens’ purses? Moreover, be it noted in passing, one must not forget that Colonel Bernard, the same military commission president who under Cavaignac had fifteen thousand insurgents deported without trial, is at this moment again at the head of the military commissions active in Paris.

Whereas with the state of siege in Paris, the respectable, the pure republicans planted the nursery in which the praetorians of December 2, 1851, were to grow up, they on the other hand deserve praise for the reason that, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under Louis Philippe, they now, when they had command of the national power, crawled before foreign countries, and instead of setting Italy free, let her be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans.] Louis Bonaparte’s election as President on December 10, 1848, put an end to the dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the Constituent Assembly.

In Article 44 of the Constitution it is stated:

“The President of the French Republic must never have lost his status of French citizen.”

The first President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not merely lost his status of French citizen, had not only been an English special constable, he was even a naturalized Swiss.

I have worked out elsewhere the significance of the election of December 10. I will not revert to it here. It is sufficient to remark here that it was a ''reaction of the peasants'', who had had to pay the costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation; a ''reaction of the country against the town''. It met with great approval in the army, for which the republicans of the ''National'' had provided neither glory nor additional pay; among the big bourgeoisie, which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy, among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship of the peasants to the French Revolution.

The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as ''its property''. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist. The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy, and the press were to be found on either side, though in various proportions. Here, in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule conjointly. The June insurrection had already united them in the party of Order. Now it was necessary, in the first place, to remove the coterie of bourgeois republicans who still occupied the seats of the National Assembly. Just as brutal as these pure republicans had been in their misuse of physical force against the people, just as cowardly, mealy-mouthed, broken-spirited, and incapable of fighting were they now in their retreat, when it was a question of maintaining their republicanism and their legislative rights against the executive power and the royalists. I need not relate here the ignominious history of their dissolution. They did not succumb; they passed out of existence. Their history has come to an end forever, and, both inside and outside the Assembly, they figure in the following period only as memories, memories that seem to regain life whenever the mere name republic is once more the issue and as often as the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink down to the lowest level. I may remark in passing that the journal which gave its name to this party, the ''National'', was converted to socialism in the following period.

Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective glance at the two powers, one of which annihilated the other on December 2, 1851, whereas from December 20, 1848, until the exit of the Constituent Assembly, they had lived in conjugal relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the part of the coalesced royalists, the party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On acceding to the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, the old leader, nota bene, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. M. Barrot had at last secured the ministerial portfolio whose image had haunted him since 1830, and what is more, the premiership in the ministry; but not, as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, as the most advanced leader of the parliamentary opposition, but with the task of putting a parliament to death, and as the confederate of all his archenemies, Jesuits and Legitimists. He brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted. Bonaparte seemed to efface himself completely. This party acted for him.

The very first meeting of the council of ministers resolved on the expedition to Rome, which, it was agreed, should be undertaken behind the back of the National Assembly and the means for which were to be wrested from it under false pretenses. Thus they began by swindling the National Assembly and secretly conspiring with the absolutist powers abroad against the revolutionary Roman republic.

In the same manner and with the same maneuvers Bonaparte prepared his coup of December 2 against the royalist Legislative Assembly and its constitutional republic. Let us not forget that the same party which formed Bonaparte’s ministry on December 20, 1848, formed the majority of the Legislative National Assembly on December 2, 1851.

In August the Constituent Assembly had decided to dissolve only after it had worked out and promulgated a whole series of organic laws that were to supplement the constitution. On January 6, 1849, the party of Order had a deputy named Rateau move that the Assembly should let the organic laws go and rather decide on its own dissolution. Not only the ministry, with Odilon Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members of the National Assembly told it in bullying accents then that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the consolidation of order, for putting an end to the indefinite provisional arrangements and establishing a definitive state of affairs; that it hampered the productivity of the new government and sought to prolong its existence merely out of malice; that the country was tired of it. Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the legislative power, learned it by heart, and proved to the parliamentary royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He repeated their own catchwords against them.

The Barrot Ministry and the party of Order went further. They caused petitions to the National Assembly to be made throughout France, in which this body was politely requested to decamp. They thus led the unorganized popular masses into the fire of battle against the National Assembly, the constitutionally organized expression of the people. They taught Bonaparte to appeal against the parliamentary assemblies to the people. At length, on January 29, 1849, the day had come on which the Constituent Assembly was to decide concerning its own dissolution. The National Assembly found the building where its sessions were held occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the party of Order, in whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and troops of the line had been united, held a great military review in Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the royalists in coalition threateningly declared to the Constituent Assembly that force would be employed if it should prove unwilling. It was willing, and only bargained for a very short extra term of life. What was January 29 but the coup d’etat of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists with Bonaparte against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen did not observe, or did not wish to observe, that Bonaparte availed himself of January 29, 1849, to have a portion of the troops march past him in front of the Tuileries, and seized with avidity on just this first public summoning of the military power against the parliamentary power to foreshadow Caligula. They, to be sure, saw only their Changarnier.

A motive that particularly actuated the party of Order in forcibly cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life was the organic laws supplementing the constitution, such as the law on education, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalists in coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown mistrustful. Among these organic laws, however, was also a law on the responsibility of the President of the Republic. In 1851 the Legislative Assembly was occupied with the drafting of just such a law, when Bonaparte anticipated this coup with the coup of December 2. What would the royalists in coalition not have given in their winter election campaign of 1851 to have found the Responsibility Law ready to hand, and drawn up, at that, by a mistrustful, hostile, republican Assembly!

After the Constituent Assembly had itself shattered its last weapon on January 29, 1849, the Barrot Ministry and the friends of order hounded it to death, left nothing undone that could humiliate it, and wrested from the impotent, self-despairing Assembly laws that cost it the last remnant of respect in the eyes of the public. Bonaparte, occupied with his fixed Napoleonic idea, was brazen enough to exploit publicly this degradation of the parliamentary power. For when on May 8, 1849, the National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry because of the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring back the Roman expedition to its alleged purpose. Bonaparte published the same evening in the Moniteur a letter to Oudinot in which he congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the ink-slinging parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National Assembly was endangered and, relying on the constitution, requisitioned a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in his support, and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully refused him with the remark that he did not like ''baionnettes intelligentes'' [intellectual bayonets]. In November, 1851, when the royalists in coalition wanted to begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Quaestors’ Bill the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President of the National Assembly. One of their generals, Le Flo, had signed the bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the farsighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister, Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast – and to the acclamation of the Montagne!

Thus the party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly, when it was still only the ministry, had itself stigmatized the parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851, banishes this regime from France!

We wish it a happy journey.

== Defeat of Petty-Bourgeois Democracy ==
On May 28, 1849, the Legislative National Assembly met. On December 2, 1851, it was dispersed. This period covers the span of life of the constitutional, or parliamentary, republic.

In the first French Revolution the rule of the ''Constitutionalists'' is followed by the rule of the ''Girondists'' and the rule of the Girondists by the rule of the ''Jacobins''. Each of these parties relies on the more progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution far enough to be unable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending line.

It is the reverse with the Revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15,0] and in the June days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of the party of Order. The party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble, and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on those shoulders when one fine morning it perceives that the shoulders have transformed themselves into bayonets. Each party kicks from behind at the one driving forward, and leans over in front toward the party which presses backward. No wonder that in this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious gyrations. The revolution thus moves in a descending line. It finds itself in this state of retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.

The period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against the constitution; revolutionists who are confessedly constitutional; a National Assembly that wants to be omnipotent and always remains parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its vocation in patience and counters its present defeats by prophesying future victories; royalists who form the ''patres conscripti'' [elders] of the republic and are forced by the situation to keep the hostile royal houses they adhere to abroad, and the republic, which they hate, in France; an executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its respectability in the contempt that it calls forth; a republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, with an imperial label – alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of tranquillity, most solemn preaching of tranquillity in the name of revolution – passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world’s coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers, who in their ''laisser aller'' [letting things go] remind us less of the Day of Judgment than of the times of the Fronde [An anti-royalist movement of 1648-53] – the official collective genius of France brought to naught by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a filibuster. If any section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this. Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies.1a] The revolution itself paralyzes its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. When the “red specter,” continually conjured up and exercised by the counterrevolutionaries finally appears, it appears not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in ''red breeches''.

We have seen that the ministry which Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1848, on his Ascension Day, was a ministry of the party of Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux Ministry had outlived the republican Constituent Assembly, whose term of life it had more or less violently cut short, and found itself still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, continued to unite in his person the general command of the First Army Division and of the National Guard of Paris. Finally, the general elections had secured the party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly. Here the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe encountered a hallowed host of Legitimists, for whom many of the nation’s ballots had become transformed into admission cards to the political stage. The Bonapartist representatives of the people were too sparse to be able to form an independent parliamentary party. They appeared merely as the ''mauvaise queue'' [evil appendage] of the party of Order. Thus the party of Order was in possession of the governmental power, the army and the legislative body, in short, of the whole of the state power; it had been morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous triumph of the counterrevolution on the whole continent of Europe.

Never did a party open its campaign with greater resources or under more favorable auspices.

The shipwrecked pure republicans found that they had melted down to a clique of about fifty men in the Legislative National Assembly, the African generals Cavaignac, Lamoriciere, and Bedeau at their head. The great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne. The social-democratic party had given itself this parliamentary baptismal name. It commanded more than two hundred of the seven hundred and fifty votes of the National Assembly and was consequently at least as powerful as any one of the three factions of the party of Order taken by itself. Its numerical inferiority compared with the entire royalist coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the elections in the departments show that it had gained a considerable following among the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost all the deputies from Paris; the army had made a confession of democratic faith by the election of three noncommissioned officers; and the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, in contradistinction to all the representatives of the party of Order, had been raised to the parliamentary peerage by five departments, which had pooled their votes for him. In view of the inevitable clashes of the royalists among themselves and of the whole party of Order with Bonaparte, the Montagne thus seemed to have all the elements of success before it on May 28, 1849. A fortnight later it had lost everything, honor included.

Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: “reaction” – night, in which all cats are gray and which permits them to reel off their night watchman’s commonplaces. And to be sure, at first sight the party of Order reveals a maze of different royalist factions which not only intrigue against each other – each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction – but also all unite in common hatred of, and common onslaughts on, the “republic.” In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of the “republic.” The party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a “reaction,” directed against press, association, and the like, neither more nor less than in Prussia, and, as in Prussia, carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie, and the law courts. The Montagne, for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the “eternal rights of man” as every so-called people’s party has done, more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, disappears.

Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from each other nothing but fleur-de-lis and tricolor, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism – was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While each faction, Orleanists and Legitimists, sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to the two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses. And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital - sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

The royalists in coalition carried on their intrigues against one another in the press, in Ems, in Claremont, outside parliament. Behind the scenes they donned their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries again and once more engaged in their old tourneys. But on the public stage, in their grand performances of state4] as a great parliamentary party, they put off their respective royal houses with mere obeisances and adjourn the restoration of the monarchy in infinitum. They do their real business as the party of Order, that is, under a social, not under a political title; as representatives of the bourgeois world order, not as knights of errant princesses; as the bourgeois class against other classes, not as royalists against the republicans. And as the party of Order they exercised more unrestricted and sterner domination over the other classes of society than ever previously under the Restoration or under the July Monarchy, a domination which, in general, was possible only under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite, and thus put the rule of their class instead of the regime of a privileged faction of it on the order of the day. If they nevertheless, as the party of Order, also insulted the republic and expressed their repugnance to it, this happened not merely from royalist memories. Instinct taught them that the republic, true enough, makes their political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown, without being able to divert the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy. It was a feeling of weakness that caused them to recoil from the pure conditions of their own class rule and to yearn for the former more incomplete, more undeveloped, and precisely on that account less dangerous forms of this rule. On the other hand, every time the royalists in coalition come in conflict with the pretender who confronts them, with Bonaparte, every time they believe their parliamentary omnipotence endangered by the executive power – every time, therefore, that they must produce their political title to their rule – they come forward as republicans and not as royalists, from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that the republic divides them least, to the Legitimist Berryer, who on December 2, 1851, as a tribune swathed in a tricolored sash, harangues the people assembled before the town hall of the Tenth Arrondissement in the name of the republic. To be sure, a mocking echo calls back to him: Henry V! Henry V!

As against the coalesced bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic party. The petty bourgeois saw that they were badly rewarded after the June days of 1848, that their material interests were imperiled, and that the democratic guarantees which were to insure the effectuation of these interests were called in question by the counterrevolution. Accordingly they came closer to the workers. On the other hand, their parliamentary representation, the Montagne, thrust aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its lost popularity through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February, 1849, banquets celebrated the reconciliation. A joint program was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose social-democracy. The new Montagne, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some supernumeraries from the working class and some socialist sectarians, the same elements as the old Montagne, but numerically stronger. However, in the course of development it had changed with the class that it represented. The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.

After this analysis it is obvious that if the Montagne continually contends with the party of Order for the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final end, any more than an army which one wants to deprive of its weapons and which resists has taken the field in order to remain in possession of its own weapons.

Immediately, as soon as the National Assembly met, the party of Order provoked the Montagne. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of making an end of the democratic petty bourgeois, just as a year before it had realized the necessity of settling with the revolutionary proletariat. But the situation of the adversary was different. The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeois in the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of decoying them out of the National Assembly into the streets and causing them to smash their parliamentary power themselves, before time and circumstances could consolidate it. The Montagne rushed headlong into the trap.

The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait that was thrown. It violated Article 5 of the constitution, which forbids the French Republic to employ its military forces against the freedom of another people. In addition to this, Article 54 prohibited any declaration of war by the executive power without the assent of the National Assembly, and by its resolution of May 8 the Constituent Assembly had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers on June 11, 1849. Exasperated by the wasp stings of Thiers, he actually let himself be carried away to the point of threatening that he would defend the constitution by every means, even with arms in hand. The Montagne rose to a man and repeated this call to arms. On June 12 the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, and the Montagne left the parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the proclamation issued by a section of the Montagne declaring Bonaparte and his ministers “outside the constitution”; the street procession of the democratic National Guard, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed on encountering the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. A part of the Montagne fled abroad; another part was arraigned before the High Court at Bourges; and a parliamentary regulation subjected the remainder to the schoolmasterly surveillance of the President of the National Assembly. Paris was again declared in a state of siege and the democratic part of its National Guard dissolved. Thus the influence of the Montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in Paris were broken.

Lyon, where June 13 had given the signal for a bloody insurrection of the workers, was, along with the five surrounding departments, likewise declared in a state of siege, a condition that has continued up to the present moment.

The bulk of the Montagne had left its vanguard in the lurch, having refused to subscribe to its proclamation. The press had deserted, only two journals having dared to publish the pronunciamento. The petty bourgeois betrayed their representatives in that the National Guard either stayed away or, where they appeared, hindered the building of barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeois in that the alleged allies from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it.

Seldom had an action been announced with more noise than the impending campaign of the Montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with greater certainty or longer in advance than the inevitable victory of the democracy. Most assuredly the democrats believe in the trumpets before whose blasts the walls of Jericho fell down. And as often as they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Montagne wished to triumph in parliament it should not have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament it should not have acted in parliamentary fashion in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was meant seriously, then it was folly not to foresee that it would be given a warlike reception. If a real struggle was intended, then it was a queer idea to lay down the weapons with which it would have to be waged. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to intimidate the antagonist. And when they have run into a blind alley, when they have sufficiently compromised themselves to make it necessary to activate their threats, then this is done in an ambiguous fashion that avoids nothing so much as the means to the end and tries to find excuses for succumbing. The blaring overture that announced the contest dies away in a pusillanimous snarl as soon as the struggle has to begin, the actors cease to take themselves ''au sorieux'', and the action collapses completely, like a pricked bubble.

No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation. Since a section of the army had voted for it, the Montagne was now convinced that the army would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion which, from the standpoint of the troops, had no other meaning than that the revolutionists took the side of the Roman soldiers against the French soldiers. On the other hand, the recollections of June, 1848, were still too fresh to allow of anything but a profound aversion on the part of the proletariat toward the National Guard and a thoroughgoing mistrust of the democratic chiefs on the part of the chiefs of the secret societies. To iron out these differences, it was necessary for great common interests to be at stake. The violation of an abstract paragraph of the constitution could not provide these interests. Had not the constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the assurance of the democrats themselves? Had not the most popular journals branded it as counterrevolutionary botchwork? But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie – that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted – imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. Now if in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalized and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoiled the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.

Therefore one must not imagine the Montagne, decimated and broken though it was, and humiliated by the new parliamentary regulation, as being particularly miserable. If June 13 had removed its chiefs, it made room, on the other hand, for men of lesser caliber, whom this new position flattered. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be doubted, they were entitled now to confine their actions to outbursts of moral indignation and blustering declamation. If the party of Order affected to see embodied in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all the terrors of anarchy, they could in reality be all the more insipid and modest. They consoled themselves, however, for June 13 with the profound utterance: but if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then – then we’ll show them what we are made of! ''Nous verrons!'' [We shall see!]

So far as the Montagnards who fled abroad are concerned, it is sufficient to remark here that Ledru-Rollin, because in barely a fortnight he had succeeded in ruining irretrievably the powerful party at whose head he stood, now found himself called upon to form a French government in partibus; that to the extent that the level of the revolution sank and the official bigwigs of official France became more dwarf-like, his figure in the distance, removed from the scene of action, seemed to grow in stature; that he could figure as the republican pretender for 1852, and that he issued periodical circulars to the Wallachians and other peoples in which the despots of the Continent were threatened with the deeds of himself and his confederates. Was Proudhon altogether wrong when he cried to these gentlemen: “''Vous n’etes que des blagueurs''” ["you are nothing but windbags"]?

On June 13 the party of Order had not only broken the Montagne, it had effected the subordination of the constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. And it understood the republic thus: that the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary forms, without, as in a monarchy, encountering any barrier such as the veto power of the executive or the right to dissolve parliament. This was a parliamentary republic, as Thiers termed it. But whereas on June 13 the bourgeoisie secured its omnipotence within the house of parliament, did it not afflict parliament itself, as against the executive authority and the people, with incurable weakness by expelling its most popular part? By surrendering numerous deputies without further ado on the demand of the courts, it abolished its own parliamentary immunity. The humiliating regulations to which it subjected the Montagne exalted the President of the Republic in the same measure as it degraded the individual representatives of the people. By branding an insurrection for the protection of the constitutional charter an anarchic act aiming at the subversion of society, it precluded the possibility of its appealing to insurrection should the executive authority violate the constitution in relation to it. And by the irony of history, the general who on Bonaparte’s instructions bombarded Rome and thus provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional revolt of June 13, that very Oudinot had to be the man offered by the party of Order imploringly and unfailingly to the people as general on behalf of the constitution against Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who was lauded from the tribune of the National Assembly for the brutalities he committed in the democratic newspaper offices at the head of a gang of National Guards belonging to high finance circles – this same Vieyra had been initiated into Bonaparte’s conspiracy and he contributed substantially to depriving the National Assembly in the hour of its death of any protection by the National Guard.

June 13 had still another meaning. The Montagne had wanted to force the impeachment of Bonaparte. Its defeat was therefore a direct victory for Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The party of Order gained the victory; Bonaparte had only to cash in on it. He did so. On June 14 a proclamation could be read on the walls of Paris in which the President, reluctantly, against his will, compelled as it were by the sheer force of events, comes forth from his cloistered seclusion and, posing as misunderstood virtue, complains of the calumnies of his opponents and, while he seems to identify his person with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of order with his person. Moreover, the National Assembly had, it is true, subsequently approved the expedition against Rome, but Bonaparte had taken the initiative in the matter. After having reinstalled the High Priest Samuel in the Vatican, he could hope to enter the Tuileries as King David. He had won the priests over to his side.

The revolt of June 13 was confined, as we have seen, to a peaceful street procession. No war laurels were therefore to be won against it. Nevertheless, at a time as poor as this in heroes and events, the party of Order transformed this bloodless battle into a second Austerlitz. Platform and press praised the army as the power of order, in contrast to the popular masses representing the impotence of anarchy, and extolled Changarnier as the “bulwark of society,” a deception in which he himself finally came to believe. Surreptitiously, however, the corps that seemed doubtful were transferred from Paris, the regiments which had shown the most democratic sentiments in the elections were banished from France to Algiers; the turbulent spirits among the troops were relegated to penal detachments; and finally the isolation of the press from the barracks and of the barracks from bourgeois society was systematically carried out.

Here we have reached the decisive turning point in the history of the French National Guard. In 1830 it was decisive in the overthrow of the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe every rebellion miscarried in which the National Guard stood on the side of the troops. When in the February days of 1848 it evinced a passive attitude toward the insurrection and an equivocal one toward Louis Philippe, he gave himself up for lost and actually was lost. Thus the conviction took root that the revolution could not be victorious without the National Guard, nor the army against it. This was the superstition of the army in regard to civilian omnipotence. The June days of 1848, when the entire National Guard, with the troops of the line, put down the insurrection, had strengthened the superstition. After Bonaparte’s assumption of office, the position of the National Guard was to some extent weakened by the unconstitutional union, in the person of Changarnier, of the command of its forces with the command of the First Army Division.

Just as the command of the National Guard appeared here as an attribute of the military commander in chief, so the National Guard itself appeared as only an appendage of the troops of the line. Finally, on June 13 its power was broken, and not only by its partial disbandment, which from this time on was periodically repeated all over France, until mere fragments of it were left behind. The demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had not, to be sure, borne their arms, but had worn their uniforms against the army; precisely in this uniform, however, lay the talisman. The army convinced itself that this uniform was a piece of woolen cloth like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848, bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie had united as the National Guard with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851, the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment, Thus the bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army; the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but before it as a rebel, it had to smash it as in general it was bound to destroy all its means of defense against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute.

Meanwhile, the party of Order celebrated the reconquest of a power that seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again, freed from its restraints, in 1849, celebrated by means of invectives against the republic and the constitution, of curses on all future, present, and past revolutions, including that which its own leaders had made, and in laws by which the press was muzzled, association destroyed, and the state of siege regulated as an organic institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October, after having appointed a permanent commission for the period of its absence. During this recess the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists with Claremont, Bonaparte by means of princely tours, and the Departmental Councils in deliberations on a revision of the constitution: incidents which regularly recur in the periodic recesses of the National Assembly and which I propose to discuss only when they become events. Here it may merely be remarked, in addition, that it was impolitic for the National Assembly to disappear from the stage for considerable intervals and leave only a single, albeit a sorry, figure to be seen at the head of the republic, that of Louis Bonaparte, while to the scandal of the public the party of Order fell asunder into its royalist component parts and followed its conflicting desires for restoration. As often as the confused noise of parliament grew silent during these recesses and its body dissolved into the nation, it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was still lacking to complete the true form of this republic: to make the former’s recess permanent and replace the latter’s inscription, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, with the unambiguous words: infantry, cavalry, artillery!

== Rise of Louis Bonaparte ==
In the middle of October, 1849, the National Assembly met once more. On November 1 Bonaparte surprised it with a message in which he announced the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux Ministry and the formation of a new ministry. No one has ever sacked lackeys with less ceremony than Bonaparte his ministers. The kicks that were intended for the National Assembly were given in the meantime to Barrot & Co.

The Barrot Ministry, as we have seen, had been composed of Legitimists and Orleanists; it was a ministry of the party of Order. Bonaparte had needed it to dissolve the republican Constituent Assembly, to bring about the expedition against Rome, and to break the Democratic party. Behind this ministry he had seemingly effaced himself, surrendered governmental power into the hands of the party of Order, and donned the modest character mask that the responsible editor of a newspaper wore under Louis Philippe, the mask of the ''homme de paille'' [straw man]. He now threw off a mask which was no longer the light veil behind which he could hide his physiognomy, but an iron mask which prevented him from displaying a physiognomy of his own. He had appointed the Barrot Ministry in order to blast the republican National Assembly in the name of the party of Order; he dismissed it in order to declare his own name independent of the National Assembly of the party of Order.

Plausible pretexts for this dismissal were not lacking. The Barrot Ministry neglected even the decencies that would have let the President of the Republic appear as a power side by side with the National Assembly. During the recess of the National Assembly Bonaparte published a letter to Edgar Ney in which he seemed to disapprove of the illiberal attitude of the Pope, just as in opposition to the Constituent Assembly he had published a letter in which he commended Oudinot for the attack on the Roman republic. When the National Assembly now voted the budget for the Roman expedition, Victor Hugo, out of alleged liberalism, brought up this letter for discussion. The party of Order with scornfully incredulous outcries stifled the idea that Bonaparte's ideas could have any political importance. Not one of the ministers took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion Barrot, with his well-known hollow rhetoric, let fall from the platform words of indignation concerning the "abominable intrigues" that, according to his assertion, went on in the immediate entourage of the President. Finally, while the ministry obtained from the National Assembly a widow's pension for the Duchess of Orleans it rejected any proposal to increase the Civil List of the President. And in Bonaparte the imperial pretender was so intimately bound up with the adventurer down on his luck that the one great idea, that he was called to restore the empire, was always supplemented by the other, that it was the mission of the French people to pay his debts.

The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the first and last parliamentary ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal forms, accordingly, a decisive turning point. With it the party of Order lost, never to reconquer it, an indispensable position for the maintenance of the parliamentary regime, the lever of executive power. It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility, and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic — it is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials as far as possible, and, finally, let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power. But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents, and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple, the independent organs of the social movement, where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the vital conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise, of its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power hostile to it.

The new ministry was called the Hautpoul Ministry. Not in the sense that General Hautpoul had received the rank of Prime Minister. Rather, simultaneously with Barrot's dismissal, Bonaparte abolished this dignity, which, true enough, condemned the President of the Republic to the status of the legal nonentity of a constitutional monarch, but of a constitutional monarch without throne or crown, without scepter or sword, without freedom from responsibility, without imprescriptible possession of the highest state dignity, and worst of all, without a Civil List. The Hautpoul Ministry contained only one man of parliamentary standing, the moneylender Fould, one of the most notorious of the high financiers. To his lot fell the Ministry of Finance. Look up the quotations on the Paris Bourse and you will find that from November 1, 1849, onward the French ''fonds'' [government securities] rise and fall with the rise and fall of Bonapartist stocks. While Bonaparte had thus found his ally in the Bourse, he at the same time took possession of the police by appointing Carlier police prefect of Paris.

Only in the course of development, however, could the consequences of the change of ministers come to light. To begin with, Bonaparte had taken a step forward only to be driven backward all the more conspicuously. His brusque message was followed by the most servile declaration of allegiance to the National Assembly. As often as the ministers dared to make a diffident attempt to introduce his personal fads as legislative proposals, they themselves seemed to carry out, against their will and compelled by their position, comical commissions whose fruitlessness they were persuaded of in advance. As often as Bonaparte blurted out his intentions behind the ministers' backs and played with his “''idees napoleoniennes'',” his own ministers disavowed him from the tribune of the National Assembly. His usurpatory longings seemed to make themselves heard only in order that the malicious laughter of his opponents might not be muted. He behaved like an unrecognized genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton. Never did he enjoy the contempt of all classes in fuller measure than during this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more absolutely, never did it display more ostentatiously the insignia of domination.

I need not write here the history of its legislative activity, which is summarized during this period in two laws: in the law reestablishing the wine tax and the education law abolishing unbelief. If wine drinking was made harder for the French, they were presented all the more plentifully with the water of true life. If in the law on the wine tax the bourgeoisie declared the old, hateful French tax system to be inviolable, it sought through the education law to insure among the masses the old state of mind that put up with the tax system. One is astonished to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, these old apostles of Voltaireanism and eclectic philosophy, entrust to their hereditary enemies, the Jesuits, the superintendence of the French mind. However Orleanists and Legitimists could part company in regard to the pretenders to the throne, they understood that securing their united rule necessitated the uniting of the means of repression of two epochs, that the means of subjugation of the July Monarchy had to be supplemented and strengthened by the means of subjugation of the Restoration.

The peasants, disappointed in all their hopes, crushed more than ever by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and by the growing burden of taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to bestir themselves in the departments. They were answered by a drive against the schoolmasters, who were made subject to the clergy, by a drive against the mayors, made subject to the prefects, and by a system of espionage to which all were made subject. In Paris and the large towns reaction itself has the physiognomy of its epoch and challenges more than it strikes down. In the countryside it becomes dull, coarse, petty, tiresome, and vexatious, in a word, the gendarme. One comprehends how three years of the regime of the gendarme, consecrated by the regime of the priest, were bound to demoralize immature masses.

Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed by the party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education, and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been completely organized, as long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes likewise could not appear in its pure form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If in every stirring of life in society it saw "tranquillity" imperiled, how could it want to maintain at the head of society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, this regime that, according to the expression of one of its spokesmen, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion, how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how shall any interest, any institution, sustain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of the orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and the bistros; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?

Thus by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

In the domain of the interests of the general citizenry, the National Assembly showed itself so unproductive that, for example, the discussions on the Paris-Avignon railway, which began in the winter of 1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on December 2, 1851. Where it did not repress or pursue a reactionary course it was stricken with incurable barrenness.

While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws in the spirit of the party of Order, and partly even outdid that party's harshness in their execution and administration, he, on the other hand, sought by childishly silly proposals to win popularity, to bring out his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from making its hidden treasures available to the French people. Such was the proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the noncommissioned officers. Such was the proposal of an honor-system loan bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs Bonaparte knew how to set in action. Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.

The National Assembly flared up repeatedly over these unmistakable attempts to gain popularity at its expense, over the growing danger that this adventurer, whom his debts spurred on and no established reputation held back, would venture a desperate coup. The discord between the party of Order and the President had taken on a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him back repentant into its arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850. These elections were held for the purpose of filling the representatives' seats that after June 13 had been rendered vacant by imprisonment or exile. Paris elected only social-democratic candidates. It even concentrated most of the votes on an insurgent of June, 1848, on De Flotte. Thus did the Parisian petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the proletariat, revenge itself for its defeat on June 13, 1849. It seemed to have disappeared from the battlefield at the moment of danger only to reappear there on a more propitious occasion with more numerous fighting forces and with a bolder battle cry. One circumstance seemed to heighten the peril of this election victory. The army voted in Paris for the June insurgent against La Hitte, a minister of Bonaparte's, and in the departments largely for the Montagnards, who here too, though indeed not so decisively as in Paris, maintained the ascendancy over their adversaries.

Bonaparte saw himself suddenly confronted with revolution once more. As on January 29, 1849, as on June 13, 1849, so on March 10, 1850, he disappeared behind the party of Order. He made obeisance, he pusillanimously begged pardon, he offered to appoint any ministry it pleased at the behest of the parliamentary majority, he even implored the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers, the Broglies, the Moles, in brief, the so-called burgraves, to take the helm of state themselves. The party of Order proved unable to take advantage of this opportunity that would never return. Instead of boldly possessing itself of the power offered, it did not even compel Bonaparte to reinstate the ministry dismissed on November 1; it contented itself with humiliating him by its forgiveness and adjoining M. Baroche to the Hautpoul Ministry. As public prosecutor this Baroche had stormed and raged before the High Court at Bourges, the first time against the revolutionists of May 15, the second time against the democrats of June 13, both times because of an attempt on the life of the National Assembly. None of Bonaparte's ministers subsequently contributed more to the degradation of the National Assembly, and after December 2, 1851, we meet him once more as the comfortably installed and highly paid vice president of the Senate. He had spat in the revolutionists' soup in order that Bonaparte might eat it up.

The social-democratic party, for its part, seemed only to look for pretexts to put its own victory once again in doubt and to blunt its point. Vidal, one of the newly elected representatives of Paris, had been elected simultaneously in Strasbourg. He was induced to decline the election for Paris and accept it for Strasbourg. And so, instead of making its victory at the polls conclusive and thereby compelling the party of Order to contest it in parliament at once, instead of thus forcing the adversary to fight at the moment of popular enthusiasm and favorable mood in the army, the democratic party wearied Paris during the months of March and April with a new election campaign, let the aroused popular passions wear themselves out in this repeated provisional election game, let the revolutionary energy satiate itself with constitutional successes, dissipate itself in petty intrigues, hollow declamations, and sham movements, let the bourgeoisie rally and make its preparations, and, lastly, weakened the significance of the March elections by a sentimental commentary in the April by-election, the election of Eugene Sue. In a word, it made an April Fool of March 10.

The parliamentary majority understood the weakness of its antagonist. Its seventeen burgraves — for Bonaparte had left to it the direction of and responsibility for the attack — drew up a new electoral law, the introduction of which was entrusted to M. Faucher, who solicited this honor for himself. On May 8 he introduced the law by which universal suffrage was to be abolished, a residence of three years in the locality of the election to be imposed as a condition on the electors, and finally, the proof of this residence made dependent in the case of workers on a certificate from their employers.

Just as the democrats had, in revolutionary fashion, raged and agitated during the constitutional election contest, so now, when it was requisite to prove the serious nature of that victory arms in hand, did they in constitutional fashion preach order, ''calme majestueux'', lawful action, that is to say, blind subjection to the will of the counterrevolution, which imposed itself as the law. During the debate the "Mountain" put the party of Order to shame by asserting, against the latter's revolutionary passion, the dispassionate attitude of the philistine who keeps within the law, and by felling that party to earth with the fearful reproach that it was proceeding in a revolutionary manner. Even the newly elected deputies were at pains to prove by their decorous and discreet action what a misconception it was to decry them as anarchists and construe their election as a victory for revolution. On May 31 the new electoral law went through. The Montagne contented itself with smuggling a protest into the President's pocket. The electoral law was followed by a new press law, by which the revolutionary newspaper press was entirely suppressed.04] It had deserved its fate. ''The National'' and ''La Presse'', two bourgeois organs, were left after this deluge as the most advanced outposts of the revolution.

We have seen how during March and April the democratic leaders had done everything to embroil the people of Paris in a sham fight, how after May 8 they did everything to restrain them from a real fight. In addition to this, we must not forget that the year 1850 was one of the most splendid years of industrial and commercial prosperity, and the Paris proletariat was therefore fully employed. But the election law of May 31, 1850, excluded it from any participation in political power. It cut the proletariat off from the very arena of the struggle. It threw the workers back into the position of pariahs which they had occupied before the February Revolution. By letting themselves be led by the democrats in the face of such an event and forgetting the revolutionary interests of their class for momentary case and comfort, they renounced the honor of being a conquering power, surrendered to their fate, proved that the defeat of June, 1848, had put them out of the fight for years and that the historical process would for the present again have to go on over their heads. As for the petty-bourgeois democracy, which on June 13 had cried, "But if once universal suffrage is attacked, then we'll show them," it now consoled itself with the contention that the counterrevolutionary blow which had struck it was no blow and the law of May 31 no law. On the second Sunday in May, 1852, every Frenchman would appear at the polling place with ballot in one hand and sword in the other. With this prophecy it rested content. Lastly, the army was disciplined by its superior officers for the elections of March and April, 1850, just as it had been disciplined for those of May 28, 1849. This time, however, it said decidedly: "The revolution shall not dupe us a third time."

The law of May 31, 1850, was the coup d'etat of the bourgeoisie. All its conquests over the revolution hitherto had only a provisional character and were endangered as soon as the existing National Assembly retired from the stage. They depended on the hazards of a new general election, and the history of elections since 1848 irrefutably proved that the bourgeoisie's moral sway over the mass of the people was lost in the same measure as its actual domination developed. On March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the domination of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage. The law of May 31 was therefore one of the necessities of the class struggle. On the other hand, the constitution required a minimum of two million votes to make an election of the President of the Republic valid. If none of the candidates for the presidency received this minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the President from among the three candidates to whom the largest number of votes would fall. At the time when the Constituent Assembly made this law, ten million electors were registered on the rolls of voters. In its view, therefore, a fifth of the people entitled to vote was sufficient to make the presidential election valid. The law of May 31 struck at least three million votes off the electoral rolls, reduced the number of people entitled to vote to seven million, and nevertheless retained the legal minimum of two million for the presidential election. It therefore raised the legal minimum from a fifth to nearly a third of the effective votes; that is, it did everything to smuggle the election of the President out of the hands of the people and into the hands of the National Assembly. Thus through the electoral law of May 31 the party of Order seemed to have made its rule doubly secure, by surrendering the election of the National Assembly and that of the President of the Republic to the stationary section of society.

== National Assembly vs. Bonaparte ==
As soon as the revolutionary crisis had been weathered and universal suffrage abolished, the struggle between the National Assembly and Bonaparte broke out again.

The constitution had fixed Bonaparte's salary at 600,000 francs. Barely six months after his installation he succeeded in increasing this sum to twice as much, for Odilon Barrot wrung from the Constituent National Assembly an extra allowance of 600,000 francs a year for so-called representation moneys. After June 13 Bonaparte had caused similar requests to be voiced, this time without eliciting response from Barrot. Now, after May 31, he at once availed himself of the favorable moment and had his ministers propose a Civil List of three millions in the National Assembly. A long life of adventurous vagabondage had endowed him with the most developed antennae for feeling out the weak moments when he might squeeze money from his bourgeois. He practiced ''chantage'' [blackmail] regularly. The National Assembly had violated the sovereignty of the people with his assistance and his cognizance. He threatened to denounce its crime to the tribunal of the people unless it loosened its purse strings and purchased his silence with three million a year. It had robbed three million Frenchmen of their franchise. He demanded, for every Frenchman out of circulation, a franc in circulation, precisely three million francs. He, the elect of six millions, claimed damages for the votes which he said he had retrospectively been cheated out of. The Commission of the National Assembly refused the importunate man. The Bonapartist press threatened. Could the National Assembly break with the President of the Republic at a moment when in principle it had definitely broken with the mass of the nation? It rejected the annual Civil List, it is true, but it granted, for this once, an extra allowance of 2,160,000 francs. It thus rendered itself guilty of the double weakness of granting the money and of showing at the same time by its vexation that it granted it unwillingly. We shall see later for what purpose Bonaparte needed the money. After this vexatious aftermath, which followed on the heels of the abolition of universal suffrage and in which Bonaparte exchanged his humble attitude during the crisis of March and April for challenging impudence to the usurpatory parliament, the National Assembly adjourned for three months, from August 11 to November 11. In its place it left behind a Permanent Commission of twenty-eight members, which contained no Bonapartists but did contain some moderate republicans. The Permanent Commission of 1849 had included only Order men and Bonapartists. But at that time the party of Order declared itself permanently against the revolution. This time the parliamentary republic declared itself permanently against the President. After the law of May 31, this was the only rival that still confronted the party of Order.

When the National Assembly met once more in November, 1850, it seemed that, instead of the petty skirmishes it had hitherto had with the President, a great and ruthless struggle, a life-and-death struggle between the two powers, had become inevitable.

As in 1849 so during this year's parliamentary recess — the party of Order had broken up into its separate factions, each occupied with its own restoration intrigues, which had obtained fresh nutriment through the death of Louis Philippe. The Legitimist king, Henry V, had even nominated a formal ministry which resided in Paris and in which members of the Permanent Commission held seats. Bonaparte, in his turn, was therefore entitled to make tours of the French departments, and according to the disposition of the town he favored with his presence, now more or less covertly, now more or less overtly, to divulge his own restoration plans and canvass votes for himself. On these processions, which the great official Moniteur and the little private Moniteurs of Bonaparte naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he was constantly accompanied by persons affiliated with the Society of December 10. This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, ''maquereaux'' [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call ''la bohème''; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself ''chief of the lumpenproletariat'', who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte ''sans phrase''. An old, crafty ''roué'', he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg, where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army. In his Society of December 10 he assembles ten thousand rascals who are to play the part of the people as Nick Bottom [A character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. - Ed.] that of the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history. What the national ''ateliers'' were for the socialist workers, what the ''Gardes mobile'' were for the bourgeois republicans, the Society of December 10 was for Bonaparte, the party fighting force peculiar to him. On his journeys the detachments of this society packing the railways had to improvise a public for him, stage popular enthusiasm, roar ''Vive l'Empereur'', insult and thrash republicans, under police protection, of course. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the advance guard, forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10 belonged to him, it was ''his'' work, his very own idea. Whatever else he appropriates is put into his hands by the force of circumstances; whatever else he does, the circumstances do for him or he is content to copy from the deeds of others. But Bonaparte with official phrases about order, religion, family, and property in public, before the citizens, and with the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs08a], the society of disorder, prostitution, and theft, behind him — that is Bonaparte himself as the original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history.

Now it had happened by way of exception that people's representatives belonging to the party of Order came under the cudgels of the Decembrists. Still more. Yon, the police commissioner assigned to the National Assembly and charged with watching over its safety, acting on the deposition of a certain Allais, advised the Permanent Commission that a section of the Decembrists had decided to assassinate General Changarnier and Dupin, the President of the National Assembly, and had already designated the individuals who were to perpetrate the deed. One comprehends the terror of M. Dupin. A parliamentary inquiry into the Society of December 10 — that is, the profanation of the Bonapartist secret world — seemed inevitable. Just before the meeting of the National Assembly Bonaparte providently disbanded his society, naturally only on paper, for in a detailed memoir at the end of 1851 Police Prefect Carlier still sought in vain to move him to really break up the Decembrists.

The Society of December 10 was to remain the private army of Bonaparte until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10. Bonaparte made the first attempt at this shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly, and precisely with the money just wrested from it. As a fatalist, he lives in the conviction that there are certain higher powers which man, and the soldier in particular, cannot withstand. Among these powers he counts, first and foremost, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage. Accordingly, to begin with, he treats officers and non-commissioned officers in his Elysée apartments to cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage. On October 3 he repeats this maneuver with the mass of the troops at the St. Maur review, and on October 10 the same maneuver on a still larger scale at the Satory army parade. The uncle remembered the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, the nephew the triumphal marches of Bacchus in the same land. Alexander was a demigod, to be sure, but Bacchus was a god and moreover the tutelary deity of the Society of December 10.

After the review of October 3, the Permanent Commission summoned War Minister Hautpoul. He promised that these breaches of discipline would not recur. We know how on October 10 Bonaparte kept Hautpoul's word. As commander in chief of the Paris army, Changarnier had commanded at both reviews. At once a member of the Permanent Commission, chief of the National Guard, the "savior" of January 29 and June 13, the "bulwark of society," the candidate of the party of Order for presidential honors, the suspected monk of two monarchies, he had hitherto never acknowledged himself as the subordinate of the War Minister, had always openly derided the republican constitution, and had pursued Bonaparte with an ambiguous lordly protection. Now he was consumed with zeal for discipline against the War Minister and for the constitution against Bonaparte. While on October 10 a section of the cavalry raised the shout: "''Vive Napoléon! Vivent les saucissons!''" [Hurrah for Napoléon! Hurrah for the sausages!] Changarnier arranged that at least the infantry marching past under the command of his friend Neumayer should preserve an icy silence. As a punishment, the War Minister relieved General Neumayer of his post in Paris at Bonaparte's instigation, on the pretext of appointing him commanding general of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth divisions. Neumayer refused this exchange of posts and so had to resign. Changarnier, for his part, published an order of the day on November 2 in which he forbade the troops to indulge in political outcries or demonstrations of any kind while under arms. The Elysee newspapers attacked Changarnier; the papers of the party of Order attacked Bonaparte; the Permanent Commission held repeated secret sessions in which it was repeatedly proposed to declare the country in danger; the army seemed divided into two hostile camps, with two hostile general staffs, one in the Elysée, where Bonaparte resided, the other in the Tuileries, the quarters of Changarnier. It seemed that only the meeting of the National Assembly was needed to give the signal for battle. The French public judged this friction between Bonaparte and Changarnier like the English journalist who characterized it in these words:

"The political housemaids of France are sweeping away the glowing lava of the revolution with old brooms and wrangle with one another while they do their work."

Meanwhile, Bonaparte hastened to remove the War Minister Hautpoul, to pack him off in all haste to Algiers, and to appoint General Schramm War Minister in his place. On November 12 he sent to the National Assembly a message of American prolixity, overloaded with detail, redolent of order, desirous of reconciliation, constitutionally acquiescent, treating of all and sundry, but not of the ''questions brûlantes'' [burning questions] of the moment. As if in passing, he made the remark that according to the express provisions of the constitution the President alone could dispose of the army. The message closed with the following words of great solemnity:

"''Above all things, France demands tranquillity.... But bound by an oath, I shall keep within the narrow limits that it has set for me....'' As far as I am concerned, elected by the people and owing my power to it alone, I shall always bow to its lawfully expressed will. Should you resolve at this session on a revision of the constitution, a Constituent Assembly will regulate the position of the executive power. If not, then the people will solemnly pronounce its decision in 1852. But whatever the solutions of the future may be, let us come to an understanding, so that passion, surprise, or violence may never decide the destiny of a great nation.... What occupies my attention, above all, is not who will rule France in 1852, but how to employ the time which remains at my disposal so that the intervening period may pass by without agitation or disturbance. I have opened my heart to you with sincerity; you will answer my frankness with your trust, my good endeavors with your cooperation, and God will do the rest."

The respectable, hypocritically moderate, virtuously commonplace language of the bourgeoisie reveals its deepest meaning in the mouth of the autocrat of the Society of December 10 and the picnic hero of St. Maur and Satory.

The burgraves of the party of Order did not delude themselves for a moment concerning the trust that this opening of the heart deserved. About oaths they had long been blasé they numbered in their midst veterans and virtuosos of political perjury. Nor had they failed to hear the passage about the army. They observed with annoyance that in its discursive enumeration of lately enacted laws the message passed over the most important law, the electoral law, in studied silence, and moreover, in the event of there being no revision of the constitution, left the election of the President in 1852 to the people. The electoral law was the lead ball chained to the feet of the party of Order, which prevented it from walking and so much the more from storming forward! Moreover, by the official disbandment of the Society of December 10 and the dismissal of War Minister Hautpoul, Bonaparte had with his own hand sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the country. He had blunted the edge of the expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to avoid, to mitigate, to gloss over any decisive conflict with the executive power. For fear of losing their conquests over the revolution, they allowed their rival to carry off the fruits thereof. "Above all things, France demands tranquillity." This was what the party of Order had cried to the revolution since February 848], this was what Bonaparte's message cried to the party of Order. "Above all things, France demands tranquillity." Bonaparte committed acts that aimed at usurpation, but the party of Order committed "unrest" if it raised a row about these acts and construed them hypochondriacally. The sausages of Satory were quiet as mice when no one spoke of them. "Above all things, France demands tranquillity." Bonaparte demanded, therefore, that he be left in peace to do as he liked and the parliamentary party was paralyzed by a double fear, the fear of again evoking revolutionary unrest and the fear of itself appearing as the instigator of unrest in the eyes of its own class, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, since France demanded tranquillity above all things, the party of Order dared not answer "war" after Bonaparte had talked "peace" in his message. The public, which had anticipated scenes of great scandal at the opening of the National Assembly, was cheated of its expectations. The opposition deputies, who demanded the submission of the Permanent Commission's minutes on the October events, were out-voted by the majority. On principle, all debates that might cause excitement were eschewed. The proceedings of the National Assembly during November and December, 1850, were without interest.

At last, toward the end of December, guerrilla warfare began over a number of prerogatives of parliament. The movement got bogged down in petty squabbles about the prerogatives of the two powers, since the bourgeoisie had done away with the class struggle for the moment by abolishing universal suffrage.

A judgment for debt had been obtained from the court against Mauguin, one of the people's representatives. In answer to the inquiry of the president of the court, the Minister of Justice, Rouher, declared that a ''capias'' should be issued against the debtor without further ado. Mauguin was thus thrown into debtors' prison. The National Assembly flared up when it learned of the assault. Not only did it order his immediate release, but it even had him fetched forcibly from Clichy the same evening, by its clerk. In order, however, to confirm its faith in the sanctity of private property and with the idea at the back of its mind of opening, in case of need, a place of safekeeping for Montagnards who had become troublesome, it declared imprisonment of people's representatives for debt permissible when its consent had been previously obtained. It forgot to decree that the President might also be locked up for debt. It destroyed the last semblance of the immunity that enveloped the members of its own body.

It will be remembered that, acting on the information given by a certain Allais, Police Commissioner Yon had denounced a section of the Decembrists for planning the murders of Dupin and Changarnier. In reference to this, at the very first session the quaestors made the proposal that parliament should form a police force of its own, paid out of the private budget of the National Assembly and absolutely independent of the police prefect. The Minister of the Interior, Baroche, protested against this invasion of his domain. A miserable compromise on this matter was concluded, according to which, true, the police commissioner of the Assembly was to be paid out of its private budget and to be appointed and dismissed by its quaestors, but only after previous agreement with the Minister of the Interior. Meanwhile the government had started criminal proceedings against Alais, and here it was easy to represent his information as a hoax and through the mouth of the public prosecutor to cast ridicule upon Dupin, Changarnier, Yon, and the whole National Assembly. Thereupon, on December 29, Minister Baroche writes a letter to Dupin in which he demands Yon's dismissal. The bureau of the Assembly, alarmed by its violence in the Mauguin affair and accustomed when it has ventured a blow at the executive power to receive two blows from it in return, does not sanction this decision. It dismisses Yon as a reward for his official zeal and robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative indispensable against a man who does not decide by night in order to execute by day, but decides by day and executes by night.

We have seen how on great and striking occasions during the months of November and December the National Assembly avoided or quashed the struggle with the executive power. Now we see it compelled to take up the struggle on the pettiest occasions. In the Mauguin affair it confirms the principle of imprisoning people's representatives for debt, but reserves the right to have it applied only to representatives obnoxious to itself and wrangles over this infamous privilege with the Minister of Justice. Instead of availing itself of the alleged murder plot to decree an inquiry into the Society of December 10 and irredeemably unmasking Bonaparte before France and Europe in his true character of chief of the Paris lumpen proletariat, it lets the conflict be degraded to a point where the only issue between it and the Minister of the Interior is which of them has the authority to appoint and dismiss a police commissioner. Thus during the whole of this period we see the party of Order compelled by its equivocal position to dissipate and disintegrate its struggle with the executive power in petty jurisdictional squabbles, pettifoggery, legalistic hairsplitting, and delimitational disputes, and to make the most ridiculous matters of form the substance of its activity. It does not dare take up the conflict at the moment when this has significance from the standpoint of principle, when the executive power has really exposed itself and the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. By so doing it would give the nation its marching orders, and it fears nothing more than that the nation should move. On such occasions it accordingly rejects the motions of the Montagne and proceeds to the order of the day. The question at issue in its large aspects having thus been dropped, the executive power calmly waits for the time when it can again take up the same question on petty and insignificant occasions, when this is, so to speak, of only local parliamentary interest. Then the repressed rage of the party of Order breaks out, then it tears the curtain away from the coulisses, then it denounces the President, then it declares the republic in danger, but then, also, its fervor appears absurd and the occasion for the struggle seems a hypocritical pretext or altogether not worth fighting about. The parliamentary storm becomes a storm in a teacup, the fight becomes an intrigue, the conflict a scandal. While the revolutionary classes gloat with malicious joy over the humiliation of the National Assembly, for they are just as enthusiastic about the parliamentary prerogatives of this Assembly as the latter is about the public liberties, the bourgeoisie outside parliament does not understand how the bourgeoisie inside parliament can waste time over such petty squabbles and imperil tranquillity by such pitiful rivalries with the President. It becomes confused by a strategy that makes peace at the moment when all the world is expecting battles, and attacks at the moment when all the world believes peace has been made.

On December 20 Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior concerning the Gold Bars Lottery. This lottery was a "daughter of Elysium." Bonaparte with his faithful followers had brought her into the world and Police Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official protection, although French law forbids all lotteries except raffles for charitable purposes. Seven million lottery tickets at a franc-a-piece, the profits ostensibly to be devoted to shipping Parisian vagabonds to California. On the one hand, golden dreams were to supplant the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat, the seductive prospect of the first prize the doctrinaire right to work. Naturally the Paris workers did not recognize in the glitter of the California gold bars the inconspicuous francs that were enticed out of their pockets. In the main, however, the matter was nothing short of a downright swindle. The vagabonds who wanted to open California gold mines without troubling to leave Paris were Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden Round Table. The three millions voted by the National Assembly had been squandered in riotous living; in one way or another coffers had to be replenished. In vain had Bonaparte opened a national subscription for the building of so-called ''cites ouvrieres'' [workers' cities], and headed the list himself with a considerable sum. The hard-hearted bourgeois waited mistrustfully for him to pay up his share, and since this naturally did not ensue, the speculation in socialist castles in the air immediately fell to the ground. The gold bars proved a better draw. Bonaparte & Co. were not content to pocket part of the excess of the seven millions over the bars to be allotted in prizes; they manufactured false lottery tickets; they issued ten, fifteen, and even twenty tickets with the same number — a financial operation in the spirit of the Society of December 10! Here the National Assembly was confronted not with the fictitious President of the Republic but with Bonaparte in the flesh. Here it could catch him in the act, in conflict not with the constitution but with the ''Code penal''. If after Duprat's interpellation it proceeded to the order of the day, this did not happen merely because Girardin's motion that it should declare itself "satisfied" reminded the party of Order of its own systematic corruption. The bourgeois, and above all the bourgeois inflated into a statesman, supplements his practical meanness by theoretical extravagance. As a statesman he becomes, like the state power that confronts him, a higher being that can be fought only in a higher, consecrated fashion.

Bonaparte, who precisely because he was a bohemian, a princely lumpen proletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct the struggle meanly, now saw, after the Assembly guided him with its own hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the Society of December 10, and finally the Code penal, that the moment had come when he could pass from an apparent defensive to the offensive. The minor defeats meanwhile sustained by the Minister of Justice, the Minister of War, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of Finance, through which the National Assembly signified its snarling displeasure, troubled him little. He not only prevented the ministers from resigning and thus recognizing the sovereignty of parliament over the executive power, but could now consummate what he had begun during the recess of the National Assembly: the severance of the military power from parliament, ''the removal of Changarnier''.

An Elysée paper published an order of the day alleged to have been addressed during the month of May to the First Army Division, and therefore proceeding from Changarnier, in which the officers were urged, in the event of an insurrection, to give no quarter to the traitors in their own ranks, but to shoot them immediately, and to refuse troops to the National Assembly if it should requisition them. On January 3, 1851, the cabinet was interpellated concerning this order of the day. For the investigation of this matter it requests a breathing space, first of three months, then of a week, finally of only twenty-four hours. The Assembly insists on an immediate explanation. Changarnier rises and declares that there never was such an order of the day. He adds that he will always hasten to comply with the demands of the National Assembly and that in case of a clash it can count on him. It receives his declaration with indescribable applause and passes a vote of confidence in him. It abdicates, it decrees its own impotence and the omnipotence of the army by placing itself under the private protection of a general; but the general deceives himself when he puts at its command against Bonaparte a power that he holds only as a fief from the same Bonaparte, and when, in his turn, he expects to be protected by this parliament, his own protègé in need of protection. Changarnier, however, believes in the mysterious power with which the bourgeoisie has endowed him since January 29, 1849. He considers himself the third power, existing side by side with both the other state powers. He shares the fate of the rest of this epoch's heroes, or rather saints, whose greatness consists precisely in the biased great opinion of them that their party creates in its own interests and who shrink to everyday figures as soon as circumstances call on them to perform miracles. Unbelief is, in general, the mortal enemy of these reputed heroes who are really saints. Hence their majestically moral indignation at the dearth of enthusiasm displayed by wits and scoffers.

That same evening the ministers were summoned to the Elysée. Bonaparte insists on the dismissal of Changarnier; five ministers refuse to sign; the Moniteur announces a ministerial crisis, and the press of the party of Order threatens to form a parliamentary army under Changarnier's command. The party of Order had constitutional authority to take this step. It merely had to appoint Changarnier president of the National Assembly and requisition any number of troops it pleased for its protection. It could do so all the more safely as Changarnier still actually stood at the head of the army and the Paris National Guard and was only waiting to be requisitioned together with the army. The Bonapartist press did not as yet even dare to question the right of the National Assembly to requisition troops directly, a legal scruple that in the given circumstances did not look promising. That the army would have obeyed the order of the National Assembly is probable when one bears in mind that Bonaparte had to search all Paris for eight days in order, finally, to find two generals — Baraguay d'Hilliers and Saint-Jean d'Angely — who declared themselves ready to countersign Changarnier's dismissal. That the party of Order, however, would have found in its own ranks and in parliament the necessary number of votes for such a resolution is more than doubtful, when one considers that eight days later two hundred and eighty-six votes detached themselves from the party and that in December, 1851, at the last hour of decision, the Montagne still rejected a similar proposal. Nevertheless, the burgraves might, perhaps, still have succeeded in spurring the mass of their party to a heroism that consisted in feeling themselves secure behind a forest of bayonets and accepting the services of an army that had deserted to their camp. Instead of this, on the evening of January 6, Messrs. the Burgraves betook themselves to the Elysée to make Bonaparte desist from dismissing Changarnier by using statesmanlike phrases and urging considerations of state. Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as master of the situation. On January 12, Bonaparte, assured by this step, appoints a new ministry in which the leaders of the old ministry, Fould and Baroche, remain. Saint-Jean D'Angely becomes War Minister, the Moniteur publishes the decree dismissing Changarnier, and his command is divided between Baraguay d'Hilliers, who receives the First Army Division, and Perrot, who receives the National Guard. The bulwark of society has been discharged, and while this does not cause any tiles to fall from the roofs, quotations on the Bourse are, on the other hand, going up.

By repulsing the army, which places itself in the person of Changarnier at its disposal, and so surrendering the army irrevocably to the President, the party of Order declares that the bourgeoisie has forfeited its vocation to rule. A parliamentary ministry no longer existed. Having now indeed lost its grip on the army and the National Guard, what forcible means remained to it with which simultaneously to maintain the usurped authority of parliament over the people and its constitutional authority against the President? None. Only the appeal to impotent principles remained to it now, to principles that it had itself always interpreted merely as general rules, which one prescribes for others in order to be able to move all the more freely oneself. The dismissal of Changarnier and the falling of the military power into Bonaparte's hands closes the first part of the period we are considering, the period of struggle between the party of Order and the executive power. War between the two powers has now been openly declared, is openly waged, but only after the party of Order has lost both arms and soldiers. Without the ministry, without the army, without the people, without public opinion, after its electoral law of May 31 no longer the representative of the sovereign nation, sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything, the National Assembly had undergone a gradual transformation into an ''ancient French parliament'' that has to leave action to the government and content itself with growling remonstrances ''post festum'' [belatedly].

The party of Order receives the new ministry with a storm of indignation. General Bedeau recalls to mind the mildness of the Permanent Commission during the recess, and the excessive consideration it showed by waiving the publication of its minutes. The Minister of the Interior himself now insists on the publication of these minutes, which by this time have naturally become as dull as ditch water, disclose no fresh facts, and have not the slightest effect on the blasé public. Upon Remusat's proposal the National Assembly retires into its office and appoints a "Committee for Extraordinary Measures." Paris departs the less from the rut of its everyday routine because at this moment trade is prosperous, factories are busy, corn prices low, foodstuffs overflowing, and the savings banks receiving fresh deposits daily. The "extraordinary measures" that parliament has announced with so much noise fizzle out on January 18 in a no-confidence vote against the ministry without General Changarnier ever being mentioned. The party of Order was forced to frame its motion in this way to secure the votes of the republicans, since of all the ministry's measures, Changarnier's dismissal was precisely the only one the republicans approved of, while the party of Order was in fact not in a position to Censure the other ministerial acts, which it had itself dictated.

The no-confidence vote of January 18 was passed by four hundred and fifteen votes to two hundred and eighty-six. Thus, it was carried only by a coalition of the extreme Legitimists and Orleanists with the pure republicans and the Montagne. Thus it proved that the party of Order had lost in conflicts with Bonaparte not only the ministry, not only the army, but also its independent parliamentary majority; that a squad of representatives had deserted its camp, out of fanaticism for conciliation, out of fear of the struggle, out of lassitude, out of family regard for the state salaries so near and dear to them, out of speculation about ministerial posts becoming vacant (Odilon Barrot), out of sheer egoism, which makes the ordinary bourgeois always inclined to sacrifice the general interest of his class for this or that private motive. From the first, the Bonapartist representatives adhered to the party of Order only in the struggle against revolution. The leader of the Catholic party, Montalembert, had already at that time thrown his influence into the Bonapartist scale, since he despaired of the parliamentary party's prospects of life. Lastly, the leaders of this party, Thiers and Berryer, the Orleanist and the Legitimist, were compelled openly to proclaim themselves republicans, to confess that their hearts were royalist but their heads republican, that the parliamentary republic was the sole possible form for the rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus they were compelled, before the eyes of the bourgeois class itself, to stigmatize the restoration plans, which they continued indefatigably to pursue behind parliament's back, as an intrigue as dangerous as it was brainless.

The no-confidence vote of January 18 hit the ministers and not the President. But it was not the ministry, it was the President who had dismissed Changarnier. Should the party of Order impeach Bonaparte himself? Because of his restoration desires? The latter merely supplemented their own. Because of his conspiracy in connection with the military reviews and the Society of December 10? They had buried these themes long since under routine orders of the day. Because of the dismissal of the hero of January 29 and June 13, the man who in May, 1850, threatened to set fire to all four corners of Paris in the event of a rising? Their allies of the Montagne and Cavaignac did not even allow them to raise the fallen bulwark of society by means of an official attestation of sympathy. They themselves could not deny the President the constitutional authority to dismiss a general. They only raged because he made an unparliamentary use of his constitutional right. Had they not continually made an unconstitutional use of their parliamentary prerogative, particularly in regard to the abolition of universal suffrage? They were therefore reduced to moving within strictly parliamentary limits. And it took that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, ''parliamentary cretinism'', which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world — it took this parliamentary cretinism for those who had destroyed all the conditions of parliamentary power with their own hands, and were bound to destroy them in their struggle with the other classes, still to regard their parliamentary victories as victories and to believe they hit the President by striking at his ministers. They merely gave him the opportunity to humiliate the National Assembly afresh in the eyes of the nation. On January 20 the Moniteur announced that the resignation of the entire ministry had been accepted. On the pretext that no parliamentary party any longer had a majority — as the vote of January 18, this fruit of the coalition between Montagne and royalists, proved — and pending the formation of a new ministry, of which not one member was an Assembly representative, all being absolutely unknown and insignificant individuals; a ministry of mere clerks and copyists. The party of Order could now work to exhaustion playing with these marionettes; the executive power no longer thought it worth while to be seriously represented in the National Assembly. The more his ministers were pure dummies, the more obviously Bonaparte concentrated the whole executive power in his own person and the more scope he had to exploit it for his own ends.

In coalition with the Montagne, the party of Order revenged itself by rejecting the grant to the President of 1,800,000 francs which the chief of the Society of December 10 had compelled his ministerial clerks to propose. This time a majority of only a hundred and two votes decided the matter; thus twenty-seven fresh votes had fallen away since January 18; the dissolution of the party of Order was progressing. At the same time, so there might not for a moment be any mistake about the meaning of its coalition with the Montagne, it scorned even to consider a proposal signed by a hundred and eighty-nine members of the Montagne calling for a general amnesty of political offenders. It sufficed for the Minister of the Interior, a certain Vaisse, to declare that the tranquillity was only apparent, that in secret great agitation prevailed, that in secret ubiquitous societies were being organized, the democratic papers were preparing to come out again, the reports from the departments were unfavorable, the Geneva refugees were directing a conspiracy spreading by way of Lyon all over the South of France, France was on the verge of an industrial and commercial crisis, the manufacturers of Roubaix had reduced working hours, the prisoners of Belle Isle were in revolt — it sufficed for even a mere Vaisse to conjure up the red specter and the party of Order rejected without discussion a motion that would certainly have won the National Assembly immense popularity and thrown Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of letting itself be intimidated by the executive power with the prospect of fresh disturbances, it ought rather to have allowed the class struggle a little elbow room, so as to keep the executive power dependent on it. But it did not feel equal to the task of playing with fire.

Meanwhile the so-called transition ministry continued to vegetate until the middle of April. Bonaparte wearied and befooled the National Assembly with continual new ministerial combinations. Now he seemed to want to form a republican ministry with Lamartine and Billault, now a parliamentary one with the inevitable Odilon Barrot, whose name is never missing when a dupe is necessary, then a Legitimist ministry with Vatimesnil and Benoit d'Azy, and then again an Orleanist one with Maleville. While he thus kept the different factions of the party of Order in tension against one another, and alarmed them as a whole by the prospect of a republican ministry and the consequent inevitable restoration of universal suffrage, he at the same time engendered in the bourgeoisie the conviction that his honest efforts to form a parliamentary ministry were being frustrated by the irreconcilability of the royalist factions. The bourgeoisie, however, cried out all the louder for a "strong government"; it found it all the more unpardonable to leave France "without administration," the more a general commercial crisis seemed now to be approaching, and won recruits for socialism in the towns just as the ruinously low price of corn did in the countryside. Trade daily became slacker, the number of unemployed increased perceptibly; ten thousand workers, at least, were breadless in Paris, innumerable factories stood idle in Rouen, Mulhouse, Lyon, Roubaix, Tourcoing, St. Ettienne, Elbeuf, etc. Under these circumstances Bonaparte could venture, on April 11, to restore the ministry of January 18: Messrs. Rouher, Fould, Baroche, etc., reinforced by M. Leon Faucher, whom the Constituent Assembly during its last days had, with the exception of five votes cast by ministers, unanimously stigmatized by a vote of no confidence for sending out false telegrams. The National Assembly had therefore gained a victory over the ministry on January 18, had struggled with Bonaparte for three months, only to have Fould and Baroche on April 11 admit the puritan Faucher as a third party into their ministerial alliance.

In November, 1849, Bonaparte had contented himself with an unparliamentary ministry, in January, 1851, with an extra-parliamentary one, and on April 11 he felt strong enough to form an anti-parliamentary ministry, which harmoniously combined in itself the no-confidence votes of both Assemblies, the Constituent and the Legislative, the republican and the royalist. This gradation of ministries was the thermometer with which parliament could measure the decrease of its own vital heat. By the end of April the latter had fallen so low that Persigny, in a personal interview, could urge Changarnier to go over to the camp of the President. Bonaparte, he assured him, regarded the influence of the National Assembly as completely destroyed, and the proclamation was already prepared that was to be published after the coup d'etat, which was kept steadily in view but was by chance again postponed. Changarnier informed the leaders of the party of Order of the obituary notice, but who believes that bedbug bites are fatal? And parliament, stricken, disintegrated, and death-tainted as it was, could not prevail upon itself to see in its duel with the grotesque chief of the Society of December 10 anything but a duel with a bedbug. But Bonaparte answered the party of Order as Agesilaus did King Agis: “''I seem to thee an ant, but one day I shall be a lion''.” [Paraphrase of a story by the Greek writer Athenaeus (ca. second century AD) in his book, Deipnosophistae. - Ed.]

== Victory of Bonaparte ==
The coalition with the Montagne and the pure republicans, to which the party of Order saw itself condemned in its unavailing efforts to maintain possession of the military power and to reconquer supreme control of the executive power, proved incontrovertibly that it had forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. On May 28 the mere power of the calendar, of the hour hand of the clock, gave the signal for its complete disintegration. With May 28, the last year of the life of the National Assembly began. It now had to decide for continuing the constitution unaltered or for revising it. But revision of the constitution — that implied not only rule of the bourgeoisie or of the petty-bourgeois democracy, democracy or proletarian anarchy, parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it implied at the same time Orleans or Bourbon! Thus fell in the midst of parliament the apple of discord that was bound to inflame openly the conflict of interests which split the party of Order into hostile factions. The party of Order was a combination of heterogeneous social substances. The question of revision generated a political temperature at which the product again decomposed into its original components.

The Bonapartists' interest in a revision was simple. For them it was above all a question of abolishing Article 45, which forbade Bonaparte's reelection and the prolongation of his authority. No less simple appeared the position of the republicans. They unconditionally rejected any revision; they saw in it a universal conspiracy against the republic. Since they commanded more than a quarter of the votes in the National Assembly, and according to the constitution three-quarters of the votes were required for a resolution for revision to be legally valid and for the convocation of a revising Assembly, they needed only to count their votes to be sure of victory. And they were sure of victory.

As against these clear positions, the party of Order found itself inextricably caught in contradictions. If it should reject revision, it would imperil the status quo, since it would leave Bonaparte only one way out, that of force; and since on the second Sunday in May, 1852, at the decisive moment, it would be surrendering France to revolutionary anarchy, with a President who had lost his authority, with a parliament which for a long time had not possessed it, and with a people that meant to reconquer it. If it voted for constitutional revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would be bound to fail constitutionally because of the republicans' veto. If it unconstitutionally declared a simple majority vote to be binding, it could hope to dominate the revolution only if it subordinated itself unconditionally to the sovereignty of the executive power; then it would make Bonaparte master of the constitution, of its revision, and of the party itself. A partial revision, which would prolong the authority of the President, would pave the way for imperial usurpation. A general revision, which would shorten the existence of the republic, would bring the dynastic claims into unavoidable conflict, for the conditions of a Bourbon and an Orleanist restoration were not only different, they were mutually exclusive.

The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory on which the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and Orleanists, large landed property and industry, could dwell side by side with equality of rights. It was the unavoidable condition of their common rule, the sole form of state in which their general class interest subjected to itself at the same time both the claims of their particular factions and all the remaining classes of society. As royalists they fell back into their old antagonism, into the struggle for the supremacy of landed property or of money, and the highest expression of this antagonism, its personification, was their kings themselves, their dynasties. Hence the resistance of the party of Order to the recall of the Bourbons.

The Orleanist and people's representative Creton had in 1849, 1850, and 1851 periodically introduced a motion for the revocation of the decree exiling the royal families. Just as regularly, parliament presented the spectacle of an Assembly of royalists that obdurately barred the gates through which their exiled kings might return home. Richard III murdered Henry VI, remarking that he was too good for this world and belonged in heaven. The royalists declared France too bad to possess her kings again. Constrained by force of circumstances, they had become republicans and repeatedly sanctioned the popular decision that banished their kings from France.

A revision of the constitution — and circumstances compelled taking that into consideration — called in question, along with the republic, the common rule of the two bourgeois factions, and revived, with the possibility of a monarchy, the rivalry of the interests which the monarchy had predominantly represented by turns, the struggle for the supremacy of one faction over the other. The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could settle the struggle by an amalgamation of the two dynasties, by a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. The real fusion of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was the parliamentary republic, in which Orleanist and Legitimist colors were obliterated and the various species of bourgeois disappeared into the bourgeois as such, the bourgeois genus. Now, however, Orleanist was to become Legitimist and Legitimist Orleanist. Royalty, in which their antagonism was personified, was to embody their unity, the expression of their exclusive factional interests was to become the expression of their common class interest, the monarchy was to do what only the abolition of two monarchies, the republic, could do and had done. This was the philosopher's stone, to produce which the doctors of the party of Order racked their brains. As if the Legitimist monarchy could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeois or the bourgeois monarchy ever become the monarchy of the hereditary landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could fraternize under one crown, when the crown could descend to only one head, the head of the elder brother or of the younger. As if industry could come to terms with landed property at all, so long as landed property itself does not decide to become industrial. If Henry V should die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not on that account become the king of the Legitimists unless he ceased to be the king of the Orleanists. The philosophers of fusion, however, who became more vociferous in proportion as the question of revision came to the fore, who had provided themselves with an official daily organ in the ''Assemblee Nationale'', and who are again at work even at this very moment (February, 1852), considered the whole difficulty to be due to the opposition and rivalry of the two dynasties. The attempts to reconcile the Orleans family with Henry V, begun since the death of Louis Philippe, but, like the dynastic intrigues generally, played at only while the National Assembly was in recess, during the entr'actes, behind the scenes — sentimental coquetry with the old superstition rather than seriously meant business — now became grand performances of state, enacted by the party of Order on the public stage, instead of in amateur theatricals as before. The couriers sped from Paris to Venice, from Venice to Claremont, from Claremont to Paris. The Count of Chambord issues a manifesto in which "with the help of all the members of his family" he announces not his, but the "national" restoration. The Orleanist Salvandy throws himself at the feet of Henry V. The Legitimist chiefs, Berryer, Benoit d'Azy, Saint-Priest, travel to Claremont to persuade the Orleans set, but in vain. The fusionists perceive too late that the interests of the two bourgeois factions neither lose exclusiveness nor gain pliancy when they become accentuated in the form of family interests, the interests of two royal houses. If Henry V were to recognize the Count of Paris as his heir - the sole success that the fusion could achieve at best — the House of Orleans would not win any claim that the childlessness of Henry V had not already secured to it, but it would lose all the claims it had gained through the July Revolution. It would waive its original claims, all the titles it had wrested from the older branch of the Bourbons in almost a hundred years of struggle; it would barter away its historical prerogative, the prerogative of the modern kingdom, for the prerogative of its genealogical tree. The fusion, therefore, would be nothing but a voluntary abdication of the House of Orleans, its resignation to Legitimacy, repentant withdrawal from the Protestant state church into the Catholic. A withdrawal, moreover, that would not even bring it to the throne it had lost, but to the steps of the throne where it had been born. The old Orleanist ministers, Guizot, Duchatel, etc., who likewise hastened to Claremont to advocate the fusion, in fact represented merely the Katzenjammer over the July Revolution, the despair about the bourgeois kingdom and the kingliness of the bourgeois, the superstitious belief in Legitimacy as the last charm against anarchy. Imagining themselves mediators between Orleans and Bourbons, they were in reality merely Orleanist renegades, and the Prince of Joinville received them as such. On the other hand, the viable, bellicose section of the Orleanists, Thiers, Baze, etc., convinced Louis Philippe's family all the more easily that if any directly monarchist restoration presupposed the fusion of the two dynasties, and if any such fusion presupposed abdication of the House of Orleans, it was, on the contrary, wholly in accord with the tradition of their forefathers to recognize the republic for the moment and wait until events permitted the conversion of the presidential chair into a throne. Rumors of Joinville's candidature were circulated, public curiosity was kept in suspense, and a few months later, in September, after the rejection of revision, his candidature was publicly proclaimed.

The attempt at a royalist fusion of Orleanists with Legitimists had thus not only failed; it had destroyed their ''parliamentary fusion'', their common republican form, and had broken up the party of Order into its original component parts; but the more the estrangement between Claremont and Venice grew, the more their settlement collapsed and the Joinville agitation gained ground, so much the more eager and earnest became the negotiations between Bonaparte's minister Faucher and the Legitimists.

The disintegration of the party of Order did not stop at its original elements. Each of the two great factions, in its turn, decomposed all over again. It was as if all the old shadings that had formerly fought and jostled one another within each of the two circles, whether Legitimist or Orleanist, had thawed out again like dry Infusoria on contact with water, as if they had acquired anew sufficient vital energy to form groups of their own and independent antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamed they were back among the controversies between the Tuileries and the Pavillon Marsan, between Villèle and Polignac. The Orleanists relived the golden days of the tourney between Guizot, Mole, Broglie, Thiers, and Odilon Barrot.

The section of the party of Order that was eager for revision, but was divided again on the limits to revisions — a section composed of the Legitimists led by Berryer and Falloux, on the one hand, and by La Rochejaquelein, on the other, and of the conflict-weary Orleanists led by Mole, Broglie, Montalembert and Odilon Barrot — agreed with the Bonapartist representatives on the following indefinite and broadly framed motion: "With the object of restoring to the nation the full exercise of its sovereignty, the undersigned representatives move that the constitution be revised."

At the same time, however, they unanimously declared through their reporter Tocqueville that the National Assembly had no right to move the ''abolition of the republic'', that this right was vested solely in the Revising Chamber. For the rest, the constitution might be revised only in a "''legal''" ''manner'', hence only if the constitutionally prescribed three-quarters of the number of votes were cast in favor of revision. On July 19, after six days of stormy debate, revision was rejected, as was to be anticipated. Four hundred and forty-six votes were cast for it, but two hundred and seventy-eight against. The extreme Orleanists, Thiers, Changarnier, etc., voted with the republicans and the Montagne.

Thus the majority of parliament declared against the constitution, but this constitution itself declared for the minority and that its vote was binding. But had not the party of Order subordinated the constitution to the parliamentary majority on May 31, 1850, and on June 13, 1849? Up to now, was not its whole policy based on the subordination of the paragraphs of the constitution to the decisions of the parliamentary majority? Had it not left to the democrats the antediluvian superstitious belief in the letter of the law, and castigated the democrats for it? At the present moment, however, revision of the constitution meant nothing but continuation of the presidential authority, just as continuation of the constitution meant nothing but Bonaparte's deposition. Parliament had declared for him, but the constitution declared against parliament. He therefore acted in the sense of parliament when he tore up the constitution and acted in the sense of the constitution when he adjourned parliament.

Parliament had declared the constitution and, with the latter, its own rule to be "beyond the majority"; by its vote it had abolished the constitution and prolonged the term of presidential power, while declaring at the same time that neither could the one die nor the other live so long as the Assembly itself continued to exist. Those who were to bury it were standing at the door. While it debated on revision, Bonaparte removed General Baraguay d'Hilliers, who had proved irresolute, from the command of the First Army Division and appointed in his place General Magnan, the victor of Lyons, the hero of the December days, one of his creatures, who under Louis Philippe had already more or less compromised himself in Bonaparte's favor on the occasion of the Boulogne expedition.

The party of Order proved by its decision on revision that it knew neither how to rule nor how to serve; neither how to live nor how to die; neither how to suffer the republic nor how to overthrow it; neither how to uphold the constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to cooperate with the President nor how to break with him. To whom, then, did it look for the solution of all the contradictions? To the calendar, to the course of events. It ceased to presume to sway them. It therefore challenged events to assume sway over it, and thereby challenged the power to which, in the struggle against the people, it had surrendered one attribute after another until it stood impotent before this power. In order that the head of the executive power might be able the more undisturbedly to draw up his plan of campaign against it, strengthen his means of attack, select his tools, and fortify his positions, it resolved precisely at this critical moment to retire from the stage and adjourn for three months, from August 10 to November 4.

The parliamentary party was not only dissolved into its two great factions, each of these factions was not only split up within itself, but the party of Order in parliament had fallen out with the party of Order outside parliament. The spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie, its platform and its press — in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented — faced one another in estrangement and no longer understood one another.

The Legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizon and unlimited enthusiasm, accused their parliamentary leaders, Berryer and Falloux, of deserting to the Bonapartist camp and of defection from Henry V. Their fleur-de-lis minds believed in the fall of man, but not in diplomacy.

Far more fateful and decisive was the breach of the commercial bourgeoisie with its politicians. It reproached them not as the Legitimists reproached theirs, with having abandoned their principles, but on the contrary, with clinging to principles that had become useless.

I have indicated above that since Fould's entry into the ministry the section of the commercial bourgeoisie which had held the lion's share of power under Louis Philippe, namely, the aristocracy of finance, had become Bonapartist. Fould not only represented Bonaparte's interests in the Bourse, he represented at the same time the interests of the Bourse before Bonaparte. The position of the aristocracy of finance is most strikingly depicted in a passage from its European organ, the ''London Economist''. In the issue of February 1, 1851, its Paris correspondent writes:

"Now we have it stated from numerous quarters that above all things France demands tranquillity. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly; it is echoed from the tribune; it is asserted in the journals; it is announced from the pulpit, it is demonstrated by the sensitiveness of the public funds at the least prospect of disturbance, and their firmness the instant it is made manifest that the executive is victorious."

In its issue of November 29, 1851, the Economist declares in its own name:

"The President is the guardian of order, and is now recognized as such on every stock exchange of Europe."

The aristocracy of finance, therefore, condemned the parliamentary struggle of the party of Order with the executive power as a disturbance of order, and celebrated every victory of the President over its ostensible representatives as a victory of order. By the aristocracy of finance must here be understood not merely the great loan promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard to whom it is immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the interests of the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit. A part of their business capital is necessarily invested and put out at interest in quickly convertible public funds. Their deposits, the capital placed at their disposal and distributed by them among merchants and industrialists, are partly derived from the dividends of holders of government securities. If in every epoch the stability of the state power signified Moses and the prophets to the entire money market and to the priests of this money market, why not all the more so today, when every deluge threatens to sweep away the old states, and the old state debts with them?

The industrial bourgeoisie too, in its fanaticism for order, was angered by the squabbles of the parliamentary party of Order with the executive power. After their vote of January 18 on the occasion of Changarnier's dismissal, Thiers, Angles, Sainte-Beuve, etc., received from their constituents, in precisely the industrial districts, public reproofs in which their coalition with the Montagne was especially scourged as high treason to order. If, as we have seen, the boastful taunts, the petty intrigues which marked the struggle of the party of Order with the President merited no better reception, then on the other hand this bourgeois party, which required its representatives to allow the military power to pass from its own parliament to an adventurous pretender without offering resistance, was not even worth the intrigues that were squandered in its interests. It proved that the struggle to maintain its public interests, its own class interests, its political power, only troubled and upset it, as it disturbed private business.

With barely an exception the bourgeois dignitaries of the departmental towns, the municipal authorities, the judges of the commercial courts, etc., everywhere received Bonaparte on his tours in the most servile manner, even when, as in Dijon, he made an unrestrained attack on the National Assembly, and especially on the party of Order.

When trade was good, as it still was at the beginning of 1851, the commercial bourgeoisie raged against any parliamentary struggle, lest trade be put out of humor. When trade was bad, as it continually was from the end of February, 1851, the commercial bourgeoisie accused the parliamentary struggles of being the cause of stagnation and cried out for them to stop so that trade could start again. The revision debates came on just in this bad period. Since the question here was whether the existing form of state was to be or not to be, the bourgeoisie felt all the more justified in demanding from its representatives the ending of this torturous provisional arrangement and at the same time the maintenance of the status quo. There was no contradiction in this. By the end of the provisional arrangement it understood precisely its continuation, the postponement to a distant future of the moment when a decision had to be reached. The status quo could be maintained in only two ways: prolongation of Bonaparte's authority or his constitutional retirement and the election of Cavaignac. A section of the bourgeoisie desired the latter solution and knew no better advice to give its representatives than to keep silent and leave the burning question untouched. They were of the opinion that if their representatives did not speak, Bonaparte would not act. They wanted an ostrich parliament that would hide its head in order to remain unseen. Another section of the bourgeoisie desired, because Bonaparte was already in the presidential chair, to leave him sitting in it, so that everything could remain in the same old rut. They were indignant because their parliament did not openly infringe the constitution and abdicate without ceremony.

The Department Councils, those provincial representative bodies of the big bourgeoisie, which met from August 25 on during the recess of the National Assembly, declared almost unanimously for revision, and thus against parliament and in favor of Bonaparte.

Still more unequivocally than in its falling out with its parliamentary representatives, the bourgeoisie displayed its wrath against its literary representatives, its own press. The sentences to ruinous fines and shameless terms of imprisonment, on the verdicts of bourgeois juries, for every attack of bourgeois journalists on Bonaparte's usurpationist desires, for every attempt of the press to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the executive power, astonished not merely France, but all Europe.

While the parliamentary party of Order, by its clamor for tranquillity, as I have shown, committed itself to quiescence, while it declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with the safety and existence of the bourgeoisie — by destroying with its own hands, in the struggle against the other classes of society, all the conditions for its own regime, the parliamentary regime — the extraparliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, by its servility toward the President, by its vilification of parliament, by its brutal maltreatment of its own press, invited Bonaparte to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing section, its politicians and its literati, its platform and its press, so it would then be able to pursue its private affairs with full confidence in the protection of a strong and unrestricted government. It declared unequivocally that it longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling.

And this extraparliamentary bourgeoisie, which had already rebelled against the purely parliamentary and literary struggle for the rule of its own class, and had betrayed the leaders of this struggle, now dares after the event to indict the proletariat for not having risen in a bloody struggle, a life-and-death struggle on its behalf! This bourgeoisie, which every moment sacrificed its general class interests, that is, its political interests, to the narrowest and most sordid private interests, and demanded a similar sacrifice from its representatives, now moans that the proletariat has sacrificed its ideal political interests to its material interests. It poses as a lovely creature that has been misunderstood and deserted in the decisive hour by the proletariat, misled by socialists. And it finds a general echo in the bourgeois world. Naturally, I do not speak here of German shyster politicians and riff-raff of the same persuasion. I refer, for example, to the already quoted Economist, which as late as November 29, 1851, that is, four days prior to the coup d'etat, declared Bonaparte to be the "guardian of order" but Thiers and Berryer to be "anarchists," and on December 27, 1851, after Bonaparte had quieted these "anarchists," is already vociferous about the treason to "the skill, knowledge, discipline, spiritual insight, intellectual resources, and moral weight of the middle and upper ranks" committed by the masses of "ignorant, untrained, and stupid proletaires." The stupid, ignorant, and vulgar mass was none other than the bourgeois mass itself.

In the year 1851, France, to be sure, had passed through a kind of minor trade crisis. The end of February showed a decline in exports compared with 1850; in March trade suffered and factories closed down; in April the position of the industrial departments appeared as desperate as after the February days; in May business had still not revived; as late as June 28 the holdings of the Bank of France showed, by the enormous growth of deposits and the equally great decrease in advances on bills of exchange, that production was at a standstill, and it was not until the middle of October that a progressive improvement of business again set in. The French bourgeoisie attributed this trade stagnation to purely political causes, to the struggle between parliament and the executive power, to the precariousness of a merely provisional form of state, to the terrifying prospect of the second Sunday in May of 1852. I will not deny that all these circumstances had a depressing effect on some branches of industry in Paris and the departments. But in any case the influence of political conditions was only local and inconsiderable. Does this require further proof than the fact that the improvement of trade set in toward the middle of October, at the very moment when the political situation grew worse, the political horizon darkened, and a thunderbolt from Elysium was expected at any moment? For the rest, the French bourgeois, whose "skill, knowledge, spiritual insight, and intellectual resources" reach no further than his nose, could throughout the period of the Industrial Exhibition in London have found the cause of his commercial misery right under his nose. While in France factories were closed down, in England commercial bankruptcies broke out. While in April and May the industrial panic reached a climax in France, in April and May the commercial panic reached a climax in England. Like the French woolen industry, the English woolen industry suffered, and as French silk manufacture, so did English silk manufacture. True, the English cotton mills continued working, but no longer at the same profits as in 1849 and 1850. The only difference was that the crisis in France was industrial, in England commercial; that while in France the factories stood idle, in England they extended operations, but under less favorable conditions than in preceding years; that in France it was exports, in England imports which were hardest hit. The common cause, which is naturally not to be sought within the bounds of the French political horizon, was obvious. The years 1849 and 1850 were years of the greatest material prosperity and of an overproduction that appeared as such only in 1851. At the beginning of this year it was given a further special impetus by the prospect of the Industrial Exhibition. In addition there were the following special circumstances: first, the partial failure of the cotton crop in 1850 and 1851, then the certainty of a bigger cotton crop than had been expected; first the rise, then the sudden fall — in short, the fluctuations in the price of cotton. The crop of raw silk, in France at least, had turned out to be even below the average yield. Woolen manufacture, finally, had expanded so much since 1848 that the production of wool could not keep pace with it and the price of raw wool rose out of all proportion to the price of woolen manufactures. Here, then, in the raw material of three industries for the world market, we already have three-fold material for a stagnation in trade. Apart from these special circumstances, the apparent crisis of 1851 was nothing else but the halt which overproduction and overspeculation invariably make in completing the industrial cycle, before they summon all their strength in order to rush feverishly through the final phase of this cycle and arrive once more at their starting point, the general trade crisis. During such intervals in the history of trade, commercial bankruptcies break out in England, while in France industry itself is reduced to idleness, partly forced into retreat by the competition, just then becoming intolerable, of the English in all markets, and partly singled out for attack as a luxury industry by every business stagnation. Thus besides the general crisis France goes through national trade crises of her own, which are nevertheless determined and conditioned far more by the general state of the world market than by French local influences. It will not be without interest to contrast the judgment of the English bourgeois with the prejudice of the French bourgeois. In its annual trade report for 1851, one of the largest Liverpool houses writes:

"Few years have more thoroughly belied the anticipations formed at their commencement than the one just closed; instead of the great prosperity which was almost unanimously looked for it has proved one of the most discouraging that has been seen for the last quarter of a century — this, of course, refers to the mercantile, not to the manufacturing classes. And yet there certainly were grounds for anticipating the reverse at the beginning of the year — stocks of produce were moderate, money was abundant, and food was cheap, a plentiful harvest well secured, unbroken peace on the Continent, and no political or fiscal disturbances at home; indeed, the wings of commerce were never more unfettered.... To what source, then, is this disastrous result to be attributed? We believe to overtrading in both imports and exports. Unless our merchants will put more stringent limits to their freedom of action, nothing but a triennial panic can keep us in check."

Now picture to yourself the French bourgeois, how in the throes of this business panic his trade-crazy brain is tortured, set in a whirl, and stunned by rumors of coups d'etat and the restoration of universal suffrage, by the struggle between parliament and the executive power, by the Fronde war between Orleanists and Legitimists, by the communist conspiracies in the south of France, by alleged Jacqueries in the departments of Nievre and Cher, by the advertisements of the different candidates for the presidency, by the cheapjack solutions offered by the journals, by the threats of the republicans to uphold the constitution and universal suffrage by force of arms, by the gospel-preaching emigre heroes ''in partibus'', who announced that the world would come to an end on the second Sunday in May, 1852 — think of all this and you will comprehend why in this unspeakable, deafening chaos of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiration, coalition, emigration, usurpation, and revolution, the bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic:

"Rather an end with terror than terror without end!"

Bonaparte understood this cry. His power of comprehension was sharpened by the growing turbulence of creditors, who with each sunset which brought settling day, the second Sunday in May, 1852, nearer, saw a movement of the stars protesting their earthly bills of exchange. They had become veritable astrologers. The National Assembly had blighted Bonaparte's hopes of a constitutional prolongation of his authority; the candidature of the Prince of Joinville forbade further vacillation.

If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before, it was Bonaparte's coup d'etat. As early as January 29, 1849, barely a month after his election, he had made a proposal about it to Changarnier. In the summer of 1849 his own Prime Minister, Odilon Barrot, had covertly denounced the policy of coups d'etat; in the winter of 1850 Thiers had openly done so. In May, 1851, Persigny had sought once more to win Changarnier for the coup; the ''Messager de l'Assemblee'' had published an account of these negotiations. During every parliamentary storm the Bonapartist journals threatened a coup d'etat, and the nearer the crisis drew, the louder their tone became. In the orgies that Bonaparte kept up every night with men and women of the "swell mob," as soon as the hour of midnight approached and copious potations had loosened tongues and fired imaginations, the coup d'etat was fixed for the following morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, the representatives were thrown out the window, the imperial mantle fell upon Bonaparte's shoulders, until the following morning banished the ghost once more and astonished Paris learned, from vestals of little reticence and from indiscreet paladins, of the danger it had once again escaped. During the months of September and October rumors of a coup d'etat followed fast, one after the other. Simultaneously the shadow took on color, like a variegated daguerreotype. Look up the September and October copies of the organs of the European daily press and you will find, word for word, intimations like the following: "Paris is full of rumors of a coup d'etat. The capital is to be filled with troops during the night, and the next morning is to bring decrees which will dissolve the National Assembly, declare the Department of the Seine in a state of siege, restore universal suffrage, and appeal to the people. Bonaparte is said to be seeking ministers for the execution of these illegal decrees." The dispatches that bring these tidings always end with the fateful word "postponed." The coup d'etat was ever the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With this idea he had again set foot on French soil. He was so obsessed by it that he continually betrayed it and blurted it out. He was so weak that, just as continually, he gave it up again. The shadow of the coup d'etat had become so familiar to the Parisians as a specter that they were not willing to believe in it when it finally appeared in the flesh. What allowed the coup d'etat to succeed was therefore neither the reticent reserve of the chief of the Society of December 10 nor the fact that the National Assembly was caught unawares. If it succeeded, it succeeded despite its indiscretion and with its foreknowledge, a necessary, inevitable result of antecedent developments.

On October 10 Bonaparte announced to his ministers his decision to restore universal suffrage; on the sixteenth they handed in their resignations; on the twenty-sixth Paris learned of the formation of the Thorigny Ministry. Police Prefect Carlier was simultaneously replaced by Maupas; the head of the First Military Division, Magnan, concentrated the most reliable regiments in the capital. On November 4 the National Assembly resumed its sessions. It had nothing better to do than to recapitulate in a short, succinct form the course it had gone through and to prove that it was buried only after it had died.

The first post it forfeited in the struggle with the executive power was the ministry. It had solemnly to admit this loss by accepting at full value the Thorigny Ministry, a mere shadow cabinet. The Permanent Commission had received M. Giraud with laughter when he presented himself in the name of the new ministers. Such a weak ministry for such strong measures as the restoration of universal suffrage! Yet the precise object was to get nothing through in parliament, but everything against parliament.

On the very first day of its reopening, the National Assembly received the message from Bonaparte in which he demanded the restoration of universal suffrage and the abolition of the law of May 31, 1850. The same day his ministers introduced a decree to this effect. The National Assembly at once rejected the ministry's motion of urgency and rejected the law itself on November 13 by three hundred and fifty-five votes to three hundred and forty-eight. Thus, it tore up its mandate once more; it once more confirmed the fact that it had transformed itself from the freely elected representatives of the people into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it acknowledged once more that it had itself cut in two the muscles which connected the parliamentary head with the body of the nation.

If by its motion to restore universal suffrage the executive power appealed from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative power appealed by its Quaestors' Bill from the people to the army. This Quaestors' Bill was to establish its right of directly requisitioning troops, of forming a parliamentary army. While it thus designated the army as the arbitrator between itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte, while it recognized the army as the decisive state power, it had to confirm, on the other hand, the fact that it had long given up its claim to dominate this power. By debating its right to requisition troops, instead of requisitioning them at once, it betrayed its doubts about its own powers. By rejecting the Quaestors' Bill, it made public confession of its impotence. This bill was defeated, its proponents lacking a hundred and eight votes of a majority. The Montagne thus decided the issue. It found itself in the position of Buridan's ass — not, indeed, between two bundles of hay with the problem of deciding which was the more attractive, but between two showers of blows with the problem of deciding which was the harder. On the one hand, there was the fear of Changarnier; on the other, the fear of Bonaparte. It must be confessed that the position was not a heroic one.

On November 18 an amendment was moved to the law on municipal elections introduced by the party of Order, to the effect that instead of three years', one year's domicile should suffice for municipal electors. The amendment was lost by a single vote, but this one vote immediately proved to be a mistake. By splitting up into its hostile factions, the party of Order had long ago forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. It showed now that there was no longer any majority at all in parliament. The National Assembly had become incapable of transacting business. Its atomic constituents were no longer held together by any force of cohesion; it had drawn its last breath; it was dead.

Finally, a few days before the catastrophe, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie was solemnly to confirm once more its breach with the bourgeoisie in parliament. Thiers, as a parliamentary hero infected more than the rest with the incurable disease of parliamentary cretinism, had, after the death of parliament, hatched out, together with the Council of State, a new parliamentary intrigue, a Responsibility Law by which the President was to be firmly held within the limits of the constitution. Just as, on laying the foundation stone of the new market halls in Paris on September 15, Bonaparte, like a second Masaniello, had enchanted the ''dames des balles'', the fishwives - to be sure, one fishwife outweighed seventeen burgraves in real power - just as after the introduction of the Quaestors' Bill he enraptured the lieutenants whom he regaled in the Elysee, so now, on November 25, he swept off their feet the industrial bourgeoisie, which had gathered at the circus to receive at his hands prize medals for the London Industrial Exhibition.

I shall give the significant portion of his speech as reported in the ''Journal des Débats'':

"'With such unhoped-for successes, I am justified in reiterating how great the French Republic would be if it were permitted to pursue its real interests and reform its institutions, instead of being constantly disturbed by demagogues, on the one hand, and by monarchist hallucinations, on the other.' (Loud, stormy and repeated applause from every part of the amphitheater.) 'The monarchist hallucinations hinder all progress and all important branches of industry. In place of progress nothing but struggle. One sees men who were formerly the most zealous supporters of the royal authority and prerogative become partisans of a Convention merely in order to weaken the authority that has sprung from universal suffrage.' (Loud and repeated applause.) 'We see men who have suffered most from the Revolution, and have deplored it most, provoke a new one, and merely in order to fetter the nation's will.... I promise you tranquillity for the future,' etc., etc. (Bravo, bravo, a storm of bravos.) "

Thus the industrial bourgeoisie applauds with servile bravos the coup d'etat of December 2, the annihilation of parliament, the downfall of its own rule, the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The thunder of applause on November 25 had its answer in the thunder of cannon on December 4, and it was on the house of Monsieur Sallandrouze, who had clapped most, that they clapped most of the bombs.

Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, went alone into its midst, took out his watch so that it should not continue to exist a minute after the time limit he had fixed, and drove out each one of the members of Parliament with hilariously humorous taunts. Napoleon, smaller than his prototype, at least betook himself on the eighteenth Brumaire to the legislative body and read out to it, though in a faltering voice, its sentence of death. The second Bonaparte, who, moreover, found himself in possession of an executive power very different from that of Cromwell or Napoleon, sought his model not in the annals of world history but in the annals of the Society of December 10, in the annals of the criminal courts. He robs the Bank of France of twenty-five million francs, buys General Magnan with a million, the soldiers with fifteen francs apiece and liquor, comes together with his accomplices secretly like a thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into, and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Le Flô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., dragged from their beds and put in prison, the chief squares of Paris and the parliamentary building occupied by troops, and cheapjack placards posted early in the morning on all the walls, proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the Seine Department in a state of siege. In like manner he inserted a little later in the Moniteur a false document which asserted that influential parliamentarians had grouped themselves around him and formed a state consulta.

The rump parliament, assembled in the mairie building of the Tenth Arrondissement and consisting mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, votes the deposition of Bonaparte amid repeated cries of "Long live the Republic," unfailingly harangues the gaping crowds before the building, and is finally led off in the custody of African sharpshooters, first to the d'Orsay barracks, and later packed into prison vans and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham, and Vincennes. Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly, and the February Revolution.

Before hastening to close, let us briefly summarize the latter's history:

''1. First period.'' From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal-brotherhood swindle.

''2. Second period.'' Period of constituting the republic and of the Constituent National Assembly.

a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.

b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.

c. December 20, 1848, to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.

''3. Third period.'' Period of the constitutional republic and of the Legislative National Assembly.

a. May 28, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.

b. June 13, 1849, to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry.

c. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.

(1) May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The Assembly loses the supreme command of the army.

(2) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power. The party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. It forms a coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.

(3) April 11, 1851, to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The party of Order decomposes into its separate constituents. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie becomes definite.

(4) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. The Assembly performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes. Passing of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire.

== Summary ==
The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost. The democratic republic announces its appearance. It is dissipated on June 13, 1849, together with its deserting petty bourgeois, but in its flight it redoubles its boastfulness. The parliamentary republic together with the bourgeoisie takes possession of the entire state; it enjoys its existence to the full, but December 2, 1851, buries it to the accompaniment of the anguished cry of the coalesced royalists: “Long live the Republic!”

The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never tired of crying out to the revolution what St. Arsenius cried out to the Christians: “''Fuge, tace, quiesce!''” [“Flee, be silent, keep still!”] Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: “''Fuge, tace, quiesce!''"

The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s dilemma: “In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.” It solved it in the “Cossack republic.” No Circe using black magic has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was already contained in the parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.

Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after December 2?

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had as yet been only decreed; the decree was not carried out. Any serious insurrection of the proletariat would at once have put new life into the bourgeoisie, reconciled it with the army, and insured a second June defeat for the workers.

On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and shopkeeper to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of the National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the scene of battle. For the bourgeois and the shopkeeper had learned that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte had abolished the secret ballot and had ordered them to put a “yes” or “no” after their names on the official registers. The resistance of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he had placards posted on all the street corners of Paris announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the shopkeeper believed they had gained their objective. Those who failed to appear next morning were the bourgeois and the shopkeeper.

By a ''coup de main'' the night of December 1-2 Bonaparte had robbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade commanders. An army without officers, averse to fighting under the banner of the Montagnards because of the memories of June, 1848 and 1849, and May, 1850, it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the task of saving the insurrectionary honor of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had surrendered to the military so unresistingly that, subsequently, Bonaparte could disarm the National Guard with the sneering motive of his fear that its weapons would be turned against it by the anarchists!

"This is the complete and final triumph of socialism!” Thus Guizot characterized December 2. But if the overthrow of the parliamentary republic contains within itself the germ of the triumph of the proletarian revolution, its immediate and obvious result was Bonaparte’s victory over parliament, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases. In parliament the nation made its general will the law; that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general will. It renounces all will of its own before the executive power and submits itself to the superior command of an alien, of authority. The executive power, in contrast to the legislative one, expresses the heteronomy of a nation in contrast to its autonomy. France therefore seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back under the despotism of an individual, and what is more, under the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally powerless and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt.

But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other half. It first completed the parliamentary power in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has achieved this, it completes the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole! [paraphrase from Shakespeare’s ''Hamlet'', Act 1, Scene 5: “Well said, old mole!”, also cited by Hegel in his Philosophy of History]

The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million – this terrifying parasitic body which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores sprang up in the time of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system which it had helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory.

The ''first'' French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state administration. Every common interest was immediately severed from the society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the activities of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth, and the national University of France. Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. '''''All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.''''' The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.

But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, and under Napoleon the bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much it strove for power of its own.

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent. The state machinery has so strengthened itself vis-à-vis civil society that the Chief of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head – an adventurer dropped in from abroad, raised on the shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he bought with whisky and sausages and to which he has to keep throwing more sausages. Hence the low-spirited despair, the feeling of monstrous humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast of France and makes her gasp. She feels dishonored.

And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants.

Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d’état of December 2, 1851.

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.

But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in half of France, the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration and transportation of the peasants?

Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the peasants “on account of demagogic agitation.”

But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705] but his modern Vendée. [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendée, in 1793]

The three years’ stern rule of the parliamentary republic freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as often as they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery. The process took the form of an incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters. The peasants for the first time made efforts to behave independently vis-à-vis the government. This was shown in the continual conflict between the mayors and the prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the mayors. Finally, during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of different localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie punished these peasants with sieges and executions. And this same bourgeoisie now cries out against the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude that betrayed it to Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie itself has violently strengthened the imperialism of the peasant class; it has preserved the conditions that form the birthplaces of this species of peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.

In the uprisings after the coup d’état, a part of the French peasants protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 1848. The school they had gone to since 1848 had sharpened their wits. But they had inscribed themselves in the historical underworld; history held them to their word, and the majority was still so implicated that precisely in the reddest departments the peasant population voted openly for Bonaparte. In their view, the National Assembly had hindered his progress. He has now merely broken the fetters that the towns had imposed on the will of the countryside. In some parts the peasants even entertained the grotesque notion of a convention with Napoleon.

After the first Revolution had transformed the semi-feudal peasants into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions in which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which they had only just acquired, and could slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land and the soil, the property form which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is exactly these material conditions which made the feudal peasant a small-holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations sufficed to produce the unavoidable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture and progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” property form, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition of the emancipation and enrichment of the French countryfolk, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their enslavement and their pauperism. And just this law is the first of the “Napoleonic ideas” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in the small holdings themselves but outside them – in the influence of secondary circumstances – his experiments will shatter like soap bubbles when they come in contact with the relations of production.

The economic development of small-holding property has radically changed the peasants’ relations with the other social classes. Under Napoleon the fragmentation of the land in the countryside supplemented free competition and the beginning of big industry in the towns. The peasant class was the ubiquitous protest against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy. The roots that small-holding property struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. The landmarks of this property formed the natural fortification of the bourgeoisie against any surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant’s small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages. The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital. The ''Code Napoléon'' is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order. But “strong and unlimited government” - and this is the second “Napoleonic idea” that the second Napoleon has to carry out – is called upon to defend this “material order” by force. This “material order” also serves, in all Bonaparte’s proclamations, as the slogan against the rebellious peasants.

In addition to the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the small holding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the life source of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of the entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property forms a basis for an all-powerful and numberless bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of personal and economic relationships over the whole extent of the country. Hence it also permits uniform action from a supreme center on all points of this uniform mass. It destroys the aristocratic intermediate steps between the mass of the people and the power of the state. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct intrusion of this state power and the interposition of its immediate organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population which can find no place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of additional state positions. By the new markets which he opened with bayonets, and by the plundering of the Continent, Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes with interest. These taxes were a spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob his industry of its last resources and complete his defenselessness against pauperism. An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the “Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, considering that alongside the actual classes of society, he is forced to create an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question? Hence one of his first financial operations was the raising of officials’ salaries to their old level and the creation of new sinecures.

Another “''idée napoléonienne''" [Napoleonic idea] is the domination of the priests as an instrument of government. But while at the time of their emergence the small-holding owners, in their accord with society, in their dependence on natural forces and submission to the authority which protected them from above, were naturally religious, now that they are ruined by debts, at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond their own limitations, they have become naturally irreligious.

Heaven was quite a pleasing addition to the narrow strip of land just won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is thrust forward as a substitute for the small holding. The priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police – another “''idée napoléonienne''.” The expedition against Rome will take place in France itself next time, but in a sense opposite from that of M. de Montalembert.

Finally, the culminating “''idée napoléonienne''” is the ascendancy of the army. The army was the “''point d’ honneur''” of the small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their own state costume; war was their poetry; the small holding, enlarged and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies whom the French peasant now has to defend his property against are not the Cossacks; they are the ''huissiers'' [bailiffs] and the tax collectors. The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland but in the registry of mortgages. The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpen proletariat. It consists largely of replacements, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a replacement, the substitute for Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valor by hounding the peasants in masses like chamois, by doing gendarme duty; and if the natural contradictions of his system chase the Chief of the Society of December 10 across the French border, his army, after some acts of brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but thrashings.

It is clear: All “''idée napoléonienne''” are ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth; they are a contradiction to the outlived holdings. They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts. But the parody of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state power and society. With the progressive deterioration of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it collapses. The centralization of the state that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism.

The condition of the French peasants provides us with the answer to the riddle of the general elections of December 20 and 21, which bore the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws but to give them.

Obviously the bourgeoisie now had no choice but to elect Bonaparte. When the Puritans of the Council of Constance 414-18] complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the necessity for moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for angels.” Similarly, after the coup d’état the French bourgeoisie cried out: Only the Chief of the Society of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!

As the executive authority which has made itself independent, Bonaparte feels it to be his task to safeguard “bourgeois order.” But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He poses, therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody solely because he has broken the power of that middle class, and keeps on breaking it daily. He poses, therefore, as the opponent of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power he revives its political power. Thus the cause must be kept alive, but the effect, where it manifests itself, must be done away with. But this cannot happen without small confusions of cause and effect, since in their interaction both lose their distinguishing marks. New decrees obliterate the border line. Bonaparte knows how to pose at the same time as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, as a man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the framework of bourgeois society. New decrees cheat the “true socialists” of their governmental skill in advance. But above all, Bonaparte knows how to pose as the Chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpen proletariat to which he himself, his entourage, his government, and his army belong, and whose main object is to benefit itself and draw California lottery prizes from the state treasury. And he confirms himself as Chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees, and despite decrees.

This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused groping which tries now to win, now to humiliate, first one class and then another, and uniformly arrays all of them against him; whose uncertainty in practice forms a highly comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style of the government decrees, a style slavishly copied from the uncle.

Industry and commerce, hence the business affairs of the middle class, are to prosper in hothouse fashion under the strong government: the grant of innumerable railroad concessions. But the Bonapartist lumpen proletariat is to enrich itself: those in the know play ''tripotage'' [underhand dealings] on the Exchange with the railroad concessions. But no capital is forthcoming for the railroads: obligation of the Bank to make advances on railroad shares. But at the same time the Bank is to be exploited for personal gain and therefore must be cajoled: release the Bank from the obligation to publish its report weekly; leonine [from Aesop’s fable about the lion who made a contract in which one partner got all the profits and the other all the disadvantages] agreement of the Bank with the government. The people are to be given employment: initiation of public works. But the public works increase the people’s tax obligations: hence reduction of taxes by an attack on the rentiers, by conversion of the 5-percent bonds into 4½-percent. But the middle class must again receive a sweetening: hence a doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy wine retail, and a halving of the wine tax for the middle class, which drinks it wholesale; dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but promises of miraculous future associations. The peasants are to be helped: mortgage banks which hasten their indebtedness and accelerate the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to make money out of the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans; no capitalist wants to agree to this condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another. Just as it was said of the Duke de Guise in the time of the Fronde that he was the most obliging man in France because he gave all his estates to his followers, with feudal obligations to him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in France and turn all the property and all the labor of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal all of France in order to make a present of it to France, or rather in order to buy France anew with French money, for as the Chief of the Society of December 10 he must buy what ought to belong to him. And to the Institution of Purchase belong all the state institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the Assembly, the Legion of Honor, the military medals, the public laundries, the public works, the railroads, the general staff, the officers of the National Guard, the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans. The means of purchase is obtained by selling every place in the army and the government machinery. But the most important feature of this process, by which France is taken in order to give to her, are the percentages that find their way into the pockets of the head and the members of the Society of December 10 during the turnover. The witticism with which Countess L., the mistress of M. de Morny, characterized the confiscation of the Orleans estates – “It is the first ''vol'' [the word means both “flight” and “theft"] of the eagle” – is applicable to every flight of this eagle, who is more like a ''raven''. He and his follower; call out to one another like that Italian Carthusian admonishing the miser who ostentatiously counted the goods on which he could still live for years: “''Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni''” [Thou countest thy goods, thou shouldst first count thy years]. In order not to make a mistake in the years, they count the minutes. At the court, in the ministries, at the head of the administration and the army, a gang of blokes of whom the best that can be said is that one does not know whence they come – these noisy, disreputable, rapacious bohemians who crawl into gallooned coats with the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque – elbow their way forward. One can visualize clearly this upper stratum of the Society of December 10 if one reflects that Veron-Crevel [A dissolute philistine character in Balzac’s novel ''Cousin Bette''] is its preacher of morals and Granier de Cassagnac its thinker. When Guizot, at the time of his ministry, turned this Granier of an obscure newspaper into a dynastic opponent, he used to boast of him with the quip: “''C’est le roi des droles''” [He is the king of buffoons]. It would be wrong to recall either the Regency4] or Louis XV in connection with Louis Bonaparte’s court and clique. For “often before France has experienced a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men.” [Quoted from Mme. de Girardin.]

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d’état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Tunic of Trier [A Catholic relic, allegedly taken from Christ when he was dying, preserved in the cathedral of Marx’s native city] he duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column.
[[Category:Library works by Karl Marx]]
{{Marx/Engels works}}
[[Category:Library works about France]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:18th_Brumaire_of_Louis_Bonaparte}}

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{{Library work|title=Localizing Power in Post Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asian Perspective|image=Dialectics of Chinese Labor - Trade Unions under Market Socialism.png|thumb]]|author=Vedi R. Hadiz|publisher=Standford University Press|published_date=January, 26, 2010|type=Book|source=Anna's Archive|pdf=https://annas-archive.gl/md5/1f21e343eb53857f29b21cc7c9f60581}}

Library:Dialectics of Chinese Labor - Trade Unions under Market Socialism

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{{Library work|title=Dialectics of Chinese Labor - Trade Unions under Market Socialism|image=Dialectics of Chinese Labor - Trade Unions under Market Socialism.png|thumb]]|author=Immanuel Ness|publisher=Brill|published_date=April 29 2026|type=Book|source=Brill|pdf=https://brill.com/display/title/74520?language=en}}

== '''Introduction: Chinese Workers under Market Socialism''' ==
For 50 years, Labor researchers and commentators have lamented that the decades-long decline in trade union representation as a worldwide phenomenon is accelerating despite the spread and growth of workers into the global South, where the majority of the world's population reside. Deindustrialization in the global North has deepened the decline of trade union membership and the societal power of trade unions, which have become less relevant in the lives of workers than at any time since the 19th century. Concomitantly, the shift and expansion of production industries to the global South have not given rise to appreciable growth in union membership. Paradoxically, robust trade unions are not emerging and existing unions are diminishing in membership and power as technological advances within workplaces have displaced workers in existing unions. Both in the North and South, workers are experiencing high levels of job insecurity. In the South, the majority of workers entering national labor markets are precarious laborers who scarcely can earn enough to survive, let alone sustain their families.

In sharp contrast to labor trends throughout most of the world, workers in China's All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the largest trade union federation in the world, are collectively experiencing substantial real wage growth, improvements to benefits and conditions on the job and labor rights within the workplace. Formed in 1925, the ACFTU has experienced unprecedented membership growth from 134 million members in 2005 to nearly 303 million members in 2018 (Xi 2018). Urban migrant workers comprise 140 million members of the Federation. Trade union membership is not compulsory, and all workers are covered by contractual bargaining agreements. Union dues are not paid by workers to the union; instead, unionized establishments must pay dues to fund trade union operations including organization, representation, raising grievances and public events.

The central argument of this book is that, while trade unions are declining worldwide, China's trade unions are thriving as the ACFTU supports the most unprecedented growth of organized members in history. The Chinese trade union movement is increasing exponentially and represents the most significant historical expansion in union membership ever, but this phenomenon is dismissed by Labor Studies research in the West which only considers as legitimate its own liberal democratic models of trade unionism. Trade unions in China are swept away as state propaganda or fake trade unionism without authentic labor representation. In essence, Western Labor Studies' perception of China's trade unions is nothing more than a form of cultural imperialism and anti-communism. Why must the Chinese working class adopt a model of trade unionism which benefits from the inequality of trade and pillage of the underdeveloped global South?

=== '''1 Labor and Trade Unions on the Periphery''' ===
This book specifically contrasts Western Labor Studies with the reality of labor relations found in transitional states of the global South (Lauesen 2024). At its core, Labor Studies in the West applies a model to labor movements worldwide without considering the structure of global capital accumulation and drawing identifiable distinctions among nation states. It is impossible to generalize the living conditions of the working classes worldwide and essential to recognize that workers struggle for improved living conditions within a world system and the transfer of value from the working class on the periphery to the core of the capitalist global economy.

The corollary is the formation of dynamic capitalist development with teeming working class democracy in the center and underdeveloped capitalism with anemic unions on the periphery of the world system. But, due to class polarization and the presence of revolutionary class conflict in the South, not all peripheral states surrender to the hegemony of the capitalist system.

Nation states on the periphery of the global economy are composed of three archetypes:

# Most peripheral states are former colonies dominated by rentier economies which are stewards of Western advanced capitalist corporations and are frequent victims of International Monetary Fund austerity programs. In most instances, but not all, peripheral economies have weak or non-existent trade unions (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Yemen).
# Semi-peripheral formations, which are subservient to Western imperialism, whose economies are not fully dependent on the imperial core and have a modicum of capital and technology but where high levels of poverty are frequently rampant. Semi-peripheral societies are polarized on the basis of class, gender and other identities. Wealth is highly stratified on the basis of class, race, religion, caste and gender. Under neoliberalism, trade unions have declined significantly and are no longer a potent societal force (Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey).
# Transitional states which resist imperialism with vigorous anti-capitalist class conflict in response to extractive and underdeveloped capitalism. Conflict often takes the form of struggle over labor and resources. These states include socialist projects (China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam) and states attempting to oppose imperialism (Burkina Faso, Mali, Nicaragua, Niger, Venezuela). Opposition to the imperialist core is intermittent and sustained. In transitional states, working class conflict is organized through political parties which have gained power to initiate the transition to socialism, as was the case in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Socialism does not occur instantly, above all because the revolutionary struggle only occurs on the underdeveloped periphery.

Transitional projects, including the former Soviet Union, unremittingly endeavor to advance and modernize technology and the means of production, recognizing that socialism must be accompanied by technological development. Though not always successful, only transitional states on the periphery have accomplished the transition from semifeudal and capitalist modes of production to socialism; most notably China is in an inchoate form. Before socialism can be achieved, the transitional state must acquire the capacity to develop a socialist mode of production. Socialism does not just appear without delay, and China and other socialist projects must encounter the opposition of the capitalist imperialist center.

Labor conflict does not follow a single pattern and occurs in three specific locations: the imperialist center (North America and Western Europe), the capitalist periphery (Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa) and transitional socialist states (like China and Cuba).

Successful labor movements require both a socialist political party and trade unions which are focused on mobilizing the working class: the party to develop plans to advance the interests of the working class writ large; and, according to socialist doctrine, trade unions which confine their efforts to improving the immediate conditions of the working class within a capitalist mode of production moving towards socialism. In no case have revolutionary transformations occurred immediately, an objective and standard which Western Marxists require but is impracticable and idealistic. Consequently, reformist parties tend to form in the capitalist core and revolutionary parties on the periphery of the global economy.

In the Preface to the 1892 edition of The Condition of the English Working Class 1844, Friedrich Engels suggests that wages and conditions for a segment of labor noticeably improved:

That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. (Engels 1892/1952, xv)

The emergence and expansion of the labor aristocracy may have driven the British capitalist class to capture a greater share of surplus value through advancing economic imperialism in the late 19th century. In this sense, the labor aristocracy is both cause and effect of British imperialism.

Due to the value-transfer by European colonialism and imperialism on the periphery, trade unions in the core turned into effective economistic institutions whose members profited through higher wages, and together with allied working-class parties adopted social democracy and reformism which created an aristocracy of labor from the mid-19th century to the present (Breman 2026). Eric Hobsbawm asserts that the British working class benefited significantly from imperialism in the 1860s:

The further we progress into the imperialist era, the more difficult does it become to put one's finger on groups of workers which did not, in one way or another, draw some advantage from Britain's position, who were not able to live rather better than they would have done in a country whose bourgeoisie possessed fewer accumulated claims to profits and dividends abroad, or power to dictate the terms of trade with backward areas. Or, since there is no simple correlation between the standard of living and political moderation, on workers who could not be made to feel that their interests depended on the continuance of imperialism. (Hobsbawm 1967, 360)

The foundation of the labor aristocracy is at all times imperialist exploitation of the periphery, a pattern which expanded from 1860s Britain to Europe and North America in the 19th century through the present. Undeniably, Hobsbawm extends the labor aristocracy in Britain who benefited from imperialism to "important bodies of hitherto unprivileged and underpaid" workers (Hobsbawm 1967, 360). Echoing Lenin, Hobsbawm asserts that the labor aristocracy is unambiguously facilitated through an alignment of social-democratic political parties and trade unions with the imperialist project (Hobsbawm 1970).

=== '''2 Trade Unions and the Transitional State in the People's Republic of China''' ===
This book draws a fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, reformist social-democratic parties and trade unions and their members in the core countries, which are beneficiaries of imperialism; and, on the other hand, peripheral transitional states with communist parties and trade unions, which are striving for revolutionary transformation. Some states have revolutionary political parties and trade union federations in power (viz. Communist Party of China (CPC) and ACFTU), and others have communist parties and federations which are challenging bourgeois democratic parties for power: viz. India's Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU); South Africa's fractured left, notably the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and independent Marxist-Leninist trade unions, including the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA); and, in Brazil, fragmented left parties and unions, including the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), the Workers Party and the splintering trade union center (Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT)). The former party–union alliances in core countries are beneficiaries of imperial plunder, and the latter resist economic imperialism. In that context, the CPC and ACFTU operate in partnership to advance socialism with Chinese characteristics, specifically improving the conditions of the working class as the economy advances. The character of a transitional state was powerfully set forth by Lenin in January 1922:

Under the transitional type of proletarian state such as ours, however, the ultimate object of every action taken by the working class can only be to fortify the proletarian state and the state power of the proletarian class by combatting bureaucratic distortions, mistakes and flaws in this state, and by curbing the class appetites of the capitalists who try to evade its control, etc. Hence, the Communist Party, the Soviet government and the trade unions must never forget and must never conceal from the workers and the mass of the working people that the strike struggle in the state where the proletariat holds political power can be explained and justified only by the bureaucratic distortions of the proletarian state. ... Hence, when friction and disputes arise between individual contingents of the working class and the individual departments and organs of the workers' state, the task of the trade unions is to facilitate the speediest and smoothest settlement of these disputes to the maximum advantage of the groups of workers they represent. ... The only correct, sound and expedient method of removing friction and of settling disputes between individual contingents of the working class and the organs of the workers' state is for the trade unions to act as mediators. (Lenin 1922/1973, 187)

Without cognizance of the stark distinction between social-democratic imperialist states and socialist transitional states, it is unrealistic to compare the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the ACFTU with Western bourgeois political parties and trade unions, aside from measuring the efficacy of mobilizing workers in defense of their class interests.

=== '''3 Trade Unions in the Transitional State''' ===
In effective transitional states with the capacity to develop productive forces and advance the interests of the working class, of necessity, trade unions must serve as a transmission belt of the communist political party.

In the PRC, the trade union is a recruiting ground for cadre in the political party. The CPC views the ACFTU as the primary institution and agency for identifying and molding party members. The role of the ACFTU is to advance the line of the CPC among the working class and to prevent counterrevolutionary forces from developing. The trade union federation is decisive in ensuring discipline within the working class. The trade union is decisive for defending the revolution as any opposition would emerge through the working class.

Foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have used labor organizations to challenge the ACFTU, mobilizing opposition within the working class through promoting the formation of similar "worker organizations" to those currently developed in the West which are opponents to the trade unions. In the 2010s, foreign NGOs funded the development of anemic workers' centers and working-class formations as an alternative to the strong and holistic trade union model. Thus, from the 1990s to the 2010s, the West has promoted weak powerless unions which typically respond on a piecemeal basis to multinational corporations and new technological applications. These associations have opposed a centralized model of trade unionism and tried to replace them with syndicalism rather than establishing a strong voice of the working class akin to the ACFTU.

The transitional state is a peripheral nation developing a socialist mode of production. By necessity, a workers' party must retain control over the dominant state apparatus, land, finance and economy. Trade unions of the transitional state have a collective responsibility to: (1) maintain an institution to defend their workers within a hostile world-system; and (2) support the state in developing the productive forces to meet human and societal needs and move towards socialism. In the course of the history of the 20th century, sacrifices have been made by the working class to try to achieve the goals of the transitional state and make headway towards the socialist mode of production. The individual workers must make every effort to adhere to socialist state planning and programs rather than advancing their economistic self-interests. Thus, in certain phases, the working class must forego immediate demands to preserve and expand the long-term collective class interests implanted by the workers' party.

The transitional state maintains a flexible economy controlled by the state sector, collective and cooperative production and private sector markets. China has propped up a significant non-public sector of national and multinational enterprises during the "opening up" period. But the CPC has also encouraged trade union struggles in all sectors of the economy among both private and state-owned enterprises. In view of the fact that the private sector employs more than 80 percent of all workers, the ACFTU's organizing achievements and improved working conditions in the non-public economy are remarkable. Workers are participants in labor disputes, which are openly documented through the state and CPC in the Chinese Statistical Yearbook and The Worker's Daily.

However, as the CPC is in command of the economy, the political line is decided by the party without an immediate need for an antagonistic contradiction between the state and the labor movement. The CPC does not deny that labor conflict continues in the transitional state. In response, it has established an expansive labor mediation court system which this book will show typically decides on the basis of workers' interests. But investment decisions are planned by the state and "socialism with Chinese characteristics" grants it the right to prioritize immediate gains in the form of consumption over investment in future gains.

The character of the trade union struggle in a transitional state is different from the trade union struggle in societies ruled be capital. In the transitional state the capitalist sector is controlled by a planned economy, in coordination with the state-owned sector. Non-public enterprises are circumscribed by the CPC and the ACFTU.

The division of the world-system into center, periphery and transition state is also reflected in the international organization of trade unions. The ACFTU and its industrial, provincial and spatial affiliates have grown to collectively represent more than 300 million workers, or about 75 percent of 400 million workers in the PRC. The foundation of this dramatic growth is what I call holistic unionism. The two primary features of holistic unionism are the will to respond to democratic demands of workers and a formidable organization which maintains and grows the capacity to compel private and public employers to comply with workers' reasonable demands. The outcome is a significant growth of trade union membership in terms of numbers, range of industrial sectors and skill levels.

The objective of this study is to present an accurate portrait of the workers' movement in China through the lens of the ACFTU, workers and Labor research. Above all, the book seeks to avoid ridicule, trivialization and oversimplification of individual case studies based on mistaken premises leading to false conclusions. Instead, it examines Chinese workers and trade unions in historical and comparative perspective and identifies the unique constraints and dynamics of a transitional state committed to advancing the collective needs of its working class. The PRC has experienced more than 70 years of protracted challenges led principally by external forces aiming to undermine its determination to improve the standard of living for urban and rural workers. In addition to showing what the PRC and its trade union federation strive to accomplish, it is necessary to show what they do not do. Reaffirming Freeman and Medoff's valuable exploration of US trade unions (1984), this book asks: What do Chinese unions do?

=== '''4 Party–Trade Union Alliance''' ===
I claim in this book that the ACFTU has fostered the growth of holistic unionism which responds to the democratic demands of workers and then organizes them into its constituent unions, representing a large majority of China's working class, through negotiating agreements with employers and advocating for the improvement of wage and benefit standards which are supported by the state. This perspective departs from what I define as Eurocentric monolithic and intentionally immoderate assessments of the Chinese trade union movement by many Western Labor Studies scholars. These unfairly dismiss the ACFTU as a legitimate representative of the working class. Such assessments frequently function as an echo chamber through failing to account for the ACFTU's achievements in improving the wages and conditions of the Chinese working class and hold the Federation up to standards which Western unions do not meet. Over and again, the labor literature on China from left to right conforms to reinforce culturally imperialist ideals and does not consider the ACFTU on its own terms and benchmarks for success: to represent the democratic aspirations of China's working class and implement the directives of the CPC. This perspective, originating in the West, contends that the West's political institutions and organizations are far superior to all others. This interpretation's Labor Studies adherents, through disparaging the PRC, engage in unqualified cultural imperialism to denigrate all other forms of governance and labor representation as inferior and even go so far as to seek to interfere in the internal affairs of other states. However, one must ask, if Western forms of trade union organization are superior, why do their initiatives have meager results?

A second claim of this book is that the ACFTU is far more effective for the Chinese working class (even if Western standards are used as the benchmark) than Western unions are for their own members. The ACFTU outperforms all other trade unions through organizing and representing workers who have the freedom to decide if they wish to join and become members of its industrial and geographic affiliates. Moreover, the ACFTU is the driver of wage increases, benefits and insurance and is a potent force in improving working conditions in a nation state which is demonstrably committed to workplace health and safety.

The PRC is not unique in preserving a trade union alliance with a political party. Numerous such examples can be found throughout the world. Moreover, in those instances when a trade union is allied with a party holding state power, workers are not compelled to go on strike. In Sweden, where the Social Democrats hold power, trade unions rarely strike to improve their wages and conditions as the alliances tend to reach settlements before strikes become necessary. The achievements of the CPC–ACFTU partnership in China flow from the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The ACFTU was formed in 1925 and affiliated with the CPC and remains committed to advancing the "dictatorship of the working class." If party–trade union alliances are a norm in countries with effective unions, then why shouldn't this also be true for the ACFTU in China? Detractors dismiss the ACFTU as beholden to the CPC, designating it as a "party-state," an insult to indicate that it is not a trade union in spite of the fact that the most effective trade unions are affiliated with a political party (Traub-Merz 2011). The expression is used so often that it has become a mistaken cliché which we must all follow at risk of facing exclusion. But academic scholarship should never rely upon or atrophy into a supposed absolute canon where research and debate are obstructed. If we narrow scholarship to uninterpretable "fact," we fail to consider history, the passage of time, new events and changing practices which bear on human subjectivity and agency.

Labor Studies in the West laments the waning of trade unions in the West and worldwide yet lacks a consensus on a strategy to counter the enduring temporal decline. Research tends to focus on employer and government opposition to unions, while some thinkers celebrate the decline and many suggest that the emergence of new working-class organizations outside of existing union structures is a positive development. Yet those who revel in the decline in existing unions have no solution to staunch the regression of genuine working-class organizations dedicated to advancing members' interests. Instead, some Labor Studies scholars view the weak and practically passive trade unions as paving the way for democratic labor power in the absence of resilient and established unions. Advocates of autonomous worker uprisings and riots in response to the injustice of capitalists dismiss the value of organization. Political parties and trade unions are obsolete vestiges of past generations of workers. This book claims that it is true that new approaches to organizing workers are important as a consequence of technological change which creates new labor processes. It may also be true that a large number of existing trade unions in the West are both bureaucratic and uninspiring to a labor force which has shifted away from manufacturing towards the service sector and digital economy. But if that were the case, why in the West have so many labor initiatives sprouted up encouraging people to join unions, especially among workers outside highly socialized workplaces like factories but also including small and sporadic service establishments such as coffee shops and, increasingly, the digital economy, where workers are atomized and isolated from most of their peers?

Undeniably, a reason for the decline in the ability of trade unions on the periphery to represent workers has been their weakness in confronting neoliberalist practices which have become integrated into capitalist global supply chains. A related weakness has been their submission to conditions of foreign direct investment aimed at producing commodities and delivering natural resources at low cost. By doing so, trade unions have weakened and now lack the capacity to represent workers, let alone improve wages. Western economic imperialism condemns workers on the periphery to a subordinate position in global production. Consumers in core countries benefit from lower cost commodities resulting through the inequality of international trade (Emmanuel 1972/2025). In the postcolonial era, the value of production in the global South remains subservient to rich countries of the North, and the South's trade unions are captives to international capitalist markets which assign a lower value to the labor of Southern workers. Accordingly, Labor scholars searching for the reason why trade unions are declining in the global South even as industrialization is growing will find their answer in the depreciation of the value of production through trade. Certainly, labor unions in the South are incapable of overcoming unequal exchange of international trade which consigns workers to perpetual subordination. In contrast, under China's market socialism, wages, benefits, working conditions and ecological conditions are gradually improving. Holistic unionism is defined through the ACFTU's charge and commitment to improve the standard of living of the Chinese working class, its responsiveness to worker demands and its authority to improve wage standards and working conditions.

Labor scholar Zhang Zhongyuan contends that, despite the entry of non-public managers into the CPC, trade union organizers retain their focus on improving living standards and defending and improving the conditions of workers due to the historical legacies of revolution that "haunt would-be" class enemies. Consequently, the party and trade union are compelled to continuously deliver positive material outcomes for workers precisely because of their own first and second generational knowledge of immiserated and desperate workers. They represent a working-class stratum highly sympathetic to employees. Western critics of the PRC may identify ACFTU organizers supportive of non-public enterprises in rare instances. But organizers are occasionally supportive of employers to preserve the jobs of members. Zhang Zhongyuan contrasts ACFTU organizers who are devoted to advancing the material interests of workers qualitatively unlike "bought" union officials who are routinely found in the West or global South (Zhang 2025).

=== '''5. Applying Utopian Ideas to Historical Materialism''' ===
The analysis of the form and character of the ACFTU is derived from data available in ACFTU archives, the China University of Labor Relations, trade union university archives, interviews with trade union officials, Labor scholars, interviews with workers, ethnographic in situ studies with enterprise managers, workers, interview data, research on employer practices, long and all-embracing discussions with academics and students in China, and research and evaluation of NGOs in Hong Kong. This research began in 2013 and continues to the present.

This book is also based upon a study of a major 2014 strike among about 40,000 workers at a factory making athletic shoes in Dongguan, and evaluation of ethnographic work I conducted among NGO operatives embracing a range of perspectives in opposition to China and its labor movement (Ness 2015; Schmalz et al. 2016). The names of informants are confidential. Briefly, NGO operatives failed to provide convincing evidence of their claims and seemed to be in competition for foreign funding to advance a universal agenda to discredit and shame the PRC, as they do in other contexts. The US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government agency, alone spends $10 million annually to disparage China (Yu 2021). The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and today's reconstituted International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), as well as national Western trade unions, have used enormous resources, directly or through Western NGOs, to influence trade unions on the periphery towards social democracy. In Hong Kong, NGOs have attempted to build a trade union confederation in opposition to the State and have stationed labor NGOs in Hong Kong and beyond focused on unsettling the ACFTU.

To genuinely comprehend the chinesen model of trade union representation one must comprehend the goals and objectives of the Marxist Leninist model developed and advanced by V. I. Lenin in the Soviet Union and adopted by Mao Zedong based on the leadership of the CPC. In short, the CPC personifies the dictatorship of the proletariat and exercises absolute control over the political sphere; the ACFTU, as its affiliated trade union, must follow the general directives of the party.

Labor Studies literature in the West is uncompromising and one-sided in opposition to actually existing socialist projects. However, some Labor critics are silent on the question of the hegemony of the CPC over independent political perspectives. To some, the introduction of market socialism under Deng Xiaoping represented a clear-cut ideological break with the CPC under Mao Zedong. However, if one reads the literature carefully, the goals and objectives of Deng Xiaoping and his successors were predominantly serving the state in accordance with the principles of the 1949–76 era. Certainly, the market socialist system represents a divergence from the path towards socialism, but, according to the speeches and writings of Deng Xiaoping, the state remains committed to the path of developing and perfecting its socialist system. Labor Studies researchers share a common predisposition which is motivated by a partisanship categorically opposed to the transitory chinesen socialist state and socialism with chinesen characteristics.

By no means does this book claim that all critics are analogous, but the vast majority are disposed to use an idealistic perspective to evaluate China based on their own favorite political outlooks. Taken together, those who dare to cast a more accurate view of China based on what the state seeks to achieve and grounded in its distinct form of socialism will confront pervasive derision and ridicule from respectable Labor scholars in the West. Careful and attentive thinkers may come to a more nuanced conclusion which is not filled with polemical invective and animosity towards China, past and present. The meticulous work of Isabella Weber, for example, demonstrates that, in contrast to almost every other country, China did not succumb to US-led neoliberal policies. Instead, it retained control over state owned enterprises and maintained collective ownership over agriculture (Weber 2021). Taken together, China's workers also benefited from a strong and protective trade union federation which shielded them from the extreme forms of exploitation found in the periphery and former socialist states after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Likewise, Barry Naughton contemplates how China measures up to four features of socialism without engaging in absolutes. Although his analysis ignores the concept of the principal contradiction which the state must always contemplate, at least it has a measure of rigor and an absence of bias (Naughton 2017).

=== '''Capitalist and Socialist Markets and the Reserve Army of Labor''' ===
Interpretation of the natural world must go beyond a historical trajectory and be repeatedly revised to reflect changes in the workers' material conditions and the new subjectivities they will respond to in their new reality. From 1978 to 2025, no working class experienced a greater transformation of its environment and material conditions than China's. Mass migration of the rural working class to urban centers permanently transformed the lived environment and the production process for 400 million workers. Marxists must recognize that the natural world is in continuous transformation as conditions are never fixed and static but change in response to the development and application to work of new technology. If workers live under capitalism or socialism, change is the common denominator. The difference is that, under capitalism, the motive force of changing relations to production is the constant pursuit of profit through the extraction of surplus value from workers.

The development of new technology under socialism is not motivated by profit but by a determination to improve working conditions and reduce the exploitation of labor and the environment. As the dominant form of production, capitalism is in continuous search of profit through investing in new instruments of production and technology to increase productivity and reduce the cost of labor, thus generating higher surplus value through extracting higher value from each worker as the pool of necessary labor declines. If workers are more productive, individual wages may increase or decline, depending on skill and training. Conversely, surplus value can be extracted if capital is not invested in new technology through deliberately maintaining obsolete machinery and equipment and increasing the intensity of work. Instead of investing in modern productive instruments of production, capitalists can increase the exploitation of labor by lengthening the workday, withholding investment in occupational safety and disregarding government labor laws which protect workers against, for example, child labor and erratic payment of wages.

We can compare the rickshaw puller to the development of the auto-rickshaw and then the automobile, and platform technology through which the worker directly engages in work and transactions with the consumer, without the employer as intermediary. Business strategies established on the intentional non-subsumption of capital and superexploitation of labor generate surplus value up until the point when the reserve army of labor is depleted. Contrary to the capitalist market, where surplus value is the solitary goal of the capitalist, market socialism invests in new technology to improve the working conditions of labor. However, the socialist market can also generate a reserve army of labor. But the difference is that the state controls the contradictions of the market through directly intervening in it to defend workers. Certainly, a reserve army of labor is likely to emerge under market socialism. But the decisive difference is that the state takes responsibility for the well-being of workers through interceding and defending those who are displaced and exposed to the market economy. The socialist state is compelled to protect and secure the prosperity of displaced workers before they become precarious.

The trade union is the intermediary between the market and workers. In the Chinese socialist market economy, the trade union is charged by the CPC to defend workers' rights. Modern Chinese market socialism operates in accordance with the policy under which the trade union must become a transmission belt to advance the maturing working-class state, a model theorized and carried out by Lenin.

One of the greatest and most serious dangers confronting the numerically small CPC (which, as the vanguard of the working class, is guiding a vast country in the process of transition to socialism, for the time being without the direct support of the more advanced countries) is isolation from the masses: the danger that the vanguard may run too far ahead and fail to "straighten out the line," fail to maintain firm contact with the whole army of labor, that is, with the overwhelming majority of workers and peasants. Just as the very best factory, with the very best motors and first-class machines, will be forced to remain idle if the transmission belts from the motors to the machines are damaged, so our work of socialist construction must meet with inevitable disaster if the trade unions—the transmission belts from the Communist Party to the masses—are badly fitted or function badly. It is not sufficient to explain, to reiterate and corroborate this truth; it must be backed up organizationally by the whole structure of the trade unions and by their everyday activities. (Lenin 1922/1973, 192)

It is essential for the trade union (not some other organization or party within or outside the state) to abide by the CPC to defend and improve worker rights and conditions. This salience of the trade union is decisive in defending workers as it is expected to carry out the objectives of the working class which sustain the socialist system. Fundamentally, under market socialism, the state apparatus restrains the harsh effects of unemployment and redundancy through safeguarding the working class. In China, it is the party and the union which bear the exclusive responsibility of responding to the democratic demands of the working class, not an external body which may or may not consider worker interests paramount. Unlike capitalist systems, the state's charge is to continuously promote the upgrading of technology and to make certain that the conditions of all workers are improved. Market forces are weakened by the socialist state, which prevents the unpredictability of the market.

To be sure, workers engage in democratic protest and appeals to the state as a means of struggle. The state is not challenged by workers' democracy as it stands for the interests of the working class, which openly demands improvement in its material conditions within primarily private workplaces through the ACFTU, the subjective agency representing its class interests under market socialism. Accordingly, the state does not need to be prompted by external forces to defend workers. The economic churning of the urban economy has posed new challenges to workers confronting manufacturing, new technology, displacement and the emergence of a vast urban economy composed of new forms of employment. The ACFTU is prepared to adjust its organizing strategies based on its experiences of the urban economy. The Federation is now prepared for the new economic forms in technology and the rise of the digital economy. Decisively, China is still a rural country with a rural population of about 500 million. While rural workers have greater flexibility under market socialism, all workers in urban and rural regions can always return to their own plots of land. The China state continues to own all property under market socialism. The safety valve of the rural economy confers on all workers a right to live on and work the land. Xinyu Lu emphasizes the preservation of socialism in China through the state's continued formal ownership of all property (Lu 2024).

=== '''Chapter Outlines''' ===
Chapter 2 compares Western trade unions and the legacies of trade unions designed by European colonial authorities which endured following independence to the China model of trade unions. The chapter evaluates the Chinese trade union movement using both Western metrics and the distinct goals and objectives of the CPC. A principal claim of the book is that the Western trade union model is failing the working classes of the global South as it has always been dominated by the imperialist model, which is rooted in the unequal exchange of trade and constrains workers' capacity to achieve their democratic and socialist aspirations. On the periphery, an upper stratum of workers may benefit but most are relegated to subordinate and marginal status and excluded by existing unions, most notably in South Asia.

Chapter 3 examines the central features of the ACFTU and the distortions about it advanced by Western scholars. The investigation provides concrete evidence that the ACFTU is a responsible trade union which operates within the China socialist state.

Chapter 4 compares the ACFTU to trade unions worldwide over the past 50 years and demonstrates that not only is it true to its calling of advancing the interests of the China working class, but it also scores far better than any other trade union on the basis of meeting their material needs and improving their working conditions.

Chapter 5 focuses on China's rural–urban migrant workers as the foundation of the country's growing economic prosperity under market socialism and the successful, tripartite state, party and trade union initiatives to absorb hundreds of millions of workers into the urban economy. China's internal migration from rural to urban areas is the largest population transfer in human history. In a span of 40 years, the country's population voluntarily moved to urban areas. Migration from rural areas to the cities in China did not result in the development of urban slums and underserved settlements that are present throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Chinese migrant workers are commonly identified as "floating workers," as it is impossible to fully economically integrate them as residents in destination cities, even though they are indispensable to the economic vitality of the nation. This chapter contends that most critics neglect or ignore the formidable challenge to the state of incorporating the masses into urban areas through granting official resident status to workers and their families. More accurately, the CPC's rapid pace of integrating migrant workers and their families into urban life is unparalleled among nations, especially considering the vast size of the population. Urban migration is growing more rapidly than the high rates anticipated by the state. To be sure, incorporating hundreds of millions of people into urban zones is a formidable task which is not without complications. Seeking doctrinal purity without allowance for error, Western opponents seek out examples of organizational imperfection and focus on adversities, temporary setbacks, aberrations and those who are inevitably passed over.

Labor migration in the West was predominantly interstate migration from Europe to colonial outposts, which displaced Indigenous people. In China, urban migration has given rise to economic growth and prosperity. Internal migration to urban regions is most prominent in China but is also a formative demographic phenomenon throughout the developing world. If Chinese urban workers are mobilizing into trade unions at an exceptional rate, why are urban workers in comparable countries not joining unions? Even in a planned economy, inescapably, China's market socialism will produce job loss through the development of new technology and higher productivity.

Chapter 6 examines the emergence of the digital economy as a leading source of employment for China's urban working class. The ACFTU must persistently study and revise its organizing strategy to the realities of new labor markets, notably the digital economy. Urbanization and the loss of industrial jobs have given rise to the expansion of jobs in the digital economy, a labor market which requires the ACFTU and its constituent unions to launch new organizing campaigns throughout China. The formidable task of organizing digital workers into the ACFTU is incomplete and ongoing, but the Federation has become a model for labor organizing worldwide.

Chapter 7 examines the unique nature of the Chinese labor movement, which represents the transforming nature of the working class in what I call holistic unionism. The ACFTU responds to the working class's demands through bottom-up democratic unionism and has the capacity to advance their demands through its top-down capacity to respond through a strong and effective union and political party. To comprehend the significance of the ACFTU's proficiency to represent the democratic aspirations of the working class both practically and theoretically, one must measure the political and class unity within the political apparatus of the Chinese Communist state.

Chapter 8 challenges the prevailing literature in the West on the Chinese labor movement. Taken together, the literature is dismissive of the CPC and the ACFTU. To evaluate the merits of the ACFTU, research must study the objectives of the trade union federation and measure its success or failure on the basis of its ability to measure up to the goals. Categorically, the ACFTU is driven by its charge by the CPC to enable the working class to advance its material conditions, labor process and environment. The ACFTU affiliation with a party is unexceptional as many trade unions across the world, especially in transitional states, maintain a similar relationship. But the party–labor alliance does not conform to the Western Labor Studies literature, which stipulates that trade unions must organize in capitalist states. However, in the China transitional state, the party–trade union alliance is required to modernize and develop while meeting the needs of the working class. Over the past 50 years or so, this alliance has served the working class well. However, Western Labor scholars expect immediate results when their own trade unions are in a state of inertia and declining precipitously.

In Chapter 9, the Conclusion, I assess socialism with Chinese characteristics through the lens of the working class and its trade union representative. To do so, one must understand how the trade union movement determinedly adapts its organizing to the new contradictions which workers encounter in urban areas and in new economic forms of work. In this way, I show how workers' democratic demands strengthen the ACFTU and its affiliates to meet the objectives of a forward moving union dedicated to the working class. As new material conditions transform the work process, the ACFTU is striving to reflect the new subjectivities of workers across China.

Even if the ACFTU were compared to Western trade unions, it would be seen to be faring well. Worker membership, which is non-compulsory, has grown significantly over the past 25 years as labor unions have encountered new developmental challenges. Thus, while the ACFTU is continuously challenged by technological change and the emergence of new labor markets, using both the transitional state and Western metric, the Federation is nothing less than a remarkably effective representative of the Chinese working class.

This book will show how the ACFTU is meeting the challenge of organizing urban migrant workers as well as workers entering new forms of employment in the digital and logistics sectors. The ACFTU responds to the democratic demands of the working class and is charged by the CPC to organize and represent workers to improve their wages and conditions. As China's developing economy modernizes, and the working class enters new forms of work with high technology, workers in private enterprises seek to increase their wages and improve their quality of life while often encountering difficult working conditions. The ACFTU has exhibited the capacity to respond to labor demands and to request that technology companies which have expanded with new forms of employment should now directly hire workers and improve wages, benefits and working conditions.

== Workers and Labor under Capitalism and Socialism ==
<blockquote>'Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. (Eleanor Roosevelt 1933)'</blockquote>This book challenges the dominant perspective that working class representation based on Western models of trade unionism and cooperatives are the most successful paradigm for improving the conditions of workers. In contrast, this book asserts that the Western model of trade union representation has only opposed employers in specific moments of upsurge and then exclusively to reduce the intensity of social movements to improve wages and working conditions. As this model was discredited under neoliberalism and the 50-year decline of trade unionism in the West, labor organizations in the global South have declined at a steeper rate at a time when wages are declining, and labor exploitation has reached its highest form. Yet, despite the mostly dismal record of trade unions over the past half-century, Labor researchers remain committed to the Western bourgeois democratic form as the ideal model for the entire world, at a time when the global working class is larger than ever.

In sharp contrast to the Western model of trade unionism, which has declined and withered over the past 50 years, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has experienced significant success as it has organized into its affiliates approximately 75 percent of all 402 million workers in China. The ACFTU has organized in all sectors of the Chinese socialist market economy: from state owned enterprises to foreign multinationals and private (non-public) enterprises which have emerged over the past 20 years in response to the entry of hundreds of millions of workers into the digital economy. In the past decade, as China has increasingly focused on developing a modern service economy, technology and digital information services, major firms have turned to using platform economy workers. Industrial modernization continuously drives the ACFTU to focus on new organizing in manufacturing as well as new employment forms composed of workers who are not directly hired by technology companies and are not unionized. Over the past decade, the ACFTU has achieved significant success in responding to the democratic aspirations of workers to join trade unions through organizing them into trade unions. This book examines the multifarious mechanisms of organizing in a range of economic sectors and compares them to unions worldwide which have not had the success of the ACFTU. The book also challenges the Western Labor researchers who have a uniformly derisive perspective on the ACFTU and espouse the transformation of the Chinese market socialist economy, which is designed to benefit the working class, into a fully Western bourgeois democratic model where individual interests take precedence over the collective material subjectivity of the working class. While the Chinese opening up, known as market socialism, has displaced workers and paved the way for the world’s largest migration in history, the Chinese state and the ACFTU have unremittingly strived to protect workers from exploitation. Certainly, there are exceptions to every practice, even if they are advanced for the common good. From the origins of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has endeavored to improve and modernize the material conditions of the working class and masses. The opening up and introduction and expansion of market socialism have ended poverty and transformed China into a modern economy under the leadership of the CPC.

In 2015, General Secretary Xi Jinping cautioned trade unions to serve as a responsive transmission belt to advance working class interests to advance socialism with Chinese characteristics. The work of the trade unions, Communist Youth League, Women’s Federation and other mass organizations is to advance socialism. To do so, he said:<blockquote>Trade unions, the Communist Youth League, the Women’s Federation, and other mass organizations must persist in emancipating their minds, reforming and innovating, forging ahead with determination, and working diligently. They must earnestly maintain and enhance the political, progressive, and mass character of the Party’s mass organization work and its organizations, organize and mobilize … to channel their pursuit of a better life into a powerful force … to achieve … the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. (Jian 2015)</blockquote>Xi added that the mass character of trade unions was their fundamental characteristic, and trade unions were obligated to advance the interests of the working class. A crucial necessity:<blockquote>They should prioritize the masses in their work and activities, allowing them to play the leading role, rather than being treated as supporting characters or spectators. We must pay more attention to, care for, and show concern for the ordinary people, visiting thousands of homes, understanding their concerns, and building close ties with them. We must frequently engage in face-to-face, hand-in-hand, and heart-to-heart contact with the masses to foster genuine affection for them. We must vigorously strengthen organizations, especially grassroots organizations, and accelerate the development of organizations in new areas and among new social classes. Mass organizations and their cadres, especially those in leading bodies, must reach out to the grassroots and the masses, striving to be loyal practitioners of the purpose of serving the people wholeheartedly, refine adherents of the Party’s mass line, and experts in the Party’s mass work. (Jian 2015)</blockquote>General Secretary Xi’s speech, just three years after taking office, was a clarion call to the ACFTU to consistently respond to the material subjective demands of common workers, a declaration which was adopted by the federation. In the ensuing years, the ACFTU has overcome significant hurdles to respond to technological modernization and the renovation of the labor market, which poses new demands to organize and improve the conditions of workers. The ACFTU does not rest on its past laurels and formulates new strategies for organization which have had significant success adjusting to change through new models of organizing workers. Contrary to detractors, the ACFTU responds to worker demands and takes responsibility for improving worker conditions in the private and public sectors. In sum, the ACFTU represents a holistic union which both listens to workers and responds vigorously to challenges. The measure of a successful trade union is not just numbers but performance. For Lenin, rank-and-file activism and spontaneity without organization are insufficient to build sustained working-class power. As a holistic union, the ACFTU must have the capacity to advance workers’ interests through organizational and numerical effectiveness. Even the ACFTU concedes that it must assess itself and regroup to meet the changing demands of the workforce, which takes time and practice.

Almost all the Labor Studies literature discounts and maligns the ACFTU because it does not operate in the image of Western unions. It decries the ACFTU as ineffective when workers take militant action and repressive when workers do not strike. The positions advanced by detractors are advanced by schools of thought from the reactionary right to the ultraleft. They seek to undermine China, which unifies all currents through social imperialism.

Repeatedly, even if their analysis does not denigrate China’s labor movement, adversaries routinely apply a double binding critique: If there is labor peace, then the Chinese state is deemed authoritarian; if labor conflict and strikes are widespread, then there is pervasive opposition to the Chinese labor movement. In this way, the ACFTU is “placed in a Catch-22, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ contradiction whereby it is impossible to satisfy Western labor studies critics” (Bateson 2020).

Opponents of Chinese socialism reflexively reject any positive attributes of the Chinese state which cannot be reformed to resemble Western liberal democracies; democracies which they consider to be the optimal form of government. Their critique ignores and dismisses factual evidence drawn from genuine events and organizations which impact on the Chinese working class. If ACFTU advances working conditions and wages, Western critics will search for shortcomings and even failure. Thus, if local unions negotiate wage increases, opponents may criticize the shortage of rank-and-file participation in collective bargaining. If trade union members go on strike, China will be criticized as incapable of representing workers and negotiating contracts with management. If workers do not go on strike, the state will be deemed authoritarian, heavy handed or aloof.

Western critics want nothing short of transforming the socialist state into a capitalist liberal democracy or a communist utopia. They disparage the ACFTU for restricting strikes to “cellular” local and municipal conflict. Instead, they give the impression that the only means to improve conditions is through the formation of a national labor movement which seeks to overthrow the socialist state. In other words, they want nothing short of removing the CPC and the “party-state” as the representative of worker interests. The ACFTU is ridiculed as an extension of the state which prevents workers from democratic and local action, a position refuted even by Western-funded NGOs which are critical of the PRC.

Not all critics are opponents of socialist China but appear from among supporters of the pre-1978 opening up. These historical works provide valid evidence within a specific temporal era but require modification through new evaluations and altering our previous thinking. Mao Zedong (Tse-Tung) asserts that we must update our evaluations of the material world based on our cognition and the emergence of the discovery of knowledge rather than remain stationary in response to the introduction of explanations based on factual evidence and understandings which have been obscured by strictly enforced prevailing interpretations. In ''Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?'' Mao Zedong stresses that sufficient perceptual comprehension is required before revising our conceptual knowledge, representing the first stage of cognition “from objective matter to subjective consciousness from existence to ideas” followed by bringing ideas back to existence. But in social struggle the advanced class may be defeated since they do not have the power “as the forces of reaction are temporarily defeated but they are bound to triumph sooner or later.” Mao continues: “Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice” (Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-Tung 1963/2001, 17).

So, while some perspectives rest on truths and honest assessments which may have been correct in a specific period, as policies and activities change with the passage of time and the acquisition of new knowledge we must reassess our prior perceptions. This book calls attention to the development of the ACFTU over the past 25 years and calls for an examination and reevaluation through studying the dominant currents occurring over this interval, especially the second half of the past quarter century under the leadership of Xi Jinping from 2012 to the present.

=== 1. The Decline and Fall of Western Trade Unionism ===
How do we rescue workers in the South from the application of the Western imposed liberal and false leftist constructs of trade unions which have also served to undermine communist and socialist oriented unions from waging militant demands and even seeking state power? How are unions challenging capitalism, neoliberalism, imperialism and attendant unequal exchange which impoverish most of the working class in the global South? What are the best practices of trade unionism and why do Western scholars oppose them? This book focuses on the Chinese labor movement and counters inaccurate and dismissive Western perspectives which seek to diminish the significance of workers and class struggle under socialism.

The first claim of this book to be elaborated in Chapter 3 is that Western imperialist models of trade unionism throughout the world have catastrophically failed to stem the onslaught of neoliberal capitalist restructuring and outsourcing. Western unions reached an apogee in the 20th century through consolidating labor upsurge among the industrial working classes in Europe and North America. However, since about 1980, industrial unions of the West have failed workers and declined as a democratic source of representation in public and private workplaces.

The Western model of trade unions has been fatal to the Southern working class. In the post-Second World War independence era, Western unions (inherited by emergent states through maintaining the colonial models of trade unions which defended a thin layer of privileged workers while excluding most workers) produced deep inequality within and between states. Unions in the South have maintained the identical turgid system of representation and collective bargaining which failed in the North. In impoverished newly independent countries, the vast majority of workers had no union representation, lacked job security and worked under destituting and precarious conditions. Since the 1980s, the rise of neoliberalism and the shift of production industries to Asia, Africa and Latin America, wealthy countries have become beneficiaries of the near absence of trade unions and the failure to organize. Unequal exchange in trade has depressed the value of commodities produced in poor countries, giving rise to the shift in global production to the South. By extension, it has also increased the extraction of relative and absolute surplus value and devalued the price of natural resources by blocking most countries from acquiring the technology to refine and fabricate their own products for trade with rich countries.

=== 2. Marginal Gains for a Minority of Workers ===
The second claim of this book is that the Western archetype of labor–management relations has not palpably improved the wage conditions of workers in poor countries but has contained and restricted the militancy of workers and resulted in marginal gains for a minority of organized public and private employees. Most workers lack access to labor representation and are prevented from forming new unions. Over 50 years of neoliberal capitalism since the 1970s, trade unions have declined in both the West and worldwide, reducing living standards and working-class social organization in workplaces. The Western model of unionism which had proliferated throughout the world as a result of cultural imperialism has not staunched the decline of wages and working conditions. In the West, the decline in unions has depressed wages and unraveled local social organization, contributing to working-class individualism, isolation and the rise of right-wing populism. In the West, as unions declined, per capita GDP broadly increased along with inequality in rich countries. Yet, a labor aristocracy became ascendant as most workers benefited from economic imperialism and the extraction of surplus labor from poor countries through the unequal exchange of trade, reducing the cost of most commodities.

In most of the global South outside China, a small percentage of workers are union members. Those few unions which exist are holdovers from the colonial era and are mostly weak and ineffective in representing precarious workers, who are commonly jobless. Almost all existing trade unions in poor countries are ineffectual legacies of colonial era labor regimes. After independence, these exclusionary trade unions, frequently in the public sector, were often disinclined to advance the broader demands for workers and peasants. Since the 1970s, remaining trade union membership has eroded with the direction of most foreign direct investment (FDI) to those countries with low rates of unionization. To accommodate capital investment, labor unions typically engage in the labor–management models inherited from the metropoles. In the capitalist West, trade unions and their members were beneficiaries of consumption generated by unequal exchange through trade with poor countries (Breman 1996).

The Western labor–management model imposed on the South failed to mobilize most workers into unions but typically represented a fraction of the working class in the public and private sectors. Most Western enthusiasts supporting labor representation assert that workers are obstructed from organizing into trade unions by management opposition and anti-labor government regulations. Admittedly, capitalist states of the South regard trade unions as inimical to generating FDI and appealing to multinational corporations. Even if most workers may ordinarily support union representation, employers and the state caution that unions deter foreign investment. Even in Nordic social-democracies, trade union density has declined since the 2000s to accommodate capital (Kollmeyer 2021; Visser 2024). Western trade unions strive to demonstrate that they are actively fighting for all workers’ rights, when most unions are in fact just consolidating the militancy of organized labor, comprising a small segment of the working class organized in past generations.

=== 3. Socialist and Communist Contexts for Worker Empowerment ===
The third claim of this book is that the most successful working-class organizations over the past 75 years emerged in socialist states with communist political parties linked to trade union federations. Notably, in the first 25 years of the 21st century, the most effective membership representation and organizing can be found in the PRC, where more workers are represented than in any other state and outnumber those found in the two major international federations of unions combined. We recognize that this claim is anathema to almost all Western trade unionists and diverges from the abundant Labor scholarship viewing Chinese unions as lacking autonomy from a “party-state” which denies workers basic labor rights. However, if one examines Chinese unions, they provide far more safeguards to workers, negotiate collective bargaining agreements, protest against employers and frequently go on strike to improve wages and conditions. Local labor leaders at grassroots unions and non-public enterprises are democratically elected by rank-and-file members considerably more often than in Western unions (Ness 2015). From about 1995 to 2015, Chinese wages began to appreciably rise as a result of FDI and multinational relocation of production from higher wage regions. As a consequence of rising wage demands, Chinese workers began job actions at multinational and private enterprises. From 2005 to 2015, foreign private investment in private sector enterprises incited a rise in labor unrest for higher wages and improved conditions. Even today, foreign capital and multinational corporations seek to rein in union organizing in new sectors of the economy; viz technology, EVs, digital platform economy, including workers employed in logistics, ride hailing, food delivery and transportation. Digital workers employed in the private sector are organizing to improve their wages and conditions even if many are still exploited by their employers in much the same way as in the rest of the world. Yet, the rate of digital workers’ union membership in China is far higher than in any other nation: some 24 percent of workers were identified as union members in a recent study (Tu & Wang 2024).

Most importantly, as this book argues, the Chinese state seeks to ensure that all workers are mobilized into trade unions. Of course, not all trade unions are equally effective in representing their members. But, in contrast to critics in the West, we assert that the right to join and become a member of a union is a form of industrial democracy and social right which rarely occurs elsewhere (Andreas 2019). Naysayers and opponents claim that China has no unions, because all are ultimately affiliated with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). However, it is also true that many other countries have only one peak labor federation. Critics will charge that ACFTU is an arm of the CPC, yet it is also true that many unions in other parts of the world are affiliates of political parties in power.

In India, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh federation (BMS), or Indian Workers’ Union, is an affiliate of the Bharata Janata Party, India’s ruling party, in much the same way as ACFTU is associated with the CPC in China. In India, sketchy government statistics exhibit that less than 5 percent of workers are organized into unions; even as trade union centers claim to have more members than they have in reality (Kumar & Jha 2025). India has several other central trade union federations affiliated with political parties: for example, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) is associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Likewise, from 1994 to 2024, South Africa has been dominated by a tripartite alliance linking the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). In China, ACFTU is affiliated with the CPC, which gained power in 1949. By its very nature, ACFTU is a peak labor federation, just as distinct national unions exist in many other countries. Concomitantly, in countries with weak labor movements, major independent federations are present. In still other cases, major unions have split from a political party: for example, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), a militant industrial union in South Africa, split with COSATU and formed a new federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions. All in all, divisions dilute the power of labor federations.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the neoliberal pro-capitalist federation of the West, considers itself the model of “democratic unionism,” even if many workers in these Western-oriented trade unions do not participate in the union activity. It simply represents a clearing house of unions which are committed to capitalism and labor–management collective bargaining, despite members and non-members being in dire need of representation. Its leaders view themselves as democratic on the grounds that they are elected by members, but most ITUC national federations do not have free elections where union leaders are chosen by the rank and file. For example, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the largest national union, selects its leadership through mostly handpicked delegates who are functionaries in line with the AFT’s policies, including its neocon foreign policy supportive of US war and intervention. Workers have scant capacity to elect even local leadership, unlike communist unions in China where local committees form to determine tactics and strategy and are supported by the state in bargaining with management. In the West, notably the US, trade unions represent a small share of the labor force.

At the dawn of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s, the new trade unions emerging in the global South and even the West to defend the new industrial or service sector workers were viewed by Labor scholars as fonts of democracy and the model of class struggle unionism (Chun 2011; Seidman 1994; Silver 2003). Yet, these unions operated within the constraints of labor–management relations established by capital and the state, under which class conflict was contained and limited by collective bargaining agreements and deunionization. Western Marxists viewed the objective of new union formations in Brazil, South Africa and Korea as recognizing workers’ legitimate representatives who would reach collective bargaining agreements with emerging and expanding industrial corporations. The ideal was to establish labor regimes which would reflect those in the advanced economies, where trade unions were in decline as capital moved to the South to extract surplus profits through the international division of labor. In contrast to the industrial economies of the North, workers in the South acceded to lower wages through unequal exchange achieved under the inequality of trade between core and peripheral countries.

David Harvey explained wage inequality between workers in core and peripheral countries as a spatial fix in which capital relocated to regions with lower wages to capture higher levels of surplus value than could be achieved in the original location. His observation of the spatial fix did not recognize imperialism as a guiding force for the relocation of capital to new low-wage regions on the periphery. In his most highly cited article, he asserts that:<blockquote>capitalism has to fix space (in immoveable structures of transport and communication nets, as well as in built environments of factories, roads, houses, water supplies, and other physical infrastructures) in order to overcome space (achieve a liberty of movement through low transport and communication costs). This leads to one of the central contradictions of capital: that it has to build a fixed space (or “landscape”) necessary for its own functioning at a certain point in its history only to have to destroy that space (and devalue much of the capital invested therein) at a later point in order to make way for a new “spatial fix” (openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories) at a later point in its history. (Harvey 2001, 25)</blockquote>The legacy of imperialism is fully absent from Harvey’s analysis, where footloose capital will just flow to its lowest level without distinguishing the shift in production to low-wage countries in the South.

The objective was rarely, if ever, to advance union democracy or industrial rights; workers advanced their class rights in the global South with only a mixed record of effectiveness. Imposing the dominant trade unions in the South significantly reveals the particular nature of the nation state, be that the ubiquitous form of neoliberal capitalism, and less so, social democracy or socialism. It is not the nature of trade unions which determines labor conditions but the nature of the state. Yet, while Southern workers could not obtain workplace democracy, social democracies of Western Europe strived for these rights, which were undermined by neoliberalism in the 1980s (Dukes & Streeck 2023). This book argues that only in China do all workers have the right to union membership. The right to a union does not require class conflict, but the nature of the union is a function of the social organization of the enterprise or workplace.

=== 4. Workers’ Rights and Power under Actually Existing Socialism ===
This book’s fourth and most significant claim is that workers under actually existing socialist states (AES), specifically China, hold far more political and democratic rights and economic power at the workplace. For over 75 years, Labor Studies scholars have repudiated AES and dismissed socialist countries as inauthentic representatives of the working class. However, the status of workers under socialism does not always require conflict as it does in capitalist states. To be sure, cynics may argue that workers in multinational corporations and contractors do not have equivalent rights to those in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). However, under Chinese socialism, workers engage in class conflict in opposition to multinational and domestic private corporations within the contours of a socialist state which stands up for them in labor disputes and strikes.

Fundamentals of labor–management relations in capitalist states are not applicable to China’s AES. Consequently, measures applied to assess Western labor are often not relevant to most trade unions and workers in China.

# '''Union density.''' In China, all those defined as workers are members of a trade union on a local, city, provincial, industrial and national basis. In the West, union density is essential for measuring the strength of a union. Over the last 50–60 years, on the whole, union density has declined throughout the world, with the exception of China and Cuba. In 2025, the PRC estimated that 300 million out of 402 million workers were registered members of the ACFTU and its industrial, provincial, municipal, district and street level affiliate unions, a union density rate of 75 percent (see Figure 1).
# '''Expansive labor courts.''' Chinese labor courts almost always support workers in disputes with management. The Chinese state has significantly increased the number of labor courts to mediate, arbitrate and adjudicate labor–management disputes. With the assistance of the ACFTU, workers have won 95 percent of cases brought against employers.
# '''Strikes and on-the-job actions.''' Chinese workers go on strike just as workers do in the West. However, most Western scholars deride such strikes as ineffective despite the fact that external Western monitors consider them to merit attention. Even the now defunct China Labour Bulletin (CLB), a Western-funded NGO in Hong Kong, documents strike activity throughout China, in many cases without accuracy. However, unlike most countries, the Chinese state typically supports striking workers over management in the private sector as well as the burgeoning public sector, where strikes typically do not occur, especially if the trade union at the local level is well organized. Similar to elsewhere, the organization of the trade union at the local level matters both in achieving good contracts and avoiding strikes.
# '''The ACFTU is not a monolithic organization.''' The ACFTU is composed of a national center and unions on the provincial, municipal, district and street levels. Trade unions on all levels are directed by the ACFTU to support worker rights and facilitate organizing into unions. Where workers are contractors who are not legally employed by firms, the ACFTU and its constituent unions pressure private companies to sign legal contracts with workers. While the state controls the leading heights of the PRC economy, the private sector employs 80 percent of all workers, most of whom are legally protected through Chinese labor laws and are members of the ACFTU and its affiliates (Xinhua 2025a). Disposable income has grown along with the ACFTU (see Figure 2).
# '''Leading Western labor economists''' have examined the differences between trade unions which are systematically organized and effective, for instance among SOEs, and those which have yet to effectively emerge, typically in the private sector. They have also looked at cases in which workers and management have sought harmonious labor relations with employers to avoid conflict (Booth et al. 2022; Freeman & Li 2013; Xi et al. 2021). However, the primary dynamic in China is the migration of several hundred migrant workers from rural to urban areas, a significant challenge to workers and the ACFTU, perhaps the first time in contemporary history when a union federation has absorbed such a vast number of workers. Those who expect the migration unionization to occur without complications, conflict and obstacles are unrealistic and utopian. Yet, some scholars’ serious misunderstanding of supposed union futility in China and beyond is based on the expectation that trade unions will instantaneously respond to technological applications in the economy which often marginalize workers; for instance, the critique of the ACFTU for not responding directly to digitization and logistics. This book argues that it is unreasonable to expect such a response when the innovations in question have been established for less than a decade (Zhang et al. 2023). All the same, as noted, China has been at the forefront in addressing digital workers’ exploitation and has the highest union density rate of any country (Tu & Wang 2024; Zhou 2020).[[File:Dialectics of Chinese Labor Figures (Figure 1).png|thumb|615x615px|[[File:Dialectics of Chinese Labor Figures (Figure 2).png|thumb|544x544px]]]]Must the working class across countries consistently engage in direct action in order to grow and achieve strength? Labor unions do have agency of various forms in relation to capital and the state. In most instances, capital is ascendant, but in socialist states, labor forms the primary force. In this context, we must differentiate between the forms of struggle required to achieve the goals of the working class. Under socialism, workers are not struggling against the state as an agent of capital, but with the state against capital. Thus, what gains would workers achieve if they were to engage in unrest against a socialist state which is committed to equality? In this sense, this book contends that socialism in practice has purchase and that genuine AES in the past, present and future are organized to defend the interests of the working class, even in market economies. This book charts out a new course for acknowledging the genuine interest in advancing the interests of the working class under socialist states while subordinating the capitalist class.

=== 5. How and Why State/Party Unions Protect the Rights of Workers ===
This book parts company with the ubiquitous narrative of trade unions advanced by Labor Studies researchers that Western trade union models represent the superlative organizational form for improving the wages and working conditions of unorganized labor through collective bargaining, while reducing societal poverty through advocating social programs. Labor unions have undoubtedly been important actors in improving the wages and conditions of workers in Western Europe, North America and other advanced industrial regions in the 20th century, both in the workplace and through building social programs. But the emergence of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and the enduring Western “democratic” models of trade union representation have further undermined rank-and-file democracy and diminished labor’s organizational capacity to mobilize and represent the working class in the workplace.

On the contrary, Western models of trade union representation, which consolidated from the 1920s to the 1950s, restrict rank-and-file self-activity, reduce pride in assembly line production and contribute to working-class cynicism and even contempt for US unions and manufacturers (Aronowitz 1973; Braverman 1974; Burawoy 1982; Davis 1986). In response and without appreciable success, a plethora of solutions has been proffered by trade union leaders, Labor Studies scholars and labor activists to revive unions as an agency for achieving upward mobility. Of particular significance, the trade union model that requires workers to hold state-sanctioned elections for recognition by management and then to negotiate collective bargaining agreements for the right to improve labor conditions has been replicated throughout most post-colonial states of the global South and applied as a model for worker democracy and working-class upward mobility (Gold 2014; Teelucksingh 2015). Whilst scholars have examined the importance of tripartite systems of state, capital and labor participation, there is remarkably little recognition of the path development of trade unions maintaining colonial unions into post-colonial eras.

Through examining the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, this book rebuts the very premise that the Western model of trade unionism is the only vehicle for achieving workers’ upward mobility. Instead of striving to better the conditions of the privileged few and organizing new workers, this book argues that contemporary Western models of working-class organization founded in the early 20th century are incomplete since they do not provide the organizational opportunity for all workers to join unions and mobilize their own to challenge capital and the state.

This book asserts that the Western model of unionism is inadequate and doomed as it tends to represent only one segment of the working class. Moreover, trade unions have been in decline in capitalist states over the past 50 years. If conditions are improved for privileged workers while neglecting low wage ones, only a small portion will have the opportunity to realize gains. Only a small share of unionized workers in advanced capitalist countries that are decisive for the accumulation of capital will typically prevail, benefiting only a small segment of workers at home and abroad. In the global South, most of the world’s working class is excluded from high wage jobs and condemned to work under precarious conditions as contract laborers lacking union representation. Western trade union models have historically improved a segment of labor which often lacks a working-class ideology and often has also even aspired to protect wage gains by keeping dispossessed workers’ wages down. Engels (1892/1952), Lenin (1916/1964), Emmanuel (1972/2025), Edwards (1978) and other socialist theorists have noticed the disturbing tendency for the outsourcing of production to low wage regions. Meanwhile, unorganized labor is typically restricted from forming trade unions to better its wages and conditions. Put baldly, since the 1850s, trade unions have helped form a privileged class of workers whose interest is in maintaining and enlarging inequality within and between countries. Strictly speaking, most workers organized into existing trade unions represent an aristocracy of labor which is subordinate to and unified with capital’s pursuit of surplus value. In effect, labor unions and a segment of workers in imperialist countries are bribed through the accumulation of super-profits invested in poor countries and establish a parasitic relation to them. H.W. Edwards goes even further, asserting that imperialist expropriation has permitted advanced capitalist states to develop welfare states for their working classes (Edwards 1978; Lenin 1916/1964). Emmanuel (1972/2025) asserts that the inequality of trade engenders an economic conservatism among imperialist countries of Europe and North America.

In this way, the global working class is also segmented between, on the one hand, a privileged minority of workers in the global North aligned with the capitalist class; and, on the other hand, the majority of workers, whose class interests diverge from maintaining the status quo. Today, the pursuit of profit overlaps the global capitalist economy. In unison, owners and workers are taught to believe in the capitalist system, which only benefits capitalist classes and a segment of the working class. Paradoxically, in ''The German Ideology'', Karl Marx underscores a dynamic which mitigates against working-class solidarity:<blockquote>The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an historical epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. (Marx with Engels 1932/1998, 67)</blockquote>Interclass solidarity, expressed through support for capital accumulation and rising nationalism, is the veneer which overlays the international division of global labor and the dominant international ideology. In fact, the ruling class dominates by the diffusion of the ideas of capital, expressed in the 2020s through increased nationalism. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the dominant view was that capital was ascendant and unbounded by national interests. This book rejects the perspective that the hegemony of the US was articulated through neoliberal capitalism and freedom of international movement of capital. Instead, it maintains that neoliberalism has always been a means to protect and expand the dominance of affluent imperialist states at the core of the world’s economy, disguising this fact behind the false assertion that global capitalism is a constant, independent international variable (Harvey 2005; Robinson 2014).

The Labor Studies literature derides communist unions as undemocratic since they do not hold elections but are dominated by autocratic leaders. But in fact, communist unions do have democratic elections and are more likely to challenge capital. By virtue of the socialist character of the trade union, it is presupposed that disciplined institutional actions that reflect the interests of workers are far more important than electoral contests. The competence of the leadership is far more important than the individual leader, a concept advanced by V. I. Lenin in ''What Is to Be Done?'' which should be de rigueur reading for those seeking to build effective trade unions and political parties:<blockquote>The worst sin we commit is that we degrade our political and organizational tasks to the level of the immediate, “palpable”, “concrete” interests of the everyday economic struggle; yet they keep singing to us the same refrain: Lend the economic struggle itself a political character! We repeat: this kind of thing displays as much “sense for the realities of life” as was displayed by the hero in the popular fable who cried out to a passing funeral procession, “Many happy returns of the day!”. (Lenin 1902/1969, 67)</blockquote>Liberal capitalist societies supposedly allow workers to freely decide the most suitable trade unions to represent their economic interests in opposition to employers in the private and public sectors of the economy. However, Western trade unions fail to pursue blanket membership across society but have typically represented workers in specific economic labor markets. In the US, the Teamsters represent truckers, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union represent food and commercial workers, the United Auto Workers represent auto workers. Even in the public sector, where union density tends to be highest, the majority of workers are unorganized, and workers are trapped in jobs with few prospects of upgrading their wages and conditions. In 2025, despite the significant uptick in labor mobilization, only 5.9 percent of all private sector workers and 32.9 percent of public sector workers were union members (BLS 2026). In almost every country, the share of unionized workers has declined from 2000 to the present, and most workers are unrepresented and must fend for themselves. Consequently, most workers are mired in low wage jobs with few prospects of collective progress.

This book argues that the most effective trade unions must possess three primary features: (1) bottom-up democracy; (2) efficacy to advance the interests of the working class, including mobilization, organizing and a state which supports the improvement of labor conditions; (3) trade unions must be linked to a strong political party which has unwavering devotion to improving the conditions and standard of living of the working class. The trade union succeeds if the Communist Party of China, the governing working-class based political party, is centered on developing the productive forces of the economy through research and technological advancement driven by the concomitant responsibility to advancing class interests to ensure prioritization of the working class and masses.

# Genuine working-class democracy is found within the weave of the democratic aspirations of workers within workplaces and communities rather than liberal bourgeois democratic competition for leadership among the ruling class. In this way, workers at the shopfloor and workplace place bottom-up demands on the union to improve conditions. Decisively, the trade union must be motivated by improving the interests of workers and have the organizational capacity to substantively respond to their demands.
# Trade union efficacy in furthering workers’ interests consists of the ability to recognize the subjective demands of workers and formulate strategies which challenge management to respond to the material needs of their members and all workers: a form of top-down unionism. Ongoing confrontation with employers is not always necessary if the trade union has the capacity and authority to effectively advance the will of the workers through new policies. Western Labor Studies scholars wrongly contend that antagonism to management is an obligatory prerequisite to building a strong union (Taylor & Li 2007). But this perspective is fixed in the spectacle of a work stoppage or strike which may or may not be necessary. It fails to recognize that trade unions’ success is contingent on their ability to tangibly improve the material conditions of workers. The top-down approach is a reaction to bottom-up democratic demands. Collectively, they representative what I call a holistic trade union, which is both democratic and efficacious.
# Socialist and communist trade unions are almost always affiliated with left political parties. If the working class based political parties gain power, they are far more effective in charging their trade union affiliate to establish a holistic organization capable of advancing their members’ interests.
# Socialist and communist unions in both capitalist and socialist states are far more effective in improving workers’ material interests than Western trade union models that advance economistic demands of a small segment of workers who are in their organizations. Western trade union models deem democracy to involve a choice for workers about whether or not to join unions in the face of fierce opposition from management and the state, which is often also the employer. The Western notion that socialist unions are not democracy and that union democracy is a matter of individual worker choice of selecting leadership is a false dichotomy. In socialist trade unions like China’s ACFTU, local leadership is selected through democratic elections. This historical record of trade unions in the West is that they are always subservient to the capitalist state, and any effort to form opposing forces will be crushed by trade unions and the state. Trade union history in the US illustrates that communist and radical organizations will be crushed and dismantled. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) actively participated in the breakup of the United Electrical Workers in 1949 in response to its communist influence (Sears 2019; Young 2017). Today, the UE has survived and remains a prototype of a socialist and democratic union committed to working-class militancy and international solidarity while many US and Western models of trade unionism have declined into service organizations with dwindling membership.

This book challenges three central claims about labor unions and particularly criticizes the dominant Western models of trade unionism in which the state is viewed as neutral in labor–management disputes. In so doing, it summons concepts considered anathema by “enlightened” Western leftists, who are accustomed to a coercive state operating in the interests of expanding capital accumulation. This book responds by making three assertions:

# Western trade unions in capitalist countries are exclusionary and less democratic. Today’s Western European and North American unions originated in the supposedly ethical worldview set out by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Theoretically, this gives voice to workers as it strengthens the power of capital. For many Western leftists, voice is established inside the labor organization but not in relation to capital. The ILO was founded in 1919 by nine countries, led by the US and its racist and collaborationist leader Samuel Gomers of the American Federation of Labor. Other founders were Belgium, Cuba (at that time a US semi-colony), Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and the United Kingdom: positively unrepresentative of the global working class (ILO 2023). This book contrasts unions in the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), a legacy of colonial unions, with unions in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), a federation which formed and expanded globally under the Soviet Union. Both were strengthened in the 2000s. The ITUC and WFTU federations represent workers in countries throughout the world. In some cases, trade unions are affiliated with both federations. However, the primary difference is between ITUC’s support for liberal models of capitalism which are advanced by the ruling classes, and WFTU’s espousal of a socialist model for trade unions. Certainly, trade unions in each country may contrast, the most substantial distinction being what ITUC considers interunion competition as the primary form of democracy while WFTU prefers compulsory membership. Undeniably, membership is advantageous for workers who are union members. Crucially, the Western models countervail the notion of equality confirmed by citizenship. ITUC and its Labor Studies acolytes do not give all workers the right of citizenship. Socialist democracy must confer on all workers membership of trade unions. In bourgeois electoral democracies, most citizens vote in elections, but all are theoretically granted rights with the option to participate. Authentic democracy must grant these same rights for workers to join trade unions and construct organizations of their choice.
# ACFTU is more democratic than almost all Western unions. China confers the human right of trade union representation on all its citizens. From liberals to Marxists, the vast majority of Westerners who study Chinese labor view unions there as undemocratic and impotent extensions of the CPC. To a fault, anyone reading the literature on Chinese labor will find a doctrinaire position that Chinese workers are highly exploited, oppressed and without a voice. The perception of Chinese unions as authoritarian and undemocratic has been repeated so many times that it has become an article of faith. Challenging this concept is a taboo, risking exclusion from the field of Western Labor Studies. In contrast, this book asserts that the dominant Western perspective is false and that, in fact, ACFTU is far more democratic than almost all Western unions. Admittedly, ACFTU unions are not equivalent and range from being highly democratic to inert. However, every union has the potential to mobilize members to take collective action. For too many scholars of Chinese labor, time stands still, and reforms and transformation of ACFTU are considered irrelevant or lack independence of action in response to working-class demands. Even those Labor scholars who acknowledge that the labor rights of Chinese workers have expanded assert that they are only available to educated and privileged workers (Franceschini et al. 2022; Gallagher 2017; Lee, 2007; Pringle 2011).
# The beneficiary of low wage labor is the aristocracy of labor in rich states. Western labor unions are unable to halt the decline of trade unions as working-class mobilization primarily occurs in manufacturing industries, which have largely relocated to the global South. Ever since the 1980s, strong and robust labor unions have only formed in industrializing states, including Brazil, China, India, South Africa and South Korea (Silver 2003). The beneficiary of low wage labor is the aristocracy of labor in rich states, which thrives on inequality between the global North and global South.

Canonical Western Labor Studies literature since the 1970s has been dominated by labor historians and social scientists who are fixated on the decline of trade unions in the US, Canada and Western Europe, due to anti-union government policies and the state’s partiality to capitalist development over working-class democratic rights. Likewise, advocates of union democracy who find fault in the rise of bureaucratic, entrenched and corrupt unions, racism, sexism, xenophobia and absence of “social movement unionism” all also criticize the rise of neoliberalism and its assault on unions (Cowie 2010; Cowie et al. 2003; Fletcher & Gapasin 2009; Galenson 1994; Gerstle 2022; Greenhouse 2020; Hyman 2001; Lichtenstein 2013; McAlevey 2016; Moody 1988; 2017; Sugrue 2014).

All explanations of trade union decline view the Western models of trade union organization as unassailable or, as unions are in decline, some advocate new models for social movement or class struggle unionism, monikers which are consistently restated by proponents of union renewal (Burns 2022; McAlevey 2020). Unquestionably, bureaucratization, corruption, racism, sexism and lack of democracy have contributed to the decline of unions in the West, but not all scholars examine, as the author of this book will do, the nature of the Western capitalist state and its exclusion of workers.

But the Western models of unionism typically exclude most workers from membership, a condition applied in capitalist states; while socialist states at least allow workers to mobilize labor in their existing unions to transform the lives of workers in state and private enterprises (Herod 1998, 197–217). Whilst the state is essential to understanding the diverse nature of working-class organizations throughout the world, a critique of the Western liberal model of labor unions is absent. Decisively, all critiques of Western unionism reject socialist forms of inclusive representation and broader organization, viz WFTU and ACFTU. In fact, both have prodigious historical legacies and are actively engaged in organizing class struggle organizations (Ness 2021). Contrary to the position of liberal and left proponents of Western trade unions and labor federations, the premise of this book is that contemporary labor unions, including new forms of worker organization (NFWO), whilst contributing to piecemeal gains, oppose economic equality and the eradication of poverty and do not contribute to national economic development and prosperity.

This book will uncover evidence that union models linked to socialist parties in single and multiparty states contribute to the improvement of the immediate needs of workers, enable the organization of militant rank-and-file trade unions and present a persuasive counterhegemonic model to the Western social-democratic and liberal models of trade unionism.

=== 6. Globalism, the State and Workers’ Power ===
As globalization challenges labor unions seeking to improve wages and working conditions for organized and unorganized workers, the global industrial workforce has expanded. It now comprises a larger share of labor than at any time since the foundation and spread across the world of capitalism from Western Europe. Trade unions have declined in the global North and the global South as neoliberalism and globalization have forced states and firms to reject organizations formed to defend workers.

This book makes a striking and unique contribution to prevailing perspectives on union democracy advanced in the Labor Studies literature. Its argument is both counterintuitive and heretical to the widespread established unions which the Western models of trade union democracy regard as the superlative paradigm to which all other trade union organizations must adhere if they are to be considered legitimate. According to this paradigm, successful labor representation emerges from competition for the hearts and minds of workers by unions vying for the right to represent them in collective bargaining with management. I argue that this Western model of representation distinguishes workers as individual customers in a free market who choose from among unions which promise them the best deal. I propose that this liberal model of labor representation is in reality a form of free market capitalism which fails to confer on workers the right of union membership. In most cases, trade unions are prevented from forming by the state and capital. If a state and party bestow upon labor the canonical right of union membership as a prerogative, workers can form the unions of their choice on a local and industrial level. If workers are denied this right, they are likely to be repressed in the workplace.

The position of Labor Studies and advocates of Western models is that a field of unions should compete for workers and hypothetically represent their interests, but in this system, they can also be crushed by the state and management. If union membership were instead conferred as a right of citizenship, as it is in China, members could decide to mobilize or remain dormant, but the option to advance their interests through trade unions would be uncontested.

This position is abhorrent to capitalists, as it invariably presents a risk of militancy and disruption. Oddly enough, Marxists and self-proclaimed supporters of worker rights also oppose a blanket union as undemocratic. This book will provide evidence that national unions which offer workers all-encompassing membership are in fact far more effective in advancing workers’ interests against capital and the state and are invariably under the scrutiny of workers. The absorption of all workers into the ACFTU in the 2010s represents a far more significant weapon for workers against capital and the state than contracting unions in the West and throughout the world, especially with the imposition of neoliberal capitalism and global supply chains which require a weak labor movement to extract surplus labor from workers.

=== 7. Uncovering Misrepresentation of Trade Unions in Socialist States ===
The dominant narrative in Labor Studies is that competitive trade unions within capitalist economies are the optimal form of organization and the system best suited to advancing the socioeconomic interests of the working class. Liberal capitalist democracy is, it is argued, the optimal mechanism for the formation of trade unions, which represent the interests and aspirations of workers. Liberal capitalist societies supposedly allow workers to freely decide the trade union most suitable to represent their class interests to employers in the private and public sectors of the economy. If workers in liberal democracies have free will to decide their representation, the decline in union membership in most of the world implies by extension that workers prefer not to join unions. Workers alone do not constitute an organizational form but have a collective relation to their employers and their work, whether or not they are members of unions. Taking this position for granted, workers prefer to directly engage with employers rather than hand over this responsibility to trade unions.

This model does not consider the possibility that workers can form their own organizations to address workplace concerns: wages, working conditions and benefits. In the absence of trade unions, workers would be compelled to individually negotiate their terms of employment or, more likely, accept the terms which management offered in exchange for their physical exertion or services necessary to complete tasks.

Taken together, the majority of workers today, as ever, have not had the choice to decide to join or form a union. In most countries, the formation of unions is restricted and on occasion banned by government authorities. In this way, most workers do not have the capacity to act collectively unless they engage in forms of unauthorized collective action. In fact, a segment of the labor literature which is gaining traction asserts that unconventional organizing by workers through anarchism and syndicalism, and collective action without the intent to negotiate contracts with management, are the shape of things to come (Atzeni 2021; Brenner 2026; Clover 2016).

As this book will demonstrate, virtually all Western Labor Studies scholars wrongly claim that unions in single party socialist states are controlled by government authorities and are of no value in improving wages, working conditions and benefits. Workers in socialist states, the argument goes, are not permitted to choose between unions or to form independent ones. Therefore, workers have no choice about furthering their interests in socialist single party states and are even more deprived than workers who “choose” not to join unions in non-socialist states. In socialist states, trade unions are stripped of a meaningful voice and are no more than agents of single party states, which only serve to provide a façade of democracy.

This book challenges that dominant perspective as flawed. The free market democratic ideology was forged by the dominant system of capitalism in the post-Second World War era and consolidated as a doctrine after the emergence of the US as the dominant imperial power following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This book challenges the Labor Studies view that unions in states with compulsory union membership are incapable of representing workers and that Western models are far more effective. The Labor Studies literature which rejects AES as adverse to the working class fails to recognize the notable achievements of socialist unions in advancing working-class interests. I hold that it does so cynically as a way to debase the anti-imperialist state striving to maintain relevance to the working class. The socialist national liberation movements strived to give meaning to the state as an agency, not as an arena for party competition which is subordinated to their former colonial masters.

Labor Studies scholars tarnish the reputation of the AES in order to restrict its effective political and economic autonomy. Lacking any familiarity with global South, anti-imperialist socialist states, Caraway, Cook and Crowley posit that they are reflexively authoritarian:<blockquote>For much of the late twentieth century, unions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia labored under authoritarian regimes that set strict boundaries on their political and economic activities. Although the “workers’ states” of Eastern Europe created unions with near-universal membership, those unions were subordinate to ruling Communist parties, had little to no independent voice, and sought primarily to ensure that workers were productive members of society. (Caraway et al. 2015, 1)</blockquote>Western academic literature on China is an echo chamber of critics devoid of balance. It applies a narrative of the ACFTU and labor rights. To all intents and purposes, it has become a cottage industry echoing the US State Department, including its progeny the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which was established in 1983 under Ronald Reagan and supported by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, the international body of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. Likewise, NGOs are a leading force behind the condemnation of China, and students and scholars who advance the negative critique of China and the ACFTU are more likely to receive funding from private foundations.

=== 8. Neoliberalism and the Decline of Trade Union Membership ===
Contrary to dominant claims by advocates of conventional Western unions and labor representation, liberal bourgeois states have cracked down on the capacity of unions to mobilize workers into unions and engage in concerted activities, including slowdowns and work stoppages. In the US, successive anti-union decisions by the Supreme Court have impeded workers’ capacity to join unions and banned the right to strike against private and public enterprises.

In June 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled 8:1 that Kellogg’s, the multinational cereal brand, had the right to file lawsuits against trade unions striking for improved conditions if the work stoppage resulted in property damage: for example, inability to pour concrete, or causing food to decay by not transporting it to consumer markets for the company. The judgment set a precedent for trade unions being technically banned from performing their primary function of withholding labor to improve wages and working conditions. The decision could lead the Supreme Court in future to further restrict strikes and expand the capacity of employers to file damages against trade unions, revealing the undemocratic nature of the US labor regime compared to AES countries’ labor regimes, which US human rights organizations and NGOs accuse of being repressive (Kruzel 2023). By contrast, workers in China always have the right to strike and suffer no damages. Indeed, as the ACFTU is an arm of the CPC, striking against state enterprises and even private domestic or foreign firms is protected by the state. The denial of labor stoppages in the US confirms the pervasive charade which is the Western left’s critique of China as deficient and inferior to the West in defending the democratic and economic rights of workers.

The dominant trade union research privileges the global North as the origin of working-class representation and resistance. In fact, the major trade unions in the global South are vestiges of the colonial legacy which established labor laws to restrict the power of the working class and privilege capital. As 85 percent of the world’s population live in poor countries of the global South, this book provides a Southern perspective (uniquely well-substantiated in terms of its range and contemporary relevance) on the imperialist formation of labor unions and on challenges to the dominant legacy which endured even after decolonization and independence. Crucially, this demonstrates that, since independence, Western trade unions have endeavored to maintain their own dominance and that of the labor regimes privileging multinational corporations and free market policies for the benefit of capital formation.

Here is the complete transcription of the provided text, with all inline citations, block quotes, and internal section headings preserved, and all page numbers/running headers removed:

== Global Trade Union Decline, 1975–2025 ==
<blockquote>'That all efforts aiming at the great end hitherto failed from the want of solidarity between manifold divisions of labor in each country, and the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes in different countries; that the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries. (Karl Marx 1864)'</blockquote>

=== 1. Organizational Regression and Membership Loss ===
The worldwide decline of trade unions is underway even as the global working class expands in the global South and employment is expanding in the global North. This regression defies predictions by Labor Studies scholars that unions would expand as workers entered manufacturing and production industries which are predisposed to socialized workplaces and expanded exploitation as direct investments grow in countries which have low wage labor and are integrated into global production chains. However, contrary to expectations, labor organization is failing to keep pace with the expansion of industrial labor in the global South, and unions are incapable of mobilizing workers in the new employment forms of logistics and the digital economy. Labor historian Marcel van der Linden (2021) asserts the paradox that worker union membership is declining in both advanced and developing economies at a time of industrial transformation which demands strong organizations to protect and advance the economic and social exigencies of labor.

Global working class membership in trade unions has fallen over the past half-century in the wake of three substantial changes: first, the imposition of neoliberal capitalism from the 1970s to the 2020s; second, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the requirement for post-socialist states to occupy (typically unionized) sectors considered essential to advancing the political economic interests of the state; and third, accelerating technological transformation and the tapering off of higher paid skilled jobs and the rise of digital labor.

Even as capital worldwide has gained hegemony over labor, the enigma is that the deterioration in trade union organization is not in response to declining working class demand for trade union representation. On the contrary, most workers entering new sectors of the capitalist economy continue to mobilize in both the expanding industries of the global South and in the digital economy which is growing worldwide. The problem is that trade unions are not forming despite it being in the interests of workers to have union representation. Implausibly, in the absence of strong unions, workers unmistakably continue to organize against employer exploitation worldwide; from delivery workers in the digital economy of the global North to industrial workers in rapidly expanding industrial sectors of the global South.

Hasty conclusions that workers seek to form independent organizations or no organizations at all but simply spontaneously oppose serial corporate efforts to extract excess surplus value are disproved by demands for stronger working class organizations. For Lenin, spontaneity reflected the failure of organization and in today’s context the concept appeases the bourgeoisie as it fails to lead to class consciousness as well as the posturing by anarchist and other left scholars as they celebrate the “bottom-up” activism which already occurs through unstructured job actions. Most Western labor unions do not practice bottom-up organizing. On the contrary, an evaluation of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) shows that Chinese labor comprises both bottom-up and top-down attributes of organizing. Bottom-up organizing is effectively the equivalent of Lenin’s spontaneity: a form economism. In the absence of an effective organization, spontaneity does not advance the working class interests, or the difference between economism and socialism.

In ''What is to be Done?'' Lenin asserts:<blockquote>[T]he adherents of the “pure and simple” labour movement, the worshippers of the closest “organic” contacts with the proletarian struggle, the opponents of the non-labour intelligentsia are compelled, in order to defend their positions, to resort to the arguments of the bourgeois “pure and simple” trade unionists. … [S]ubservience to the spontaneity of the labour movement, the belittling of … “the conscious element” … whether one likes it or not, growth of influence of bourgeois ideology among the workers. All those who talk about “exaggerating the importance of ideology,” … imagine that the pure and simple labour movement can work out an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers “take their fate out of the hands of the leaders.” But in this they are profoundly mistaken. … Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers in the process of their movement then the only choice is: Either bourgeois, or Socialist ideology. There is no middle course. Hence, to belittle Socialist ideology in any way, to deviate from it in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology. (Lenin 1929)</blockquote>Lenin incontrovertibly rejects spontaneity as a means to build a working class movement. Today, worker spontaneity indulges scholars who embrace anarchism or fail to grasp the significance of organizations able to represent and maintain working class interests. For such rebel phrasemongers, meaning is found in words rather than sustained movements: an imaginary lexicon of “the left,” “subversion,” “anarchism,” and “radicalism” adding up to a metaphysical idealism which inspires and uplifts foreign activists but fails to address worker interests. According to such proponents, rather than attaining any objective, it is better to fight and lose while appearing to form a social movement which is typically supported monetarily by NGOs created by imperialist opponents of socialism (Ruckus 2023; Wetzel 2022). But, in the absence of trade unionism, it is the devotion to spontaneity (accounting for the failure of trade unions to establish organizational capacity) that has given rise to right wing populism. In the past decade, as trade unions decline, workers are portrayed as helpless victims without agency who only seek the satisfaction of immediate demands through riot or uprising without consolidating labor organizations capable of continuously representing worker interests through the creation of strong and capable trade unions. While workers are continually engaged in struggle, trade unions today are at an unprecedented historical nadir (Clover 2016; Ness 2023a).

=== 2. The Rise of Precarious Work in the Global Core and Periphery ===
In 1996, Jan Breman, a Dutch anthropologist of India and Pakistan, formulated the term “footloose labour” to define the typical worker in South Asia, one that could have been applied in most of the developing world. Steady employment was illusory for precarious workers habitually moving from one workplace to another (Breman 1996). Working class organizations were only available for privileged laborers employed in the public sector and critical sectors of the economy. Most laborers in the same factory performing identical jobs were paid a fraction of the wages and were devoid of job security. Trade unions were unable to help as efforts to integrate all workers into the same bargaining unit were almost always prohibited by management. Those workers seeking to form autonomous unions were harshly repressed, dismissed and even jailed (Hammer and Ness 2021; Ness 2015; Nielson & Rossiter 2017). For all but a few workers in the global North, the social contract established from the 1930s to 1960s in Western Europe and North America between private employer and worker that ensured labor’s fair wages, decent working conditions and job security are gone as labor laws have been gutted and government monitoring of the workplace has all but disappeared.

Since the 1970s, a central feature of neoliberalism has been the transformation of the traditional work relationship between employer and worker to reduce employers’ obligation to provide decent wages and benefits and working conditions. Neoliberalism represented the withdrawal of the state from all facets of the economy, including monitoring management respect for labor law and workers. For almost all workers in poor countries of the global South, precarity has always been ubiquitous. More often than not, workers in rural and urban regions have never had job stability and have always eked out a living with low pay, working under arduous and hazardous conditions without job security and with no hope of improving their conditions through training or education. In 2011, Guy Standing identified the formation of a precariat in the developed countries of the global North in the wake of industrial restructuring and outsourcing of production, and their replacement with low wage temporary jobs which most workers entering labor markets did not intend to stay in as careers (Standing 2011). In the global North and South, even professional work (including academia, accounting and health care) was typically not accompanied by gainful and permanent employment (Ayala-Hurtado 2022; O’Brady et al. 2025). However, labor precarity in the global South is far more endemic and widespread than in the global North. Research on the extensive decline in trade unions and the rise of precarious labor in developing economies has expanded precipitously as anti-union policies have been promulgated within restructured industries as a means to avoid unionization (Scully 2016).

Beverly Silver’s seminal ''Forces of Labor'' (2003) examines the rise in collective action through the lens of World-Systems Theory and finds that class conflict historically forms in global regions due to the globalization of capital to circumvent higher wage labor in the global North and advanced economies using spatial, temporal and technological fixes. Still, a distinction must be drawn between unauthorized wildcat strikes in the absence of trade unions, which most certainly occur in new regions of capital investment, and the organization of durable trade unions. The organizational question is essential for understanding the propensity for sustained working class activism. In most cases, foreign capital investments in new industries contribute to greater productivity and improved wages. But for those workers who are employed in precarious employment, unions typically are uninterested in mobilizing low wage workers as they pose a challenge to trade union leadership and do not increase union dues which are indispensable in keeping them operating, as dues are not paid by private employers. Consequently, labor unions are unwilling and frequently lack the capability to organize precarious workers in opposition to firms which seek to dodge responsibility for essential laborers. And, even if workers are themselves motivated to organize and form militant unions in manufacturing, supportive 2022; Ness 2023b; van der Linden 2021). India, Indonesia and other developing states frequently seek to attract capital investment through promoting the absence of trade unions (International Commission for Labor Rights 2013).

=== 3. Chinese Global Labor Exceptionalism: All-China Federation of Trade Unions ===
As organized labor worldwide has precipitously declined over the past 50 years, the working class membership of the ACFTU has grown dramatically from 2000 to the present. In 2025, the federation represented 300 million members, about 75 percent of China’s 402 million workers. The ACFTU is a Marxist-Leninist organization charged by the Communist Party of China (CPC) with organizing and advancing the material interests of the Chinese working class. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), trade union representation on all levels requires a diligent trade union to advance the interests of the working class. The ACFTU is a democratic centralist organization which educates its members and responds to the democratic aspirations of the working class. In a market socialist economy, the ACFTU must absorb and comprehend the material interests of workers. This does not take place instantaneously but as the exigencies of the working class are recognized and the Federation and all its affiliates respond to worker demands on a grassroots and national basis. The ACFTU is the clarion of socialism, devoted to maintaining and expanding the power of the working class through steady progress.

As trade unions have declined worldwide, the ACFTU and its provincial, municipal, district and street level workers organizations have unmistakably built the capacity to advance the material interests and democratic and consultative objectives of the Chinese working class. Undoubtedly, the institution of the market economy produced hardships, but the CPC and ACFTU have been proactive in responding to the expectations of workers. Working class demands remain and the ACFTU seeks to address these today and in the future. Taken together, organized labor in China is on the march and growing effective unions. Self-described leftist critics who expect change without delay fail to understand that the transition to socialism is a slow and bumpy course which is not devoid of obstacles. But, unlike trade unions in capitalist states, the ACFTU promotes the interests of workers to mobilize into organizations and hold democratic elections.

=== 4. Global Trade Unions in Decline ===
This chapter assesses trade unions worldwide to understand how the Chinese labor movement compares and why a clear distinction must be drawn between global labor and the ACFTU.

Over the past 50 years, working class power has been in freefall and is now weaker than at any time since the beginning of capitalism. The decline in working class agency is a logical result of decades of opposition from the state and the capitalist class in liberal democracies and the collapse of socialism since the end of the Soviet Union. Capital formation, backed by a capitalist state, precedes dialectical counterhegemonic forces. In the quest for capital accumulation and profits, the working class is formed through the expropriation of surplus labor. Technological innovation has been the dynamic force transforming primitive accumulation and all subsequent forms of production into systemic crisis. As capital must remain profitable, it must destroy existing forms of accumulation to survive and expand its productivity through one of two means: (1) the exploitation of labor power; and (2) technological development which cheapens the cost of labor through machines producing new lower cost forms of work.

The zenith of labor’s leverage is when technological advancement is at its nadir and cannot dislodge workers from a relatively advantageous position under capitalist accumulation. Yet, for Karl Marx, these moments of relative working class power set the stage for scientific and technological development which undermine the gains workers have achieved through development of the skill to master production, circulation and distribution and leverage control of labor’s share of profit.

=== 5. Actually Existing Capitalism and Actually Existing Socialism ===
The political economy literature is dominated by research which views capitalism as monolithic but with a range of forms that distinguish each state from another. For most scholars in the field, capitalism is ubiquitous and is only distinguished by the relationship between dichotomous states and economic systems which have emerged according to historical legacies. Ben Clift defines comparative political economy simply as the degree to which nation states regulate economic systems (Clift 2021). In every instance, states are capitalist, and variations of state intervention reflect a range of historical and socioeconomic factors. For Clift, socialism does not exist and state ideology that has emerged from socialist revolutions only defines the type of capitalism. By defining states as types of capitalism which exist on a continuum between high and low levels of state intervention, the legacy of socialism in the 20th and 21st centuries are rendered as nothing more than a type of state participation in an economic system.

The historic legacy of the Soviet Union, PRC, Cuba and other states which began to end capitalism and establish socialist economies based on the dictatorship of the proletariat as advanced by Marx and Engels in their ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848/1898). While few advocates of and subscribers to the Manifesto’s tenets stop to think about the implications of putting it into practice, the philosophy and positions have been taken seriously and diligently applied by communist theorists and political leaders seeking to adopt the principles of overthrowing the bourgeoisie to liberate the working classes from capitalist exploitation and ensure that the bourgeoisie is defeated and does not reemerge after the socialist revolution. The popular pamphlet is beyond doubt a most radical document, one that even socialists may find too exacting. But, from 1917 to 1990, socialism became a major economic system encompassing 30–40 percent of the world’s population. The end of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc diminished the world population living under socialism but certainly did not end socialism or variants of Marxism-Leninism defined as the dictatorship of the working class.

The unipolar moment which established US global hegemony certainly challenged extant socialist states but absolutely did not bring them to an end. Even as the PRC shifted to market socialism, rooted in the dictatorship of the working class, leading Western political scientists proclaimed that the end of the Soviet Union denoted that the Marxist ideological concept of historical materialism was entirely irrelevant to understanding the world. Rather, the rise of the US to global hegemon pointed to a permanent future of Western liberal democracy, a premise that the US pursued to remake the world in its own neoliberal bourgeois image (Fukuyama 1992). However, the era from 1990 to the present also gave rise to a deeper criticism of socialism and a return to anarchism as the desired form of resistance. To many, anarchists, autonomist Marxists and others who oppose organizational forms and the consolidation of government rule, social transformation could occur without taking state power (Graeber 2013; Holloway 2002; Öcalan 2023). In ''A Brief History of Neoliberalism'', David Harvey declared the Chinese socialist system exhausted as a consequence of the development of the market socialist economy (2007). By doing so, Harvey applies a global capitalist absolutism and applies a purity complex that was not even advocated by Mao Zedong in the formative years of the foundation of the PRC. As early as 1953, Mao accentuated the necessity to develop and industrialize to improve the material well-being of China’s population.<blockquote>We must lay emphasis on the development of production, but consideration must be given to both the development of production and the improvement of the people’s livelihood. Something must be done for their material well-being, but neither too much nor nothing at all. At present there are quite a few cadres who ignore the people’s livelihood and couldn’t care less about their sufferings (Mao Tse-Tung/Mao Zedong 1977/2021, 87).</blockquote>Mao and his successors had strived without end for economic development from the origins of the PRC to the present (Wen 2021). But Western Marxists seek absolutes which are never possible in the real world and thus hold China up to a bar that is detached from material reality. Thus, in lockstep, Harvey denounces the PRC’s socialist system which adheres to a one-party communist state directed by a proletarian democracy and dictatorship of the working class. For fastidious Western Marxists, a one party socialist state is indistinguishable from authoritarianism even as working class democracy flourished in towns, villages and workplaces throughout China. Moreover, Harvey and adherents of globalism advance notions about the capitalist world economy in the absence of a historic understanding of the pivotal role of the state and omitting China and its authentic and unremitting initiatives by the CPC to modernize and develop into an advanced economy through ending poverty (Robinson 2014; Slobodian 2023). Globalists consider actually existing socialism as a static political system incapable of adapting to global circumstances, notably the rise of neoliberal capitalism. Even Marxist political economists did not recognize the necessity for socialist states to develop the means of production to improve standards of living and develop and apply technology to serve the demands of the working classes (Ness 2024). The Western Marxist non-revisionist perspective only considers socialism in its purist form and does not consider the imperative of sustainable economic development to improve the material conditions of workers in urban and rural regions. Under these circumstances, any form of technological advancement has been viewed as an attack on the working classes; socialist states would have no input into international ecological crises and would remain at the mercy of capitalist market economies imposing conditions for the future. Among many socialists, the notion of development is anathema and those states that defined themselves as socialist would be forced to comply with the developed capitalist economies directing all technological and productive forces.

To understand the ACFTU it is necessary to clarify the practice of trade unions under capitalism and socialism with Chinese characteristics and a market economy and capitalism. From 1975 to 2025, actually existing socialist states (AES) have developed a market economy to attract new technology for modernizing and improving the social and material conditions of workers. However, new technology under both socialism and capitalism presents a similar conundrum: the erosion of workers’ capacity to maintain and increase wages and benefits. In the capitalist economy, the application of new technology is exclusively applied to undermine the bargaining power of workers in the capitalist market. Technological investment is used to directly deskill labor through reducing their productivity. The subsumption of capital in new industries increases productivity and diminishes labor’s collective power to maintain its share of wages and capital’s capacity to lower costs and increase the extraction of surplus value.

New technology is a product of surplus value extraction in the previous stage of production and is developed through investing profits in new technology. Profits produced through labor exploitation are appropriated in the work process and are the foundation of the expanded expropriation of surplus value from labor in each successive stage of capitalist accumulation. In this way, labor is the foundation of its own demise. However, labor’s role in the deterioration of its own wages is concealed through the capitalist market. Capital formation is dependent on the extraction of surplus value from a previous interval of production and will likely never work in the new industrial sectors.

=== 6. The Western Model of Unionism ===
This chapter demonstrates that as the traditional Western model of mass production trade unions established in the early 20th century has regressed since the 1980s, so the imposition of neoliberalism and the domination of capitalist hegemony over labor has grown worldwide. From 1975 to 2025, the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the Western model of labor relations which proliferated through most of the world has become obsolete. The primary elements of Western trade unionism (formed through the emergence of mass production industries and labor militancy, which motivated capitalist state reforms) is contingent on the development of labor-law supervision of the labor–management relation. In theory, this entails national labor institutions’ creation of a complicated process for the formation of trade unions to become the official representatives of workers in bargaining collective agreements on their behalf with private firms. But in practice, it has become a means to deter worker mobilization and collective action against employers, who are then able to crush unions lacking a militant working class base.

The formation of trade unions began with the development of mass production industries in Western Europe and North America in the 1930s. But trade union militancy was quickly compelled to conform to capitalist imperatives to ensure labor discipline, corporate profits and state regulation over labor–management relations. This culminated in the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in the US in 1935 and formed the basis for unionization in other advanced capitalist countries. In the aftermath of the major strikes in the auto and electronic sectors, labor unrest continued to proliferate from the 1940s to the 1980s, but most disputes typically were short term disruptions which bought labor peace following the negotiation of new bargaining agreements. Labor conflict in the West was almost always overseen by nation states and quickly settled and did not impede the long term profitability of capital. Labor–management conflict in advanced capitalist countries under the supervision of state labor bodies have almost always been dominated by labor leaders promoting cooperation with corporations. Consequently, the labor–management accords have in effect excluded workers from determining their own conditions. Labor militancy only appeared when trade unions could not control workers from going on wildcat strikes. The most notable cases of labor unrest in the US typically occurred in the public sector among postal, mass transit workers and air traffic controllers as neoliberal policies and new technology began to undermine the rights and power of labor. In Britain and other states which had state-owned firms, privatization chipped away at the organizational power of trade unions and workers.

The labor–management accords which culminated in the US with the passage of the NLRA were typically conducted through imposing labor discipline on workers. However, the gains which were achieved by workers in capitalist states were gradually eroded as capital and rapacious labor-law firms circumvented the power of workers. Notably, the introduction of neoliberalism and the restructuring of capital have severely weakened the capacity of trade unions to effectively represent workers and negotiate adequate collective contracts. The unraveling of trade union membership began in earnest during the 1980s and reached its apogee in the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet Union, as capital flight to lower wage regions undercut bargaining agreements which had engendered labor peace from the 1930s to the 1960s. Up to this point, trade unions in capitalist countries had significantly raised wages through the formation of formal labor–management relations. The expansion of trade unions had a ripple effect across the labor market as non-union industries commonly raised wages to match rates in organized workplaces. It was not even uncommon for non-union firms to pay workers even higher rates than unionized workers to maintain management control through union avoidance. These earlier gains of workers in advanced capitalist countries of the West were eviscerated.

The restructuring of capital through financialization of production demonstrates how finance capital in the West inflects economic development from emerging new technology. Advanced capitalist states expand finance into affluent consumer markets in order to extract profits as economies deindustrialize and shift away from manufacturing. It is clear that, in developed economies, financial appropriation is extracted through consumers who always benefit from the unequal exchange in trade which allows workers in the global North to afford commodities which are produced in the global South (Emmanuel 1972/2025; Lapavitsas 2013, 62–70). Absent from Lapavitsas’ analysis is the shift in production from the advanced capitalist countries to poor countries in the developing world. However, it is imperative to direct attention to the former colonial territories as sources of resource extraction and the global system of economic imperialism. Even with sustained and augmented capitalist investment, global South workers remained exploited through the unequal exchange of trade. The fact that most capital invested in the global South is later reappropriated by imperialist countries for investment in the rich global North further clarifies the dominance of imperialist finance capital and explains the decline of trade unions in rich countries. In addition, the export of capital to low wage regions has contributed to the decline of trade unions (see Table 1).

Plainly, the exporters of finance extract far higher returns through the system of unequal exchange of trade which enriches the North and diminishes the value of exports from the South (Emmanuel 1972/2025). Even China, the world’s second largest economy, is a developing country subject to the extraction of surplus value by financial capitalists in the North. But, just as the socialist economies of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc came to an end, Labor Studies scholars in the 1980s and 1990s took succor in the assertion that labor militancy was expanding in the newly industrialized regions, notably Brazil, South Africa and South Korea. However, in the intervening years, global capitalism has restructured, and trade unions seeking a share of surplus value through collective bargaining have declined.
'''Table 1''' OECD Trade union density, 1975–2018, % of employees (selected region and countries) ''(Source: Derived from OECD. 2025. Membership of Unions and Employers Organisations and Bargaining Coverage: Standing but Losing Ground (Policy Brief) 30 September. <nowiki>https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/membership-of-unions-and-employers-organisations-and-bargaining-coverage_fe47107c-en/full-report.html</nowiki> and OECD. 2025. OECD/AIS ICTWSS Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts [Dataset] 28)''
{| class="wikitable"
|'''Country'''
|'''1975'''
|'''1985'''
|'''1995'''
|'''2005'''
|'''2015'''
|'''2018'''
|-
|Australia
|50.1
|46.1
|32.9
|22.5
|13.7
|13.7
|-
|Austria
|52.6
|51.3
|41.1
|33.8
|27.4
|26.3
|-
|Canada
|34.8
|35.3
|27.7
|26.5
|25.9
|–
|-
|Colombia
|9.6
|9.4
|–
|–
|–
|–
|-
|France
|22.6
|13.8
|10.5
|–
|–
|–
|-
|Germany
|34.6
|34.7
|29.2
|21.5
|17.6
|16.6
|-
|Italy
|47.5
|42.5
|37.6
|33.8
|34.2
|32.6
|-
|Japan
|34.5
|28.8
|24.0
|18.8
|17.5
|17.0
|-
|Korea (South)
|15.8
|12.4
|12.5
|9.9
|10
|11.6
|-
|Mexico
|40.5
|16.9
|13.1
|13.1
|12
|–
|-
|Netherlands
|37.8
|27.7
|25.3
|22.1
|17.7
|16.5
|-
|Poland
|34.7
|23.8
|–
|–
|–
|–
|-
|Spain
|12.7
|18.6
|15.5
|14.4
|13
|–
|-
|Sweden
|74
|81.3
|84.8
|75.7
|67
|65.5
|-
|Turkey
|40.4
|27.9
|16.7
|10.3
|8
|9.2
|-
|UK
|43.8
|45.3
|33.9
|28.6
|24.7
|23.4
|-
|US
|25.3
|17.4
|14.3
|12
|10.6
|10.1
|-
|'''OECD'''$^{a}$
|'''38.7'''
|'''32.1'''
|'''24.2'''
|'''19'''
|'''16.5'''
|'''15.9'''
|}
''^{a} Estimated union density for OECD region.''

''Note: Figures derived from OECD Data Explorer, Trade Union Density (2023).''

=== 7. Capitalism, the Decline of Labor in the West and the Rise of Unions under Socialism ===
Affluent countries which are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and have adopted European and North American models of trade unionism have experienced a five decade decline, notwithstanding growth in traditional industries. The imposition of the Western model of trade union representation is no longer a viable means to organize workers into unions. The Western model has been adopted by newly independent countries following the end of colonial rule in the aftermath of the Second World War, but this replication has not increased union density in the global South at the periphery of the world economy. In contrast, democratic unionization in the PRC through the ACFTU has dramatically improved conditions for its members and expanded to represent 75 percent of all workers in the state through effective responses to worker demands for improved wages, working conditions and benefits. The success of the socialist model with Chinese characteristics is not dependent exclusively on strikes but on establishing a structure of responsibility among both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the private sector (non-public employees). The private sector now employs about 80 percent of all workers, who, under the holistic ACFTU model, have improved their material and working conditions dramatically in the first quarter of the 21st century. This has been achieved by effectively challenging employers through the most comprehensive labor dispute adjudication system in the world. Workers typically win over 95 percent of cases brought by the ACFTU against management (Social Sciences Academic Press 2024).

In contrast, trade unions in the West have experienced an unprecedented decline, which has led some observers to view organized labor as a spent force. Labor unions, the historic preserve and political expression of working class power under free-market capitalism, have experienced a five-decade organizational decline in influence in the private sector. In the US, the heart of neoliberal capitalism, opposition to labor unions is omnipresent and the lack of an authentic party based federation has undermined any attempt to build a strong union movement against the all-encompassing power of capital and the support of the capitalist state. Consequently, from the 1970s to 2025, labor unions have become far less relevant to the US working class and have limited efficacy among precarious workers working in home care, delivery and logistics industries (namely: women, racial minorities and immigrant laborers) essential for private sector profits. Since the 2010s, the capacity of unions to represent public sector workers has been significantly eroded by Supreme Court decisions and under Donald Trump in 2025, as federal government bargaining rights have been revoked in key government agencies (Beitsch 2025; McCartin 2025; Sainato 2025a).

Most Labor Studies analysts in the US and Western Europe attribute the decline to the expanding power of international finance capital and the US neoliberal state, which has inexorably challenged organized labor thorough a range of union-busting tactics and restrictive policies which disempower workers. In the 1980s, labor management policies fostered the redistribution of wealth from the working class to the upper classes. Concomitantly, the labor literature has since been dominated by discussions of how to energize a working class apathetic to trade unions or stymied by the power of capital. The most popular works are either historical accounts of past successes, present failures, or handbooks prescribing newfangled approaches to organizing workers better and more successfully (Burns 2022; Greenhouse 2020; McAlevey 2020; Moody 2017; Womack 2023). The most evident manifestation of the decline of the US working class is the export of finance and capital investment from manufacturing at home to low wage regions of the world to produce commodities at higher profits for major consumer markets such as North America, Western Europe and increasingly China, Southeast Asia and South Asia.

Even if the vast majority of Labor research converges on the economies of the wealthy countries at the Western core, where union organization has deteriorated to a historic low in 2025, with few exceptions, most Labor Studies scholars continue to applaud existing and proposed models of organizing as the inspirational basis for expanding trade union density. While workers in states with higher density have a propensity to go on strike, the decline in union membership has curtailed political strikes (Lindvall 2013).^1 Still, despite several exceptions, labor strikes are broadly inconsequential and have yet to contribute to a meaningful growth in trade union membership in Western Europe, North America and worldwide (McAlevey 2020). As capital restructures labor markets into new forms of work on dispersed terrains, organized labor can scarcely keep up with technological innovation and globalization of information (Huws 2014). Incredibly, notwithstanding the hemorrhaging of trade union membership, Labor scholars focus on the rare cases where workers mobilize, go on strike and even win election campaigns (Blanc 2025). Notably, the Starbucks Workers United have won elections to represent 11,000 baristas but have struggled with management for a union contract (Kaye & O’Brien 2025; Sainato 2025b). In the event that Starbucks workers do win a union contract, it is unlikely to palpably improve their wages and working conditions. Campaigns at Amazon warehouses have garnered worker support and even several union election victories but no collective bargaining agreements. Eric Loomis is more honest in his appraisal of union success in the US, which reveals a history of working class activism and strikes, sometimes succeeding but often going down to defeat (Loomis 2018).
^1 Paradoxically, the People’s Republic of China, with the highest union density rate in the world, tends to have fewer strikes due to the extensive expansion of administrative courts to settle labor disputes.
Significantly, as workers worldwide increasingly enter a digital economy, oppressed laborers employed by technology firms are almost always considered independent contractors and do not have the capacity to gain employer recognition let alone collective bargaining agreements (Cini 2025; Huws 2014; Ness 2023a; Rothstein 2025; Scholz 2017; Tassinari & Maccarrone 2020; van Doorne et al. 2022) As we shall see in Chapter 5, bottom-up and top-down holistic trade union organizing among platform workers in China has reduced the share of workers who are not directly employed by service providers. Service and retail workers are also prevented from gaining union recognition as employers are averse to unions, even if workers legitimately vote for union recognition. The fledgling election victories at Amazon warehouses and among Starbucks baristas have restored a modicum of hope to Western union enthusiasts, but none has led to a substantive bargaining agreement similar to those at the Wal-Mart and big-box retail chains a decade ago. As government legislation and lack of enforcement and legal regulations have become increasingly opposed to the formation and presence of organized labor, the prospect of rebuilding trade unions in the US and developed countries has become ever more daunting and hostile to workers, even if they have wanted to join unions. In the manufacturing sector, the bastion of trade union growth from the 1930s to 1950s, trade union organizing has failed, even with significant resources. Trade unions are necessary to lessen economic inequality but require a reconstituted labor regime as well as resources and international solidarity to counter the effective union avoidance industry which thwarts organizing campaigns in the US (McClelland 2022; Silvia 2023). Technological change and industrial restructuring have further complicated the capacity of existing trade unions to organize workers. As trade unions weaken, the attention of Labor Studies scholars has shifted towards the prospect of social movements rather than union formations (Clover 2016; della Porta et al. 2023).

=== 8. Western and Non-Western Models of Trade Unionism ===
The global labor movement is composed of trade unions in two international federations: the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), formed in Paris in 1945, and the International Confederation of Trade Unions (ITUC), founded in Brussels in 2006 through a merger of trade unions which embrace capitalism. The ACFTU is not an international federation but has more workers who are members than both organizations combined.

==== 8.1 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) ====
The WFTU was formed in 1948 by the Soviet Union as an international bloc of communist trade unions with shared principles of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and socialism. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the WFTU also hoped an international union federation would advance a common political perspective to compete with that of liberal unions intent on maintaining colonial structures after independence. The ITUC and the WFTU competed for trade union affiliates as part of competition between capitalism and socialism.

The WFTU proclaims itself to be a class oriented trade union movement fighting against capitalist/imperialist barbarity and fighting for a society free of humans exploiting humans. In 2022, the WFTU had 105 million members in 133 countries. Throughout its history, the WFTU has played a central role in the struggles against apartheid, racism, colonialism, as well as against the policies of the US, Israel and NATO and its allies. It has been at the forefront of the struggles for labor and union rights. Its history is rich, with action and struggles on central, regional and sectoral levels aimed at: uniting the forces of the working class in class struggles; uniting the workers regardless of their ideology, religion, language, gender and ethnicity; uniting the people in the struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialism.

While the ACFTU was formed in 1922, the WFTU is the oldest existing international trade union federation. It was founded in Paris, France on October 3, 1945, moving to Vienna, Austria from 1953 to 1956, Prague, Czechoslovakia from 1956 to 2004, and Athens, Greece in 2005, where it remains today. The WFTU maintains divisions on all six continents with sectoral International Trade Unions (TUIs) in every industry. It has permanent representation at the United Nations and holds consultative status in the International Labour Organization (ILO). In 1948, the WFTU advanced the international right of workers to organize. Its trade unions are primarily situated in developing economies and have advanced an anti-imperialist policy.

==== 8.2 International Confederation of Trade Unions (ITUC) ====
The ITUC, claiming 190 million members in 2018, is composed exclusively of national unions in capitalist countries. The unions are found in the European ecumene, North America, former colonies of European imperialist states that inherited the institutional regimes of their former colonial rulers and states in the US sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. ITUC trade unions seek continuity with the past and do not seek to transform liberal democracies dominated by private business, even as the ITUC represents unions which are dependent on public funding derived from state taxation for education, health care and social services. ITUC-affiliated unions do not seek to gain political power and dominance but to expand wages and social benefits for members and also to increase the share of workers who are members of trade unions. Indeed, ITUC unions are primarily motivated by simple unionism, avoid participation in politics and increasingly do not even advocate for political parties which have supported unions in the past. Most unions are transactional and seek a greater share of public funding and policies which favor their discrete industries and jurisdictions. In the private sector, ICTU trade unions seek government policies which restrict free trade, if they are in countries which have large consumer markets and promote exports. Trade unions support government labor policies which facilitate organizing new members, often contrary to attracting finance capital. In short, ITUC unions support protectionism, promotion of exports and governments which facilitate recruitment of union members.

Paradoxically, even as it criticizes the ACFTU for not interfering with socialist China, the ITUC does not engage in political activity and generally does not maintain an ideological perspective other than advancing the material interests of its unions. Even if members may maintain political perspectives, they rarely influence union policy.

=== 9. Decline of Unions in Core Capitalist States, 1975–2025 ===
Following the emergence of neoliberal policies and the dismantling of social welfare programs, trade unions in Europe, North America experienced corresponding decline from 1975 to the present (see Table 1). In Europe, where trade union membership has plummeted in the past 40 years of neoliberal capitalism, Labor scholars recognize the decline but point to a bygone era when unions were stronger as inspiration for the future (Holgate 2021). Even the Nordic region, where unionization had been highest, is experiencing a decline. In post-Eastern bloc Europe, emergent states have adopted neoliberal policies and compete for foreign investments through promising lower labor costs and union-free workplaces, significantly undermining trade unions. In the OECD region, successful labor union organizing campaigns leading to collective bargaining agreements are a rarity. Labor scholar Jelle Visser attributes the decline in trade union membership to the restructuring of labor markets and the inability of trade unions to attract young workers entering labor markets even when the historic conditions for unionization are favorable: for example, inflation and rising consumer prices, the revival of labor militancy and higher levels of government intervention to stabilize markets. In the OECD zone, Visser asserts:<blockquote>If ever there was a time for the trade union, it is now. Unemployment is lower and labour markets are tighter than has been the case in many years. Inflation has sharply risen after a long period of price stability. In many countries there is a recent upward trend in work stoppages, and more workers are involved in strikes. (Visser 2024, 629)</blockquote>Visser considers the conditions to be propitious for a restoration of government as a solution to social and economic crises and support for labor market policies which are more advantageous to workers. This sentiment is rising among labor policymakers in the OECD zone in the aftermath of economic crises, rising inequality, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organizing is in decline throughout the world, a point raised by Marcel van der Linden (2023), who argues that whilst European workers benefited from an apogee of union organization, most workers in the global South never had the opportunity to join trade unions to improve their conditions. Thus, a clear distinction must be made between US and European workers and those in poor countries of the global South (whose numbers have grown dramatically under neoliberalism) as equivalent victims of capital’s neoliberal turn and the attendant decline of labor unions, but between whom there is a massive difference in wealth and income adjusting for purchasing power parity. Moody (2017) and his acolytes assert that the decline of labor is a result of multinational capital. He dismisses the disjuncture of labor interests between rich and poor countries even as GDP per capita in the OECD countries of the global North is significantly higher than in the global South (see Table 2). Instead, the “new terrain” provides the capacity for the development of working class movements in the US which will challenge the state. Accordingly, the new labor force of logistics workers worldwide poses a militant risk to capital through mass action, and the election of candidates supportive of corporations to mitigate this risk manifests the power of capital to influence the political sphere. More recent treatments by labor sociologists (Vivek Chibber 2022) posit that labor can regain its vitality through building social movements and working class political parties. But, if labor unions are on the back foot and failing their members, allegedly it is not because of an apathetic working class but a failure of tactical and strategic organizing (McAlevey 2020).
'''Table 2''' GDP per capita, 2018–24 (constant 2021 international $) ''(Source: World Bank (Database) derived from World Bank Group. 2025. DataBank world development indicators (Database) <nowiki>https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators/Series/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD</nowiki>)''
{| class="wikitable"
|'''Region'''
|'''2018'''
|'''2020'''
|'''2022'''
|'''2024'''
|-
|OECD members
|49,543.0
|47,938.0
|52,125.4
|53,311.4
|-
|Low income
|2,395.3
|2,322.4
|2,291.7
|2,228.1
|-
|European Union
|50,726.6
|48,792.1
|53,686.6
|54,291.0
|-
|United Kingdom
|52,071.3
|47,144.7
|52,982.2
|52,518.0
|-
|United States
|67,719.8
|67,342.1
|72,679.3
|75,491.6
|-
|East Asia & Pacific$^a$
|15,925.0
|16,816.9
|18,599.5
|20,452.2
|-
|Europe & Central Asia$^a$
|41,007.4
|39,619.5
|43,268.7
|44,689.5
|-
|Middle East, North Africa Afghanistan & Pakistan$^a$
|9,498.7
|9,162.5
|9,636.7
|9,792.6
|-
|Latin America & Caribbean$^a$
|18,120.2
|16,754.7
|18,419.7
|18,935.3
|-
|North America
|66,672.0
|65,982.8
|71,185.0
|73,461.8
|-
|South Asia
|7,622.3
|7,399.2
|8,522.0
|9,653.4
|-
|Sub-Saharan Africa$^a$
|4,595.9
|4,374.7
|4,502.9
|4,535.1
|-
|'''World'''
|'''19,063.0'''
|'''18,698.1'''
|'''20,281.5'''
|'''21,267.7'''
|}
''^a Excluding high income.''

=== 10. Perspectives on the Decline and Possible Resurgence of Union Membership ===
Do the US and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) represent a model for trade union resurgence? In 2023, US trade unions declared that they were undergoing an unprecedented turnaround in the wake of labor-union strikes and collective bargaining successes in major industrial and logistics sectors, in particular the United Auto Workers (UAW) contract campaigns in the big three leading auto companies: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Notably, the UAW won wage increases ranging from 25 percent to 33 percent, expedited wage increases in the future and secured unionization in new battery factories without employer resistance, an objective which labor unions had demanded but typically failed to achieve since the late 1980s. Remarkably, through a targeted strike campaign, the UAW, under its new national president Sean Fein, forced management to abolish the tiered wage system it had instituted in 2004 which had severely eroded union membership and wage standards in the industry and set higher wage workers against lower wage ones. However, although workers covered by union collective bargaining agreements registered a marginal increase in numbers, union density, not including membership, remained at 6.8 percent in the private sector, the same rate as in 2022. Due to the Janus decision by the Supreme Court, permitting workers in unions to opt out of paying dues, ever more workers covered by collective bargaining agreements are not union members (''Janus v. AFSCME'' 2017). Right-to-work laws in the US are a leading factor in the decline of membership and have been replicated in other Western countries. Thus, workers may benefit from collective bargaining agreements but reject membership and the requirement to pay dues to employers. Most union analysts believe that the true unionization rate in the private sector is below 5 percent.

Since the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, it has been the sole labor federation in the US during a historical low point in union membership numbers. It is significant to note that the US is dominated by a single labor federation as Labor scholars often claim that socialist countries like China and Cuba have a single federation, linked to a political party without competition. The difference for the US is that the AFL-CIO is loosely allied with the Democratic Party as an interest group lacking in substantial influence over political decisions. At least, unions directly affiliated to political parties maintain the power to influence decisions in favor of labor. As union power in the US is measured by density in the working population, trade unions in the private sector declined to an all-time low which has remained relatively constant despite efforts to mobilize workers into unions and take militant strike action. Union membership in the private sector declined between 2020 and 2023 from 6.3 percent to 6.0 percent, and Supreme Court decisions further eroded union membership and power through undermining labor’s capacity to collect union dues, both in the private and public sectors (see Table 3).
'''Table 3''' Union membership, coverage, density and employment: Private sector workers ''(Source: Derived from Hirsch et al. (2025) Unionstats: Union membership and coverage database from the current population survey (Database) Unionstats.com <nowiki>https://unionstats.com/</nowiki>)''
{| class="wikitable"
|'''Year'''
|'''Sample Size'''
|'''Employment (thousands)'''
|'''Union Members (thousands)'''
|'''Membership (%)'''
|-
|1973
|40,245
|61,886.5
|14,954.1
|24.2%
|-
|1980
|55,246
|71,440.7
|14,331.6
|20.1%
|-
|1990
|152,197
|87,066.4
|10,299.4
|11.8%
|-
|2000
|134,554
|101,809.9
|9,147.7
|9.0%
|-
|2010
|137,980
|103,040.4
|7,091.9
|6.9%
|-
|2020
|111,050
|111,587.0
|7,082.3
|6.3%
|-
|2023
|105,475
|122,994.1
|7,408.1
|6.0%
|}
''Note: Data is based on the US Government Current Population Survey.''

=== 11. Factors in the International Decline of Trade Union Membership ===
Union membership has declined throughout the world in the neoliberal period since 1975. Scholars have historically attributed this in the US to government and Supreme Court policies and legal decisions hostile to unions. Others assert that unions lack internal democracy, thus repelling workers from social organization at the workplace (Moody 1988). However, the evidence shows that as trade unions are ineffective in defending labor, a growing share of workers prefers to remain independent from unions and are largely uninterested in joining new union campaigns. The rise of neoliberalism and the precipitous decline in union density poses a significant dynamic in the economies of wealthy states in the affluent West as wages decline and fewer can afford housing, transportation and other necessities. This helps explain why trade union strategists believe that organizing new forms of worker organizations that include youth, women and immigrants entering the labor market will boost the size of collective trade unions (Kochan et al 2023; Visser 2024). But trade unions, workers’ organizations and NGOs have shifted from direct organizing towards advocacy campaigns to increase membership, hoping that workers will achieve wage increases as a result of lobbying rather than direct action. Consequently, wage gains are applicable to NGOs and government minimum wage laws rather than union organizing activity. Concomitantly, the wage gap between union and non-unions jobs is becoming less significant. Often, in unskilled jobs, government minimum wage laws set by elected officials are the basis for setting wages rather than being an advantage which unions gain from mobilizing members. In skilled jobs, workers are apt to bargain directly with employers rather than depend on a union to do so on their behalf.

Scholars have attributed the decline in unions to legal and political restrictions on labor organizing and membership (Gould 2022; Lichtenstein 2013). Certainly, the US labor courts (biased against trade unions), and corporate lawyers have significantly constrained the capacity of workers to strike and engage in concerted action to improve conditions and have limited their rights to represent workers. But legal restrictions alone do not explain the anemic state of the labor movement in the US. In addition, union wages are not appreciably higher than non-union wages, and workers have been beneficiaries of the privileged position they hold compared to workers overseas. While Black and Latino workers have a propensity to join unions, the record shows that employer anti-union campaigns pose formidable legal obstacles to organizing. Moreover, in comparison to other countries in the West and OECD region, white US workers are less interested in labor representation due to employer opposition (Bronfenbrenner 2009; Wang and Young 2023). Race also is a factor in unionization, but if white workers are already members and realize that interracial solidarity is beneficial to all workers they are more likely to unify on class rather than identity (Frymer and Grumbach 2020). William Gould, chairman of the National Labor Relations Board in the US from 1994 to1998, contends that labor laws have been a barrier to union organization, but such impediments do not explain the wide gap between US and overseas workers in this respect. Instead, in his most recent work, Gould asserts that unions in the US lack internal democracy in the workplace (Gould 2022; Levitt 2021). During this time, most labor unions throughout the world have had restricted rank-and-file participation and have often been complicit with employers in negotiating and enforcing contracts. This view has long been maintained by union democracy reformers in the Teamsters, UAW and other major unions (Brenner et al. 2010; Burns 2022; Crowe 1993; Moody 1988; 2017). They believe that the spectacle of rank-and-file militancy in those cases takes precedence over establishing genuinely strong and viable unions capable of overcoming the power of capitalist exploitation. Rising capitalist exploitation in the West and the decline of existing trade unions have eroded the living standards of workers, characterized by Guy Standing as “the precariat,” who, lacking in representation, constitute a dangerous class which has the potential to politically destabilize society, an outcome which has come to fruition with the rise of populism (Standing 2011).

The growing number of workers eschewing unions does not negate the fact that workers are seeking to mobilize to obtain wage increases. But, due to occupational mobility, it is unlikely that workers will view unionization and wage gains as a significant change in their working conditions. Workers seeking unionization are the most vulnerable and view unions as a means to secure wage growth, protection from employer abuse and, for undocumented migrant workers, deportation.

=== 12. Unequal Exchange and Inexpensive Commodities ===
The decline in trade unions is in part a function of the deindustrialization of the economies of wealthy states, where the industrial working class comprised the most militant workers. Service and technology workers are far more concerned with low cost services and inexpensive commodities, which are obtained from the unequal exchange of trade between wealthy and poor countries (Emmanuel 1972/2025). In the West, even workers benefit from the extensive availability of low cost commodities. Admittedly, they are subjected to higher costs of living, and the US has the highest level of inequality of income and inequality among rich countries, but the evidence reveals that per capita GDP in the West is far higher than in the rest of the world and growing (Chancel et al. 2022). In the post-industrial economies of North America and Western Europe, the workforce has shifted away from industrial manufacturing and towards services and new technology. Wage inequality stems from the growth of the digital economy and the expansion of new labor markets, including ride hailing, delivery, logistics and workers who have become dependent on digital platforms where technology companies typically have no responsibility for them.

Trade unions primarily increase wages among low wage workers. Most other workers do not require labor unions to defend and improve wages, but, as they are independent contractors, trade union organizing is highly challenging or impossible for them as they do not have an official employment relationship with technology firms. A large segment of the digital workforce is composed of migrant laborers who are considered essential workers employed in jobs which are in high demand but where there is a shortage of labor. Thus, the correlation between trade union representation and wage growth applies only to low wage workers and not those who form the “labor aristocracy.” This view was advanced by Marxist economists as early as the late 19th century as they sought to understand why organized labor in rich countries was not interested in defending the interests of destitute workers in poor countries.

To begin to overcome this failure of international class solidarity, we must recognize that, from the transformation of primitive accumulation to the origins of capitalism, proletarianization has not been uniform but has reflected multiple class contradictions. The origin and development of capitalism is not monolithic and mirrors the manifold developments of capital formation and the essential introduction and application of new technology (Emmanuel 1982). The asymmetrical churning of capital formation is decisive in economic development and the formation of interclass and intraclass privilege. On a world scale, the poorest in developed societies have been better-off than the wealthiest in poor countries of the global South, patterning class conflict within societies and reflecting imperialist economic privilege among countries. The dual shift takes place through internal conflict within states and patent conflict expressed through imperialist privilege between the core and periphery, with non-uniform distinctions among social formations. It is the progression of interstate divisions which gives rise to a labor aristocracy and has been identified by major philosophers from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to eminent Third World political economists of the 20th and 21st centuries; namely, Arghiri Emmanuel, Ruy Mauro Marini, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and the World-Systems school.

The concept of unequal exchange advanced by Emmanuel in the 1960s has been revitalized in the 2020s and has shifted a growing share of the Marxist literature away from its dominant proclivity for structural theory towards studies focusing on the dialectical relationship between humans and the material reality, fostering research on the non-equivalence of wages between rich and poor countries (Brolin 2007; Cross 2021; Dunaway & Macabuac 2022; Frame 2023; Hickel 2021; Hornborg 2011; King 2023; Lauesen 2024; Malm 2020; Marini 2022; Ness 2023b; Osorio & Reyes 2023; Raffer 2023; Ricci 2022; 2023).

=== 13. Workers in the Capitalist Core and the Aristocracy of Labor ===
As the dominant imperialist power from 1945 to the present, the US has reaped economic advantages from its hegemonic economic, military, cultural and political status. The abundant literature in political economy has demonstrated that the formation and consolidation of the financial order in the postwar era has benefited the capitalist class and supported attendant economic benefits for its working classes. The dominant capitalist fractions in the US required a strong working class as consumers of its products and services. Workers also obtained economic advantages from their privileged status at the center of the global empire.

As US dominance extended from the 1970s to the early 21st century, the relocation of production from the US to new low cost sites in the global South transformed the labor market as well paid jobs in manufacturing were replaced by ones in services, retail and finance sectors. Taken together, the reconstitution of the US labor market away from production has solved the overproduction problem of the 1970s and removed a major source of economic and political instability. The unemployed reserve army was shifted from the US and other countries of the global North to the global South. In the postwar era, lower unemployment was always an indicator of an overheated economy, as capitalist markets worried that wages would creep up and reduce profitability. When unemployment rates decline today, markets stay stable, as they indicate that the consumer market remains vibrant.

Though wages have moderated as a consequence of the decline in trade unions, the US relies on a strong consumer class to purchase goods primarily manufactured overseas. Consequently, the capitalist markets require a working class which can afford foreign goods. The purchasing power of the US consumer market is the largest in the world and, based on GDP per capita, is growing. In the modern era, this satiated working class in the US and imperialist core constitutes a labor aristocracy which benefits directly from the super-exploitation of foreign labor. Thus, as Lenin noted, today’s US and European workers do not share common political material interests with 85 percent of the world in the global South but are in alliance with their national bourgeoisie (see Amin 2017). A majority of the US and metropolitan working class are members of the labor aristocracy, disinclined towards forming a common class interest with workers in the global South, which is articulated through national chauvinism with an unambiguous objective of maintaining their economic advantage derived through imperialism.

To understand the nature of populism in the US and elsewhere we need to revive the concept of the labor aristocracy as a prime driver in class consciousness and political action. The presence of a privileged sector of labor is not an abstraction but allows us to understand the unsettling impact of working class fragmentation. As Labor scholars and socialists, it is far more comfortable to perceive the working class as a cohesive unified force. It is preferable to lay blame for the decline in working class unity on rapacious employers controlled by a compliant capitalist state than to gaze at the internal divisions within the working class. Of course, it is the upper strata of labor which join with the bourgeoisie and capitalist state to advance a mutual set of interests.

As a graduate student recently related, the idea that the world capitalist system is defined by a labor aristocracy is a bitter pill to swallow. Indeed, it is a challenging normative position to conceive of workers as divided and compels scholars of the working class to reconsider our enduring perspectives on the challenges which circumscribe and restrict class unity and collective action.

==== 13.1 Labor Aristocracy in the Global Core Today ====
Working class populism is directly implanted in the turbulence of the global divide between rich and poor and intensification of the imperialist center’s struggle to preserve its economic privilege, which has not declined but deepened through superexploitation of natural resources and labor in the global South. Accordingly, we can begin to delineate the alarming growth of right wing populism in the US working class. While populism is also expressed on the left, the unmistakable erosion and disappearance of trade unions (which had advanced ideas of justice and social rights on a national basis, though certainly not on a global basis) have left workers abandoned with no form of organizational representation. Though trade unions in the US have had a tenuous relationship with their members, once jobs disappear, that connection completely disappears and workers are left to fend for themselves. (On the decline of US trade unions and other social organizations, see Putnam (2001).) Workers are more likely to join religious institutions that advance social chauvinism. However, as unions decline, most do not join any competing social organizations whatsoever.

While the wealthy countries in the global North have experienced wider income inequality, reflected in the catchphrases “1 percent,” “precarious labor,” “anti-fascism,” and growing interest in “socialism,” a close examination of the movements of the left exposes a reformism that does not seek to address questions of global poverty and exploitation but a redistribution of wealth within the wealthy countries of the global North. The social movements and political currents of the 2010s in the US, notably “Occupy Wall Street” and the dramatic growth of the Democratic Socialists of America after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, are devoted to addressing national rather than global inequality.

=== 14. The Growth and Expansion of Trade Union Representation in China ===
The premise of this book is that China’s ACFTU is a model for trade unionism worldwide. Detractors on the right and left may reject this view, asserting that the ACFTU is controlled by the CPC. However, upon the foundation of China in 1949, the ACFTU had adopted a Leninist model of trade unionism, advocating the mobilization of workers into unions but rejecting the participation of unions in independent political activity which could potentially undermine the mainsprings of a socialist society. Opponents either do not recognize the importance of the CPC’s political leadership rooted in the working class and the ACFTU’s consistent shapeshifting and metamorphosing of its organizing strategies in response to the application of new technology that also have a bearing on workers’ job stability. But to be sure, Chinese trade unions affiliated with the ACFTU elected their leaders democratically and reflect the demands of the Chinese working class for improved wages, conditions of work and benefits. The trade union federation has been recognized by the ILO as exemplary in responding to technological changes that affect workers and has assigned the ACFTU to strengthen trade union capacities to advance South–South cooperation.^2 The ACFTU’s antagonists do not consider cause and effect of technological change and focus on the temporal interval before the implementation of new organizing strategies.

The ACFTU has successfully adapted to the rapid modernization of China’s economy and has reflected the subjective needs of an urban proletariat. It had significant challenges to overcome in the development of China’s economy which required understanding of the objective requirements of the working class. No social organization can respond immediately to the organization of markets, especially the insertion of foreign capitalist markets in the formative stages of China’s opening up. The advances of the ACFTU reflect the unremitting progression of a socialist trade union organization to address worker demands.

=== 15. Conclusion ===
Opponents of the ACFTU, almost exclusively leftists outside of China, expect it to instantaneously change its organizing practices without absorbing the multifarious features of the economy. To absorb the changes, the ACFTU, like all organizations, must ascertain how to respond in the interests of the working class. In this sense, it reflects both the Leninist transmission belt of a Marxist organization and a bottom-up federation which responds to the demands of workers. Surely, we do not live in a utopian world and grasping demands is often imperfect and laden with barriers which reflect internal and external forces. In a natural world, change does not occur immediately but swells up from the rank and file and the working class forces which represent the Chinese ACFTU.

Juxtaposing Chinese labor-union representation (which mobilizes workers, increases wages, benefits and rights) with the inept Western capitalist form highlights the distinctiveness of a society which is dedicated to advancing the rights of the working class. Chapter 6 examines the ACFTU’s leadership in organizing workers in the platform economy. The Chinese success in organizing workers in logistics and the digital economy stands in stark contrast to unions’ failure to organize this rapidly expanding sector of workers elsewhere in the world. No other state encourages the democratic organization of workers in the public and private sectors. Trade union organization in China has tangible benefits: significantly higher wages, benefits and social security, as well as improved standards of occupational safety.

Unlike most countries across the world, China does not pride itself on low unionization rates to promote foreign investment. As a socialist state, it encourages workers to join local unions where there is a high level of democratic representation through elections for union leaders on the firm level. However, China’s high union density rate and attendant high wages do not inhibit foreign investment in the country due to the country’s high productivity, technological development and subsumption of capital into production. While the ACFTU has mobilized workers into unions, raised wages, benefits, social insurance and improved working conditions, the federation is charged by the CPC to continually work to improve the lives of China’s working class. As a socialist society which is dedicated to the working class, the ACFTU must never consider its efforts complete as the material conditions constantly change. Consequently, the ACFTU must consistently improve wages and working conditions in new labor market sectors, such as services and logistics, while organizing new workers into the federation. A key challenge today is ensuring that all workers have contracts with their firms. Those workers who do not work directly for employers do not have equivalent benefits. However, the ACFTU has successfully transformed the status of workers on the provincial, municipal, district and street levels. In contrast to unions globally, it is on the march and exhibiting to the world that it surpasses trade unions based on Western metrics and is moving towards an equitable socialist society.
^2 In 2024, the ILO renewed an agreement to “enhance trade union capacities in Asia and the Pacific.” The ILO has charged the ACFTU to expand its initiatives to assist unions to “advocate for policy reforms and improve working conditions” for workers through trade unions. The ACFTU will impart its effective organizing strategies in the digital sector to trade unions in Asian and Pacific countries. In addition, the ACFTU was charged with working with unions in the global South to meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) for decent work, “including gender equality, social dialogue, occupational safety and health, transitions and forced and child labour” (ILO 2024).

== Migration, Floating Labor and Urbanization ==
<blockquote>'Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally, whether in the natural world, in human society, or in man’s thinking. Between the opposites in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradictions exist everywhere, but they differ in accordance with the different nature of different things. In any given phenomenon or thing, the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and transitory, and hence relative, whereas the struggle of opposites is absolute. (Mao Zedong, 1957)'</blockquote>One must understand the condition and revolutionary nature of the Chinese working class to properly understand the major demographic transformation from 1978 to the present. During the post-Mao era, China has transformed from a fundamentally agrarian society to an urban one and, concomitantly, the primarily rural working class economy has become an urban industrial and service society. Under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, the rural economy has transformed into an urban “market socialist” economy which has set the stage for the application of a developed form of socialism. The contradiction of socialism without development was solved by releasing the forces of production. Under any dialectical process, contradictions are not resolved without adversity and struggle. If Mao’s era was characterized by the application of socialism in 1949, Deng’s rise in 1978 was directed at the institution of market reforms under a socialist state, preparing the foundation for the emergence of a more effective socialist state dedicated to the expropriation of capital under Xi Jinping from 2012 to the present (Bu 2022).

=== 1. Introduction: Anti-Imperialist Revolution and the Struggle for a Socialist Path to Development ===
When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in October 1949, just under 90 percent of its 541.2 million residents lived in the countryside and just over 10.6 percent resided in urban areas. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, from 1949 to 1976, the capacity to survive on the countryside

was considered a vital form of economic security, and the Chinese state consistently emphasized improving the lives of rural workers through collectivization and state social programs. The “iron rice bowl” provided China’s rural population with the capacity to survive, no small achievement in view of more than 100 years of imperial occupation and pillage from the early 19th century to the rise of the PRC. From the mid-1950s, China established a hukou residential system, which ensured all citizens had the right to a domicile and household, a development which contributed to the vast rise in basic living standards: for example, life expectancy, infant mortality, food and nutrition which eradicated stunting, and so on. The hukou was viewed as a social benefit ensuring the right to maintain households. Notwithstanding efforts to thwart Chinese development by the US and the West, the PRC provided basic protections which preserved the capacity of people to live in rural regions. This is why Marxist sociologist Robert Weil (1996) regarded rural state security under the socialist system of the PRC to be a significant achievement which safeguarded the Chinese rural proletariat from economic calamity and devastation.

Chinese government statistics and academic research have shown a direct nexus between the extraordinary expansion of migration from rural agrarian regions to urban agglomerations as essential to stimulating the rise of the manufacturing industries for export and a burgeoning urban economy. Within only two decades, from 1980 to 2000, China became the world’s foremost industrial producer and exporter of commodities for consumers chiefly in North America and Western Europe. In the next 25 years, from 2000 to 2025, the Chinese economy rose to be the second largest in the world, measured by the value of goods and services, without taking into consideration unequal exchange and the inequality of the value of goods and services produced in China and the US. If the true value of goods and services were factored in and unequal exchange of trade were removed, China would have the largest economy in the world (Ricci 2021a; 2021b).

Marxist political economist John Bellamy Foster (2024) lays bare the magnitude of unequal exchange from developing to developed countries:<blockquote>It should be emphasized that the Global North’s contemporary drain of economic surplus from the Global South, via the unequal exchange of labor embodied in exports from the latter, is in addition to the normal net flow of capital from developing to developed countries recorded in national accounts. This includes the balance on merchandise trade (import and exports), net payments to foreign investors and banks, payments for freight and insurance, and a wide array of other payments made to foreign capital such as for royalties and patents. (Bellamy Foster 2024)</blockquote>Jason Hickel et al. observe, on a global scale, unequal exchange of trade between North and South is extensive and durable:<blockquote>Our analysis confirms a substantial and persistent pattern of unequal exchange between the global north and South. In 2021, the global North imported 906 billion hours of embodied labour from the South while exporting only 80 billion hours in return (a ratio of 11:1). On average across the period, the North imported 15x more labour from the South than it exported in return. … This net appropriation occurs across skill categories, including high-skilled labour. On average the North imports 4× more high-skilled labour from the South than it exports, together with 17× more medium-skilled labour and 29× more low-skilled labour. … Net flows from China to the North account for roughly one-sixth of total net South–North flows. It is worth noting here that the net South–North flow of embodied labour is not “paid for” by an opposite net flow of embodied land, energy or materials (on the contrary, large South–North flows occur across all input categories. (Hickel et al. 2024, 3–5)</blockquote>The disproportionate shift in human labor and resources from the South to rich countries of the North, and particularly from China to the North, discredits the assessment of most academic critics of labor exploitation who live in the North and are beneficiaries of the uneven exchange of trade. Moreover, the Chinese government and trade unions have had to respond to social dislocation and inequality triggered by Western trade policies. That Chinese workers and trade unions are successfully improving conditions through organizing trade unions exposes the actuality of the internationalization of class struggle (Hammer and Ness 2021; Mihci 2022; Moussaly 2022). Further underpinning the achievements of the PRC is the fact that, despite its major strides, the country remains a developing country which is exploited economically by the West and recognizes the difficult task for other countries.

From 1949 to 1976, the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged and advanced proactive policies to reclaim the land and capital from foreign imperialists and large landowners. Rural collectivization provided the Chinese people with dignity but, in part due to the Sino-Soviet split in 1956, US sabotage of the Great Leap Forward, and Mao Zedong’s meeting with US president Richard Nixon, the economy was dependent on foreign alliances for development and required the technological means to advance. In effect, China could not develop because foreign countries, and especially the West, stymied efforts to provide capital and technology. It is highly mistaken to contrast the introduction of socialism under Mao from 1949 to 1976 and Deng Xiaoping’s opening of “market socialism” in 1978. As Wen (2021) describes, China has endured a series of crises under the planned socialist economy and the introduction and expansion of the market economy. However, the socialist market economy has had the most significant impact on the Chinese working class through the migration of rural workers to urban regions.

This chapter examines the most significant demographic transformation in world history over the last half century: the migration of the majority of China’s population to urban areas and the attendant consequences of urban mobility on the Chinese working class. The urbanization of China’s population is the basis for substantial analysis and critique as it was accompanied by the withdrawal of social protections by the state which had been the mainstay of the socialist economy under Mao Zedong from 1949 to 1978. Political economists and sociologists examining China in the ensuing years have delineated the rising societal tensions during the formative era of the application of “market socialism” by Mao’s successors. For many in the West, political identification and support for the CPC under Mao was replaced by disheartening appraisals that the PRC had turned away from socialism. Countless Maoists in the West abandoned support for the PRC, resigned to the adverse consequences of market socialism. Western Marxists, anarchists, and social democrats who reject Marxism Leninism, Maoism and socialism with Chinese characteristics have reveled in disingenuously caricaturing the project as a turn to capitalism. Duplicitously, most liberal and Marxist scholars have been even more rancorously opposed to the Mao era than they are to the Chinese state today.

=== 2. Internal Migration, the ACFTU and the Chinese Labor Movement ===
The “opening up” of the Chinese economy to market forces in the 1980s was the foremost factor shaping the nature of labor in the last half century and will continue being so in future. In 1978, less than 16.7 percent of China’s nearly 963 million citizens resided in urban areas. For millennia, Chinese people had been reliant on the land and agriculture for sustenance. In the 40 years after 1978, urban residents came to compose nearly 65 percent of China’s more than 1.41 billion population. Whereas China’s urban migration is the most significant demographic factor in China’s economic transformation, the presence of nearly 500 million residents in rural areas cannot be discounted, as that population represents a formidable social and economic force. However, migration to urban agglomerations is the primary driver in the development of the Chinese working class. Rapid urbanization is the primary dynamic which defines the Chinese economy over nearly half a century. Moreover, urban migration has grown so quickly that the task of integrating the urban working class into cities of all sizes has been the most formidable charge for the PRC and its institutions.

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has had a formidable task to absorb the Chinese working class within urban areas into constituent unions across labor markets, 23 provinces and 11 additional administrative regions. As the Chinese state does not restrict union representation and all workers who want to form unions have a legal right to do so, the ACFTU has had to adapt to conform to the transition from a rural agrarian to an urban industrial economy. In the initial period, from 1980 to 2000, the ACFTU had to keep pace with multinational corporations, foreign investors, offshore contractors, and internal subcontractors to make sure that labor rights ensconced in China’s labor law were observed by frequently rapacious capitalists unconcerned with municipal wage rates and occupational safety. Notably, ensuring that labor-union membership rights were adhered to also presented a challenge to the ACFTU. Frequently, private capitalists practiced union avoidance, circumventing labor laws by designating workers in their firms as independent contractors and not permanent employees. This tactic is ubiquitous throughout the world as a means to prevent workers from joining labor unions and collecting equivalent wages and benefits. In the US, where unions are far sparser than in most other capitalist countries, their absence has significant consequences for workers.

In China, a country with a legacy of collectivization, the right to form a union at the workplace is considered de rigueur. To be sure, union membership is acutely significant for migrant laborers who have relocated from rural areas and have yet to gain local residential registration. It is necessary to reinforce the fact that almost all Western literature on Chinese labor distorts the effectiveness and accomplishments of the ACFTU and fails to account for the federation’s leading role in the unfolding dialectical relationship between private employers and the working class. Beyond a doubt, the federation serves as the facilitator in the protection of labor through improving job security, wages, social insurance, working conditions and more. Even though the ACFTU has consistently endeavored to protect labor rights, formative research in the West during the early 2000s to the present has sought to disparage it for facilitating resolution of labor–management disputes even as the rights of labor have improved substantially. Instead, such commentators search for the spectacle rather than the application of labor rights. For example, Zhu (2004) admonishes the ACFTU for facilitating bottom-up organization by migrant workers in foreign enterprises in the formative years of China’s industrialization in the 1990s and early 2000s and chastises the ACFTU’s efforts to broker agreements to avert strikes in state enterprises as a means of bureaucratic control, implying that migrant workers would be better off without unionization. This paradox recurs among almost all Western Labor scholars, analysts and journalists, frequently but not always writing from abroad and focusing on rare events which may have been orchestrated by powerful Western NGOs. Typically, they do not consider the progression of government practices and policy evolution in response to identification of rapacious business practices by foreign multinationals. To reiterate, they see historical materialism as rooted in Xi Jinping’s seminal anti-corruption campaigns and poor business practices (Bieler and Chun-Yi Lee 2017; Chan et al. 2020; Friedman 2014; Gallagher 2005; Harney 2008; Lee 2007). Once again, this critique does not impute that most opponents of China’s labor regime are engaging in ideological conformity in the West. For most left opponents, since 1978, China has become state capitalist, a stance that typically requires ideological conformity. This Western purity complex applied to actually existing socialist states, non-assessment of change over time, and an absence of painstakingly examined factual information. However, after advancing disparaging perspectives on any academic subject, changing material evidence should spur scholars to change their assessment based on empirical facts. To do so requires, reappraising one’s previous research and admitting error. Unfortunately, a complex of well-funded organizations collaborates to advance the anti-China narrative, and many China academics are directly linked to them. Others are committed to applying anti-China jargon and profit from US NGOs established in the West (Friedman 2014).

The evolving labor-studies literature in the West condemns the PRC and the ACFTU for extending labor protections to all workers and opposing discrimination against women and migrant workers, as enacted in the 2007 Labor Contract Law, which took effect in January 2008 (Labor Contract Law 2007). In the aftermath of the passage of the new labor law, some Labor scholars honestly assessed the strategic transformation of the ACFTU rather than applying a uniform position to union organizing in China, as most other Labor Studies scholars did. Notably, Mingwei Liu, writing in 2010, identified distinct patterns of organizing and representation in a nuanced approach. Liu showed that the form of union organization framed the type of union organizing. Notwithstanding the perfunctory critique of the nature of the ACFTU as an arm of the CPC, Liu found that union mobilization strategies take on three patterns of organizing: traditional ACFTU pattern, the union association pattern, and the regional, industry based bargaining pattern” (Liu 2010). Writing 15 years later, Ying applies a careful empirical approach to analyzing the developing Chinese labor market and its challenges, without recourse to mockery or ridicule, examining the growth of urban migration, demographic shifts and the labor employment change as service and digital employment expands (Ying 2025).

The Chinese working class is overwhelmingly composed of recent migrants who have relocated to urban agglomerations from c.1990 to 2025. Initially, workers migrating to urban areas have been paid low wages, primarily by contractors for multinational corporations and within Special Economic Zones (SEZs) established along the eastern littoral. Each municipality has competed with others for foreign direct investment (FDI) through lax taxation, availability of low-wage workers, and infrastructural developments such as road, rail, ports, warehouses and other logistics. Taken together, the migrant working class can compete, even if earning higher wages, as high technology and efficient supply-chains have further reduced costs (surplus labor).

China’s hukou registration classification for residency in a locality initially restrained wage growth as every citizen was tied to a specific place. For example, at the outset of China’s industrialization, there was no established plan to modify the residential status of workers from rural to urban and semi-urban workers (Chan 2021). In the absence of residential status, Chinese laborers did not have the legal right to reside in their new locations and lacked access to the attendant housing, health care, and education since social benefits were determined on the basis of one’s legal habitation. Accordingly, as in the case of most urbanizing societies, workers frequently spent long periods away from family members in rural areas or other provinces. As will become apparent (see “Market Socialism, Urban Migration, and the Rise of a Floating Population” below), this problem was later addressed. Even though China’s population is nearly three times greater than that of Europe, migrant laborers have typically had authorization to work in the country’s growing urban centers and metropolitan areas. It is pointless and unreasonable to compare the conditions and rights of China’s internal migrants to those of migrants in Europe or North America, where workers are rendered “illegal” and forcibly restricted from legally participating in the labor market even as they are essential workers. In China, rural migrants’ conditions are continually improving as they receive legal status to stay and reside in destinations with their families. In the US, no legal path to citizenship is available to undocumented migrant workers who typically migrate alone, without their families, and are employed at low wages, lack occupational safety protection and are subject to perpetual abuse as they face arrest, imprisonment and deportation. Paradoxically, migrant workers are essential workers and employed in the most dangerous jobs, a factor which became especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hernández 2024; Ness 2023b; Reid et al. 2021).

=== 3. The ACFTU, Floating Migrants and Worker Representation ===
The key contention of this book, as adumbrated in the Introduction, is that the Chinese labor movement is the most inclusive and democratic in the world. We aim to dispel the prevailing critique of China among Labor scholars, which is based on impossible standards not even approached by labor movements in the West. China is unique among nations as a worker’s state which is striving to improve conditions for the working class. Even if the market economy here introduced reforms which pushed the rural working class into low wage jobs, the state has sought to soften the effects through advancing their socioeconomic status, an objective which has been achieved but which the CPC and ACFTU continually seek to improve upon. The Chinese working class has the highest union membership rates in the world. This does not imply that the ACFTU has achieved all its goals or that workers are not exploited; but fundamentally, the Chinese state is responsive to their demands. Moreover, workers who are members of unions typically are motivated to advance their collective interests and improve the wages and conditions of all workers in a firm, as all workers are represented by the union and entitled to the same conditions. Nevertheless, hostile Labor scholars have raised the bar for China and ceaselessly condemn the ACFTU for not achieving socioeconomic goals which are not even on the agenda in the West, where labor unions are on the back foot and vanishing. Most significantly, the People’s Republic of China, CPC, and the ACFTU are accomplishing the goal of incorporating migrant workers into unions. Where worker conditions are substandard, the ACFTU will intercede, resolve disputes and improve wages, benefits and safety. This is not to say that strikes do not occur in China, but disputes between labor and management are adjudicated and mediated within the interstices of the ACFTU. Undoubtedly, the ACFTU could not have been expected to anticipate the extent of the mass wave of internal urban migration. Consequently, it and the CPC responded to worker discontent with national labor laws protecting labor in 1992 and 2008, at the height of neoliberal reform and the redoubling of enforcement from 2015 to the present under the leadership of Xi Jinping.

On October 22, 2024, the People’s Republic of China Ministry of Ecology and Environment published an official position on the significance of migrant workers to urban centers and the requirement to incorporate them as vital workers with full rights. According to the CPC organization, a central plank of building a modern workforce is to:<blockquote>Cultivate migrant workers into high-quality modern industrial workers. Focusing on industrial transformation and upgrading, strengthen skills training for migrant workers and widely implement the “Study and Dream” program. Promote the integration of migrant workers into cities, further relax and expand urban settlement policies, and ensure equal access to basic urban public services for migrant workers. Increase public legal services to benefit migrant workers, protect their legitimate rights and interests, and promote stable employment. (Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the PRC 2024)</blockquote>In spite of the CPC’s policy initiatives to promote worker rights, most of the research by Western Labor scholars ends in 2015 and primarily advances a critical and judgmental perspective on the treatment of new urban migrant workers. A considerable share of the Western hostility arises from Western NGOs. The PRC considers NGOs’ research to be directed by antagonistic foreign researchers resolved to invent inadequacies rather than initiatives to improve the conditions of the Chinese migrant workers as indispensable to its working class. Indeed, this is precisely what Labor research does in the West. The narratives are almost never favorable towards the Government in power. Regrettably, the penchant for criticizing and condemning draws attention away from constructive research which identifies complications in need of improvement. Westerners apply their own models of labor–management relations when they have no relevance to China. In closing, it must be stressed that the ACFTU unions have no monetary incentives to favor members over non-members of unions as they are not subsidized by dues but by the government and sometimes employer levies. Union members do not fund union bureaucracies.

Notwithstanding this, Booth et al. (2022, 997) have found that “[t]he membership premium is particularly remarkable for wages, for which the advantage for the members is twice as large as for the non-members.” It is clear that wages, “happiness and mental health” are a function of union membership, which corresponds with improved pay, benefits and access to social insurance, participation and self-management. Thus, it stands to reason that migrant workers will require workplace and residential rights to improve their conditions as lack of hukou rights provokes anxiety and social discomfort.

The International Labour Organization (ILO), the foremost and most esteemed labor institution affiliated with the United Nations, works closely with the ACFTU and conducts studies on logistics, platform labor and cutting edge labor questions in China. The research demonstrates that the Federation is far advanced in representing migrant workers in urban workplaces, even if it faces significant challenges from businesses which do not grant labor status to workers (Wei & Wang 2024). We must question if the termination of Western research is related to the inherent bias against the ACFTU and China as a whole (Friedman et al. 2024). The negative findings by Westerners who have conducted research in China do not account for extenuating factors, notably the necessity for the Federation and its constituent unions to identify those firms which do not comply and dissuade migrant workers from unionization. To expect any union to respond in advance of gaining knowledge, gathering evidence and mobilizing workers is an unreasonable bias. It is irrational to expect any organization to respond before it has drawn together information and developed a response. This does not negate the need to improve and encourage the ACFTU to increase response rates and closely monitor worker complaints. However, in comparison to any other national trade union federation, China’s ACFTU is far and away the most responsive to workers on all spatial levels of government. Remarkably, unlike most Western unions, the Federation encourages workers to file objections to employer actions and has a comprehensive mediation and arbitration system in place which increasingly extends to internal migrants as more floating workers gain residency permits.

Westerners view work stoppages and strike as creating spectacles of mass unrest and conflict. Effectively, to Western leftists, the mass strike takes on the form of a commodity to be observed, exhibited and fetishized as a tradable good (Dubord 1967/1994). In a socialist state, dialectical materialism and class conflict exist and a workers’ state intercedes to address the legitimate demands of workers. This is in contrast to capitalist bourgeois democracies, where workers frequently have no recourse but to quit or go on strike and if they do, risk losing their jobs and livelihoods.

=== 4. Primitive Accumulation to Socialist Construction: Labor and Urban Migration ===
In ''The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism'', British political economist Maurice Dobb wrote that the primary element in establishing a capitalist society is the application of Newtonian physics to the natural world (Dobb et al. 1985). The building blocks for developing a modern society require not just conceptual knowledge but its application to the productive forces in society. This crucial insight was advanced by Karl Marx in ''Capital'' (1867/1990) and remains the genetic code for the formation of capitalism. Thus, it is only after one applies the theory to the material world that we can begin theorizing about the transition from capital to socialism.

The foregoing necessitates considering how primitive accumulation evolves into more advanced productive practices. We can begin to understand appropriate and necessary technology that is required for the next step in a higher form of agricultural production. In the absence of technology, it is impossible to even begin to consider the organization of production. It is in this way that political questions about mobilizing the rural masses around socialism must begin. In the case of China, the rural population had already been extricated from primitive accumulation through the formation of a socialist state economy and the development of rural cooperatives. Unlike capitalist economies, China already had a working class in the rural areas and had developed a proletarian subjectivity. Accordingly, the Chinese working class remained dedicated to the CPC and maintained a working class consciousness. However, for many workers employed in urban areas of the PRC, the state ceded to an organized “market economy” to generate capital. In that transformation, even the Chinese state recognizes the attendant class contradictions for its working class when multinational corporations and capitalist contractors became dependent on FDI, chiefly for export production. In a state deemed to be directed by a proletariat, the opening of the economy to “market reforms” posed challenges for its workers. Deng Xiaoping, who presided over the opening of the socialist economy to global market forces and cut social benefits in the countryside, remained steadfast in his position that China had adhered to socialism. On August 20, 1991, Deng wrote:<blockquote>The future of China hinges on adhering to [socialist] policies. … We must continue to stress the need to combat bourgeois liberalization. In carrying out the reform and the open policy and in shifting the focus of our work to economic development we are not abandoning Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. … The problem is to get a clear understanding of what socialism is and how we can build and expand it. (Deng 1992, 240)</blockquote>Deng takes a longer view of the transformation of China from imperialism, ending feudalism and then bureaucracy as a revolutionary process necessitating the fundamental change of impediments to “the development of the productive forces and to establish a vigorous socialist economic structure that will promote their development,” viewing reform to be a component of liberation (Deng 1992, 241). The migration of rural workers to urban centers, including SEZs, was an essential for opening up and, through class struggle, the emancipation of the Chinese working class from poverty.

=== 5. Evolution of the Chinese “Floating Population” ===
Applying a Hegelian dialectical perspective to actually existing socialist (AES) government involves learning to advance policy in response to the principal contradictions extant in a society. In socialist China, from 1990 to the present, internal migration and the question of a “floating population” of workers represents China’s key challenge. The socialist party must adapt and apply transformational policies to attend to the subjective needs of the working class. The dictatorship of the working class is not pursuing utopian policies which have no relevance to the natural world, which continuously presents itself with internal conflict. We must distinguish between the Chinese socialist state endeavor to reflect the interests of the working class and the reality that must be confronted by the PRC. Market socialism under Deng was an interval of reform and economic difficulty for the rural working class from 1978 to 2012, as the absence of economic and technological development had been the principal contradiction of the PRC. The rise of a capitalist class in China does not negate the genuine nature of a state which is commanded by a communist party and strives for socialism. Deng asserted on December 24, 1990, that a dictatorship of the proletariat would become necessary to seize control of the economy. The market economy was only necessary to gain access to technology from developed countries. In its absence, Deng asserts,<blockquote>… we would have … to reconcile ourselves to lagging behind. But maintaining a Socialist path was just as essential. … For a fairly long period of time the proletariat, as a new, rising class is necessarily weaker than the bourgeoisie. If it is to seize political power and build socialism, it must therefore impose a dictatorship to resist capitalist attack. To keep to the socialist road, we must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat, which we call the people’s democratic dictatorship. (Deng 1990, 236–237)</blockquote>China’s Seventh National Population Census (2020) demonstrates the proactive nature of a state striving to improve the conditions of its internal migrant working class. However, the data shows that even as a responsible socialist government is energetically adopting policy to respond to the unprecedented rise of rural–urban and urban–urban migration, socialist policy is not static but persistently adapts to the new contradictions inherent in a rapid demographic transformation. The 2020 Census reveals the unevenness and “mismatch between people’s place of residence and place of household registration” (Cheng & Duan 2021, 1). The Census reveals “cognition” (Mao) within the interstices of the CPC and the Chinese state of a need to continue efforts to regularize the “floating population” through crafting and implementing urban policies to reflect the transformation of the demographic composition of the Chinese working class. While the state’s recent accomplishments are remarkable in shifting from a planned rural economy to absorbing and serving an urban working class constituting most of the population, the pace of internal migration has exceeded expectations. In turn, the government comprehends the scale of population change and the requirement for both residence permits and services (Cheng & Duan 2021, 275–284). A not insignificant fraction of the floating population remains, not because its people are unable to establish residence permits in urban areas but because of their desire to maintain a bond to the land through rural hukous. Of course, as most migrant workers move to urban areas, rural towns are often underserved, a challenge which the Chinese state recognizes and is addressing.

In contrast to the critics, Chinese scholars of internal migration to urban areas maintain that obtaining an urban hukou is relatively smooth and seamless for most. Cheng and Duan assert:<blockquote>Chinese people can now freely choose the city where they work and live. Generally speaking, the change of the locale of a person’s household registration is usually accompanied with the change of his or her dwelling places. (2021, 277)</blockquote>The authors maintain that, despite a shortfall in housing due to the unexpectedly large growth in urban migration, the Chinese government is effectively addressing most who relocate from rural–urban and urban–urban locations and now must tackle unforeseen rural–rural and urban–rural migrant populations. The 2020 Census shows that the rural–urban migrant population grew nearly 75 percent between 2010 and 2020 and the urban–urban population expanded by 90.7 percent. Still, the state continues to promote education, medical services and public housing for newly arriving migrant workers in search of higher wages in China’s megacities.

The ACFTU must continuously adapt to the often-unexpected swings in populations requiring new forms of representation. For example, the dramatic growth of migration from mid-size to major urban agglomerations has expanded the share of contract laborers who do not work directly for employers (Zhang et al. 2023; Interviews, food delivery workers, Beijing, November 16–18, 2024). Unquestionably, a precarious migrant labor population is growing in China’s megacities. The ACFTU reports that 43 percent of couriers, food delivery and e-hailing drivers in three major cities had been successfully mobilized into trade unions in 2018 as recognized workers for employees, compared to a 90 percent national rate of unionization in China. By comparison, in most other countries, digital and platform workers have practically no representation through established trade unions and if they join unions, they do not have lawful contracts with employers but are typically considered independent contractors. Most digital delivery couriers in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York and other major cities in the West are petrified to even discuss unionization due to fear of deportation (Ness 2024b; van Doorne 2023). In the US, the Taxi Workers Alliance, an NGO which formed in NYC and is now a constituent national union of the AFL-CIO, has no contracts with employers and workers voluntarily pay dues for assistance with unfair local government regulations and fines against drivers. In the platform ride hailing and delivery sector of New York City, migrant workers must pay for all costs, including mobile phones, motorized bicycles and repairs. In addition, digital delivery workers face legal charges for minor traffic violations and are forced go to court for adjudication. No other country apart from China has even 1 percent of platform workers organized with legally enforceable employment contracts (Ness 2023c). A clear distinction must be made between workers who are employed under contract and those who have joined grassroots unions with no collective bargaining agreements with technology companies. However, even if existing unions eschew platform workers or workers are disallowed from joining trade unions, in Europe, according to Vandaele et al., about 13.4 percent of non-traditional unions represent workers, using a metric of density within the entire working age population, typically about half of laborers who are in the working population. Moreover, the definition of union is extended to “grassroots unions” who are not engaged in collective bargaining, as is the case in China (Vandaele et al. 2024). The same figure of 13.4 percent was used in a similar report issued in 2018 (see Chapter 5).

=== 6. Market Socialism, Urban Migration and the Rise of a Floating Population ===
In the late 1990s, Chinese internal migrant workers had been designated a “floating population” by scholars as they did not have residency status in urban areas. The term “floating population” does not refer to a defined type of urban dweller but to a range of migrants who move to cities for diverse purposes and live under dissimilar conditions (Goodkind and West 2002). However, the Chinese government steadily implemented national plans to reform restrictions on hukou, which were lifted as it became evident that urban workers required permanent residency in a locality. Due to worker efforts to gain rights from 1978 to the present, the hukou system is in continuous reform to serve the burgeoning Chinese working class. The most notable reforms in 2012 were advanced by President and CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Chinese government with the establishment of a formal migration system permitting workers to establish residence with their families in urban centers.

Since 2008, China has enacted and implemented successful plans to regularize urban migrant workers who have constituted almost all those seeking to transfer their official residency classification from rural to urban locations and with interprovincial migration. All but four first tier cities incorporate and are standardizing residency for floating migrants and the largest cities are recognizing migrants, especially high skilled migrant workers relocating from outside their home provinces to major cities and foreign countries (Koslowski and Ding 2024). Empirical research contradicts critical reflexive dogma advanced in the West, that significant wage differentials endure in the largest urban agglomerations in China, producing perpetually higher wages among local urban workers and floating migrants from rural areas, small cities and remote regions beyond the Eastern littoral coast. Recent data shows that labor market reforms contribute to an equalization of wages between long term residents as migrant worker wages steadily increase over time and the wage premium disappears. Certainly, as with anywhere in the world, migrant workers initially receive lower wages than local or migrant workers who maintain or acquire higher skills. However, without a doubt, wage differentials are higher in capitalist economies than in China. Notwithstanding this, the ACFTU trains workers to learn new skills and the degree of union activism contributes to a propensity to acquire skills and consequently earn higher wages (Wu et al. 2024).

The majority of China’s working class are workers who have migrated to urban regions. Thus, an examination of the Chinese working class is roughly synonymous with migrant laborers. The extensive research on China’s labor movement inescapably focuses on internal migrant laborers. However, the extensive research deriving from North America and Western Europe ignores crucial evidence, as it discounts the significance of the ACFTU’s systematic efforts to absorb internal floating migrant workers and integrate them into the social and economic life of major cities. More and more, as the pace of household registration accelerates, Chinese migrant workers gain access to housing, education and health services. Critics living in capitalist societies who have not visited China in a decade or more set up a straw man which can never be achieved in the natural world as a measure for what constitutes a socialist and capitalist society. Seemingly, most Western Marxists’ benchmark for socialism is a utopian society where people lived in rural areas and did not engage in work in rural China before the market reforms took hold in the 1980s. Consequently, it is difficult to take opponents seriously without distinct information about why they disparage the evolving socialism with Chinese characteristics. Such Western scholars’ lists of supposed defects appear endless. Through applying partial anecdotes and shunning government statistics, academics and activists establish a basis to deride and insult the socialist project in China. Apart from a few prominent serious scholars (e.g. Roland Boer (2023), Enfu Cheng (2021) and Michael Dunford and Weidong Liu (2015) among others), until 2017, due to an inherent bias, few Westerners had conducted research in China. Joel Andreas, who has conducted research in China, still rejects the notion of a state and institutional capacity to learn and adapt to changing demands and circumstances and the possibility that migrant workers in state owned enterprises (SOEs) have the capacity to engage in democratic unionism. Most other critics, whether scholars, NGO operatives or activists, lack credibility when discussing migrant laborer incorporation (Andreas 2019; Yu; Franceschini & Sorace 2022; Friedman et al. 2024; Ruckus 2021). Unfortunately, in the pursuit of opposing China and its long struggle towards socialism, anti-imperialism and improving living standards, a close examination of the works shows a bias and absence of an analysis rooted in historical materialism. Those scholars who have conducted serious unbiased research often default to the same conclusions, as division and rupture from the anti-China intellectual cottage industry is a taboo among Western critics.

Drawing on my research of Western Marxism and anti-communism, I share Viren Murthy’s reflection upon Japanese philosopher Takeuchi Yoshimi: that Asia and in this case China and its market reform and effort to improve the lives of migrants, are “more an idea than a geographic space” (Murthy 2023, 152). Given this Sinophobia, the evolving form of Chinese socialism is dismissed by Western scholars. Thus, while anti-communism is associated with imperialism, opposition to China today is a universal project which emerges among Western scholars and activists.

Instead of focusing on the prodigious achievement of absorbing an ever increasing population of urban migrant workers, scholars who study Chinese migration emphasize the obstacles for those who have yet to apply or complete local household registration. Internal migration in China is growing, and most Western research focuses on those who are left behind. What is absent is a practical grasp of the fact that policy implementation is not a magical development which is promptly resolved upon the initiation of new plans. In 2021, Kam Wing Chan, undeniably a highly reputable scholar of China’s internal migration, writing for a publication of the World Bank, directed attention to the gap in achieving policy goals. Acknowledging that China’s internal migration had more than doubled between 2010 and 2020, Chan asserted:<blockquote>China achieved the 100 million urban hukou conversion target by 2020. However, this progress was offset by faster growth in migration, resulting in a much larger migrant population without local rights (between 261 million and 376 million, or 18.5 percent and 26.6 percent of the country’s population) and thus making the 15 percent target set by the 2014 Plan impossible to meet. Thus, instead of narrowing, the social benefits gap in cities and towns has widened, edging to a worrying level of 26.6 percent of China’s population. (Chan 2021, 3)</blockquote>Chan is an established scholar of Chinese migration and demographics working in the West who does not resort to innuendo or speculation. As is to be expected and as is clearly evident in China’s census data, an unanticipated upsurge in internal migration contributes to a household registration gap in urban areas (NBSC 2021a). But the literature generally disparages China for the rise of a “floating population” and faults the government for not anticipating the higher migration rate and need to convert a larger share of workers and their families to being urban residents (Østbø & Speelman 2022).

Similarly, Zhou and Chi-Man Hui (2022), real-estate scholars at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, assert that internal migration favors the educated, skilled and wealthy, resulting in wage discrimination rather than demonstrating the higher standards of living for China’s migrant working class. Once again, we are presented with the deductive and illogical double bind. Western research focuses cynically on families omitted from health care and education, rather than on the unprecedented achievements of the Communist government between 1949 and 1978. Western capitalists and Western Marxist academics and activists benefited from the opening up. Capitalists and investors earned vast profits through seizing upon hundreds of millions of Chinese workers who had been exploited through unequal exchange of trade between poor countries and the imperialist West.

Western Marxists and activists designated China as a “state capitalist” economy without contemplating the preservation of the CPC as the primary political, economic and social force in the country. Even as China adopted market reforms, the emergence of a socialist market economy was under the guidance and control of a socialist state; what Torkil Lauesen deems to be the principal contradiction pertaining to the expansion of markets. Certainly, market reforms had deleterious consequences for Chinese rural workers living in relative security, as noted by Robert Weil. But Lauesen adopts the Maoist concept of the “principal contradiction,” that had shifted in the course of the transformation of China from a colony of extraction to a socialist state. However, academics identifying as Marxists reject a dialectical approach grounded in historical materialism and class conflict, a concept embraced by Xi Jinping and the CPC leadership. China’s absorption of migrant families is remarkably successful in view of the massive scale of urbanization. Even the Chinese government did not anticipate the magnitude of migration from rural to urban areas (Lauesen 2024; Losurdo 2024; Ness 2024).

'''Figure 3''' Urban population share of total Chinese population, 1949–2021 ''(Source: China National Population Survey (2021a))'' ''(Notes: (a) Figures before end of 1981 are from household registrations. Figures for years 1982, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020 are the census year estimates. Figures for the remaining years are estimated on the basis of the annual national sample survey of population. (b) Total population includes the servicemen of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who were reclassified as part of the urban population in population by residence.)''

=== 7. Urbanization: Planning, Workers and Sustainability (2013–Present) ===
Academics consistently conduct research on the challenges encountered by China through urbanization, overlooking the historical political economy of the rural–urban nexus. From the origins of industrialization in the mid-19th century, in capitalist or socialist economies, development scholars view agricultural productivity as the basis for the creation of an urban population which advances economic growth and improves the standard of living. The remarkable transformation in China, an economy which has been tied to the land for millennia and continues to have over 500 million people in rural regions, is a challenge which is likely to entail socioeconomic ordeals for masses of people. The pursuit of modernization could never be unproblematic under a socialist system with “Chinese characteristics” ingrained in the historic legacy of a society which has viewed agriculture as sacrosanct. Consequently, the spectacular population shift from rural to urban areas is arguably the most significant socioeconomic policy of the 50 years from 1975 to 2025.

The socialist “market economy” which emerged in the early 1980s, a form of economic planning rather than chaotic capitalism, has had significant implications for China’s 1.4 billion citizens. It has principally occasioned urbanization and population mobility from second, third and fourth tier urban areas to megacities and regions; as well as, for a not insignificant share of the population, a return back to rural regions. Surely, the immense scale of the population movement has been accompanied by socioeconomic requirements for rebalancing., but to implicate the hukou as solely an obstacle to economic transformation fails to consider that a significant share of migrants have acquired new household registration in specific cities only to seek relocation several years later. As Wang et al. conclude, “China’s urban transformation has gone well beyond the dual sector model and has resulted in new types of migration flows and new migrants such as the tens of millions of residents resettled to make space for urban development and major infrastructure projects.” It is imperative to understand China’s development and government policies to “recalibrate our understanding of Chinese migration” (2023, 317).

Instead of focusing on the determinantal effects of migration, the Chinese government considers the “organic combination” of a balanced economy (which privileges both urban and rural regions and is committed to the uplift of newcomers to China’s burgeoning cities) to be a practice based not just on hope but on planning, policy and implementation (Zou 2024).

=== 8. Systemic Western Aversion to the CPC and the ACFTU ===
Critical perspectives on the state of Chinese labor conditions fail to account for fundamental aspects of government policy in a workers’ state and are based on idealistic notions of a society dominated by representatives of the working class, a society dominated by representatives of the working class, the CPC and the ACFTU in transition to a socialist society. Opponents are one of three sorts: (1) those who maintain idealistic perspectives of a workers’ state which is not grounded in reality; (2) Labor scholars seeking to transform the workers’ state into a liberal-bourgeois democracy, with competitive labor unions akin to those in the West, where nation states are controlled by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; (3) geostrategic opponents of the Chinese state who seek to reprimand a society which is advancing the conditions of the nation’s burgeoning working class.

This chapter continues the assertion that China and the global working class must be viewed through the principal contradiction which exists at a given historical conjuncture. The principal contradiction, as advanced by Mao Zedong and more recently Torkil Lauesen, asserts that each epoch has principal and secondary contradictions which are rooted in dialectical materialism reflecting the human and societal relationship to the natural world as it evolves over time. Thus, even if the working class is not seemingly ascendant in a precise era, that does not negate the actuality that China under the CPC is a workers’ state controlled by democratic centralism. Every so often, the principal contradiction may shift, for example, from an impoverished agrarian socialist society to a state that has applied modern technology to the political economy. If, for a time, secondary contradictions appear which may produce distortions of socialism, the socialist state remains under the control of the proletariat. The negation of the contradiction is inevitable and restores the essential features of a socialist society. Yet, this requires unity in a communist party which is motivated by advancing the conditions of the working class. Even when open class conflict may appear between multinational capital and the working class, the state will defend the interests of the latter. This analysis accounts for setbacks and regression during eras of modernization and during the introduction of market socialism. The long term interests will always remain controlling even when deviations in economic policy may lead the idealist or utopian to believe that the socialist state has lost its way and transformed into a capitalist society dominated by the bourgeoisie and globalization untethered from a state. In fact, the socialist state recognizes the principal contradiction to carry forward the interests of the working class. Nonetheless, the socialist (communist) party apparatus (the central committee and the leadership) must unify to defeat degenerate actors and policies. We find this to be the central position of Antonio Gramsci in his letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. He was firmly committed to a unified party but also maintained that retrograde forces must be purged from its leadership (Gramsci 1926).<blockquote>There is yet another motive for the international bourgeoisie to take account of the possible split, or the aggravation of the internal crisis within the Communist Party of the USSR. The workers’ state in Russia has existed already for nine years. It is true that only a small minority of the labouring classes, and even of the communist parties themselves in other countries, are able to reconstruct in its whole the full development of the revolution and to find, even in the details that make up the daily life of the State of the Soviets, the continuity of the red thread leading to the general perspective of the building of socialism. … In these countries, the large masses cannot understand the discussions that take place in the Communist Party of the USSR, particularly when they lead to the current violence and affect not one aspect of the detail, but the whole political line of the Party. Not only the working masses in general, but the very mass of our parties see and want to see in the Republic of Soviets, and in the party that is in government, a united combat unit acting in the general perspective of socialism. And it is only because the masses in Western European see Russia and the Russian party from this point of view, they accept voluntarily, and as a necessary historical fact, that the Communist Party of the USSR should be the leading party of the International, so today only the Republic of Soviets and the Communist Party of the USSR constitute a formidable element of organization and revolutionary impulse.</blockquote>The necessity for unity has been decisive in building socialism, and all deviations from the fundamental interest of establishing a strong workers’ party may initiate dissent managed by bourgeois elements when competition surfaces outside the internal activities of the party and the trade union.

=== 9. International Labour Organization and Chinese Internal Migration ===
The ILO has a more balanced perspective than Western trade union critics on China and its labor institutions and their relationship to the “floating population” of migrant workers to urban prefectures and cities within and between provinces. The ILO has adjusted its assessment of the ACFTU’s reaction to changing circumstances. It has done so without resorting to the kind of ideological biases advanced by opponents who: appeal to ethereal objectives which no other country is subjected to; or, in the absence of utopian objectives, completely distort unfolding events and the historical record; or report on notorious cases which were then addressed by the ACFTU; or omit to include facts which reveal the achievements of the ACFTU; or, in some cases, knowingly report fabrications of places and events to create a sense of opprobrium and illicit condemnation from readers seeking to learn about internal migration and the Chinese labor movement (Chan et al. 2020; Friedman et al. 2024). If one challenges these false narratives and seeks to correct the record on the basis of factual information drawn from accurate government reports and site visits, one is exposed to censure and exclusion. No doubt, there are disputes that require the ACFTU to become more active; for example, the ACFTU’s goal should not be 90 percent of workers in unions but 100 percent, and this requires organizing private employers.

Notwithstanding the cottage industry of the PRC’s opponents, who are mostly anarchists and others who prefer spectacle to effective resolution of disputes, the ILO tends to produce unbiased reports. The ILO, the leading tripartite organization representing labor, management and the state, strives to advance the interests of workers through best practices and resolution of disputes rather than escalation. However, the West seeks to stoke the embers of minor disputes while their own labor practices and those of their low cost producers overseas are almost always ignored.

However, in a report on the conditions of migrant workers in China during the most challenging historical period, the ILO recognizes the constitutional status of the ACFTU as the legal national union in the PRC but also recognizes the presence of other associations which protect migrant workers in China. In 2006, the ILO found that the ACFTU “is providing more protection to the newest members of the working class” and projected that the growth of migrant laborers in each year compelled a continuous policy of absorbing more and more migrant workers into the Federation (Tuñón 2006, 26).

Policies of the ACFTU have responded directly to systemic labor abuses, chiefly by multinational corporations and private contractors. The ILO study commended the ACFTU for organizing migrant workers into unions and reported that the Federation projected to organize and represent 70 percent of all migrant workers in 2008. In addition to organizing workers, the ACFTU engaged in “promoting decent wages and working conditions” as well as “training opportunities and campaigns on behalf of migrants” with an emphasis on ending the “practice of delayed wages” by foreign multinationals and unscrupulous private contractors. Comprehending the notion of cause and effect, the ILO acknowledged the challenge of eradicating poor working conditions, organizing new members, workplace safety and even migrant workers’ need to meet living costs. It must be noted that the ACFTU had advanced these policies ahead of its policy to absorb all Chinese workers into the national labor federation to improve the bargaining power of internal migrant workers through direct representation before the Chinese state required all workers to join unions (2006, 26). The shortcomings of the ACFTU must also be placed in historical perspective. The ILO report was issued two years before the revised Labor Contract Law came into effect. Additionally, labor conditions have vastly improved for migrant workers as most who wanted residency status in localities have subsequently relocated to urban areas, as is evident from the increased size of China’s urban population as a proportion of the whole. As early as 2003, the ACFTU acknowledged the challenges of mobilizing the migrant labor force. According to Su Liqing, the Federation’s vice president:<blockquote>“they are still a weak group in society and there remains much to do to protect their rights. The most common problem for migrant workers is that they often cannot get paid in time and are fired very easily as the employers usually do not sign contracts with them,” Su said. Besides, workplace safety is also a very serious problem for migrant workers. (People’s Daily Online 2003)</blockquote>The mass urban migration in China from 1985 to the present has posed severe challenges for the ACFTU which can only be addressed after they occur under a socialist state developing an advanced economy. The creation of a “floating population” has been among the most formidable tasks over the past 40 years, and the inflow of foreign capital also contributes to the uncertainty and the inescapable creation of informal labor in provincial urban areas seeking foreign capital investment. Changing the urban working class’s status from floating informal workers to formal laborers with residence permits requires mobilization efforts which the ACFTU has striven to advance. Soaring membership in the ACFTU and its affiliates demonstrates that a significant share of the population have become formal workers with residence permits. Concomitantly, rural provinces will also inevitably confront dwindling populations and changing demographics which destabilize communities. Regularizing a “floating population” of internal migrant workers has drawbacks for rural workers who are left behind, and the Chinese government has responded with specific policies to upgrade the socioeconomic conditions where populations decline.

Starting In 2015, under Xi Jinping, China has significantly relaxed the hukou system through granting residence permits to migrant workers and their families who have been employed and lived in urban households for six months, as well as students who have attended school regularly. Additionally, the expediting of hukou reforms has greatly expanded the population of urban workers. However, the process of granting workers and their families residential permits cannot be expected to be implemented instantaneously as urbanization has occurred at a far more rapid pace than expected by the government. According to Sun Wenkai, since 2015, the Chinese government has unremittingly advanced efforts to stabilize the urban population. In the 13th five-year plan (2016–20), legal obstacles to granting residency hukou status for rural migrant workers in urban areas were to be consistently removed by the PRC and CPC. A recent study has found that an average annual rate of 13 million residents has been granted urban residency permits each year. The rate of urban hukou registration has expanded to 45 percent, leading to an increase of the permanent urban population of more than 2 percent from 2013 to the end of 2020. Those workers seeking to return to rural areas also maintain rural residency rights (Wenkai 2022, 7–9).

The capacity to absorb urban migrant workers and equalize pay scales is a formidable task for local, municipal, regional, provincial and national governments as urban migration has far exceeded predictions. Less educated rural migrants are paid lower wages than more highly educated workers, but recent studies have found that the wage gap has narrowed significantly in the last decade:<blockquote>This is also a refutation of the view that the public sector has advanced at the expense of the private sector in China. Of course, working in the public sector establishment still provides pay advantages for some groups. Through regression analysis, it is found that the wage differentials between inside and outside the establishment mainly exist among low-income labourers, which chiefly consist of labourers with a low level of education and labourers with a rural hukou. At the same time, the proportion of these labourers working in the establishment is relatively low, and it is more difficult for them to enter the establishment than other groups. Only a small number of people can enjoy the dividend of working in the establishment. (Wenkai 2022, 190)</blockquote>For per capita income differentials (US$), Engels Co-efficient, and wage by ownership see Figures 4, 5, and 6.

'''Figure 4''' Per capita annual income of urban and rural households, 1978−2012 ''(Source: Derived from National Bureau of Statistics (2024) China statistics yearbook (2024) 4–9 average wage of employed persons in urban non-private units by registered statistical category. Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics. <nowiki>https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm</nowiki>)''

'''Figure 5''' Per capita income ($US) and Engel’s coefficient of urban and rural households, 1978–2012 ''(Source: China statistical yearbook (2024) 11–2 per capita income and Engel’s coefficient of urban and rural households, 1978=100 (Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China) <nowiki>https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm</nowiki>)''

'''Figure 6''' Average wages in China by ownership type, 1995−2023 ''(Source: China statistical yearbook (2024) 11–2 per capita income and Engel’s coefficient of urban and rural households, 1978=100. (Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China) <nowiki>https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm</nowiki>)''

Though organizing is more challenging in private sector firms, all workers have the right to form unions without opposition from employers and tend to advance their authorized power if they intend to remain on the job for an extended period of time. As we shall see in Chapter 6, workers who are working temporarily while they train for new jobs may not have the equivalent investment in improving conditions through joining a union. In still other scarce instances, workers had been manipulated by NGOs with foreign financial support to generate the illusion of discord through intentionally disregarding ACFTU organizing policies. A notable example of foreign-funded NGO interference was the 2018 Jasic Technologies case in Shenzhen, orchestrated to generate international opprobrium rather than to improve wages and conditions of work. Private employers are ever more instructed of worker rights to form unions. From 1990 to 2015, China even permitted foreign NGOs to operate in China, a policy that would be forbidden if Chinese NGOs or labor institutions operated in the US or European Union. These NGOs primarily engaged in undermining the ACFTU through mobilizing a small number of workers to engage in anarchic actions which sought to “educate, agitate, and organize” workers into Western-styled labor organizations directly opposed to the workers’ state. Both foreign capital and Western NGOs share a common perspective that the period from 1990 to 2015 was the apogee of their ability to extract profit and to organize workers in opposition to the ACFTU and the PRC. The shared position of finance capital and Western labor NGOs is consistent with constructing an unregulated market, which benefits capital and NGOs capable of using the chaotic conditions to organize workers to oppose the Chinese state.

Xi Jinping put an end to the neoliberal era of unregulated foreign influence. In addition to promoting decent wages and working conditions, the ACFTU and its industrial, provincial, and local affiliates are continuously improving conditions and responses to expand opportunities for migrant workers and the Chinese labor movement as a whole. Furthermore, the ILO reported that the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) serves the interests of women migrant workers who were subject to abuse by foreign capital and corrupt private employers. The same report published by the ILO in 2006 commended the ACWF for its energetic role in defending the rights of women (Tuñón 2006, 26–27).

=== 10. Conclusion ===
Worldwide, the latest data provided by the International Organization for Migration estimates there were 740 million migrants in 2009, the vast majority being within countries of the global South. The figure for international migration based on 2020 data is 281 million (IOM 2024). Among the more than 1 billion migrants in 2020, an estimated 72 percent are internal migrants, while 28 percent are international migrants. The challenge of incorporating internal migrants is more formidable than the significant challenges of fostering the rights of international migrant laborers.

The prevailing literature asserts that urban migration contributes to economic development and growth as well as upgrading migrants’ standard of living. However, in almost all Western academic accounts, the focus is on the deleterious consequences of migration: higher levels of exploitation, lack of social services, splitting of families and households, men and women, children and parents, and leaving the aged behind (Pun & Chan 2012; Solinger 1999; Xiang 2007). This double standard reveals a bias in the literature which dismisses the net economic and social gains of internal migrants and their families. China is the exception to the rule as the destructive consequences of migration are emphasized by Western observers rather than the contribution of migration to social and economic well-being for migrants and all urban residents. Moreover, a plethora of research was conducted over a 25 year period from about 1990 to 2015, when the Chinese state and institutions were responding to the most adverse and unforeseeable consequences of migration resulting from market socialism. The national demand for FDI promoted competition among municipalities through a proliferation of SEZs and often unregulated free trade zones hosting multinational corporations (Hussinger and Palladini 2025; Jiang and Waley 2023; Renaldi 2025; Wang et al. 2022; Zeng et al. 2024).

Instead of assessing China’s mass migration from a historical perspective, most interpretations employ a static and reductionist approach which fails to absorb the CPC’s struggle to keep up with a tumultuous transformation. The whole of the ubiquitous critical literature on China’s development fails to account for the temporal and political responses to improve the negative effects of policies chiefly imposed by foreign capital on a developing society. Accordingly, Western research on Chinese migration focuses on the time lapse between episodic changes in the countryside and the formation and implementation of policy to address negative consequences (including family disruption caused by migration) rather than policies advanced to address undesirable socioeconomic consequences of market socialism. In so doing, it tends to neglect the significance of stages in migration and economic development. Rather, time seems to be fixed and stands still. As a result, research is prone to focus on the same old notorious cases, notably the Foxconn worker suicides in 2010, the escalation of strikes from 2010 to 2015 and the Jasic Technology case in Shenzhen in 2018. In the latter case, the local ACFTU affiliate sought to address the workers’ complaints only to be outflanked by a foreign-funded Hong Kong NGO, Workers Empowerment, which sought to counter efforts to resolve the dispute.

Migration is the major feature of the Chinese workforce. However, Western critics and NGOs practice a form of cultural imperialism by applying often erroneous and offensive norms to Chinese internal labor migration. Moreover, Westerners fail to recognize the nature of the Chinese socialist state. For them, China is not unique but one state among many others. The leftists refer to China as “state capitalist” or, more recently, simply “capitalist.” As such, Western critics lack understanding of the time and space of labor migration and the fact that the ACFTU can only respond after recognizing systemic problems, as it did with the Labor Contract Laws of 1994 and 2008 and subsequent amendments. The ACFTU has become more responsible and active in representing workers in the wake of the strikes and disputes from 2010 to 2015. Rather than understanding migration as a process which includes the establishment and implementation of state policies, multiple institutions and global forces, Western migration theorists who criticize China do not take into consideration that state policies to address social concerns must follow migration and a recognition of the outcomes and difficulties which migrants encounter. Policy follows a process of learning and adapting to the social obstacles and challenges which are recognized by the state. This logic, for Hegel, the imperfect government, acquires information based on experience to develop policies for advancing citizens.

Moreover, the critique is often misplaced as the hukou laws enacted in the 1950s were in response to the challenges of the time, as were labor law and policy on migration. The hukou registration system was originally established in the 1950s to regulate migration and protect the economic and survival needs of an agrarian population, not as an obstacle to rural–urban migration. Yet Western academics, activists and NGOs repeatedly apply a reactive response which does not account for the specific nature of the state and the notable achievement of integrating the largest ever wave of migrant workers into cities. While China faces tremendous obstacles (Chan and Zhang 1999; Li 2019), the demographic transformation and the government response to hundreds of millions of internal migrants are nothing short of extraordinary. Taken together, the migration literature about China exclusively applies Western concepts to the exclusion of dynamics in the Third World and socialist states.

== Digital and New Economy Workers in China: from Precarity to Job Stability ==
<blockquote>The varied, apparently unconnected, and petrified forms of individual processes now resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects. Technology also discovered the few main fundamental forms of motion, which, despite the diversity of the instruments used, are necessarily taken by every productive action of the human body. (Karl Marx, 1867)</blockquote>

=== 1. Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism ===
The emergence of industrial capitalism and labor exploitation as the dominant mode of production and trade in the 18th and 19th centuries was a direct consequence of unequal exchange of trade between poor and rich regions and nations. This engendered the international division of labor. In ''Capital'', Volume I, Marx examines the manifold systems of expropriation of labor power under primitive accumulation, which had reached its highest point through European private colonial control over trade in East, Southeast and South Asia. In the 19th century, the expansion of European colonialism was driven by private capitalists seeking to profit over low-cost production in what Marx termed “so called primitive accumulation.” This relied on the imperially authorized seizure of wealth, natural resources and labor. Marx recognized that the imprimatur of the state was integral to the development of capitalism through the authorization of totalitarian force for colonial expropriation:<blockquote>These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. (Marx 1867/1976, 915–916)</blockquote>The colonial state alone conferred the legitimacy for state-chartered private capitalists to plunder feudal and semi-feudal societies and the “right” to extract minerals, commodities and low-wage Indigenous labor. Marx underscores the significance of the British government granting the British East India Company an exclusive monopoly to expropriate wealth from China and India in the mid-19th century as an apogee of rapacious capitalism. Hence, capitalism and the expropriation of surplus value from labor could only exist with a strong state. Significantly, the plunder of natural resources, agriculture, commodities and then labor hinged on the capacity of a dominant capitalist class to control state power through colonial rule from the 17th century to the early 20th century. Political economist Amiya Kumar Bagchi asserts that European colonial powers compelled most colonized natives in Asia and Latin America to abide by their edicts through the imposition of free trade, which benefited only the British, Dutch, French, Japanese and American imperialists. European, North American and Japanese imperial rule in China was especially destructive.<blockquote>The situation of China over the period 1850–1949 must have been much worse because it witnessed two Opium Wars, the hugely destructive Taiping Revolt, a Japanese assault which led to the loss of Formosa, foreign aggression to quell the Boxer Rebellion and a period of warring landlords and full-scale Japanese aggression from 1931 culminating in civil war from 1945 to 1949 (Bagchi 2021, 10).</blockquote>Once local authorities had been weakened or overthrown, imperialist corporations could gain concessions to extract profit from the global South through annexation, impoverishment of local and regional populations and displacement of rural labor. In most of the developing world, displaced, landless rural labor has transformed into a permanent precarious labor force living at the margins of cities in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America (Breman 1996; Davis 2004/2017). By conferring the right of the colonial state to extract value from poor regions of Africa, the Americas and then Asia, European capital emerged and expanded through intervention and undermining and eradication of Indigenous political and economic systems, only permitting local leadership once European dominated trade had been asserted and spread within colonial trading zones.

Capital investment flows from developed countries with higher labor costs are transmitted to developing countries where the ability to extract surplus value from workers is far higher due to lower labor costs. Likewise, at the global periphery, internal inequality between rural and urban areas is an inescapable consequence of capital formation and urbanization. While urban regions become more affluent, rural areas often lag behind through the internal division of labor. In market economies, urban–rural inequality is far more prominent and challenging to balance. Over 40 years of neoliberal globalization, the unequal exchange of trade has become a dominant, global economic dynamic which is essential to imperialist profitability and accumulation in the core and poverty and extraction at the periphery.

By 1950 it had become clear that the development of industry at the periphery depended on the relocation of rural subsistence labor into urban agglomerations. Capitalist modernization in Western Europe and North America was viewed as the prototype for developing countries seeking to establish modern economies. In most advanced economies, migration of labor from rural areas to urban agglomerations was essential to developing a low wage working class. This development model did not consider holistic development of society in both rural and urban areas but focused on the mechanization of agriculture and the displacement of peasants from rural regions to the urban centers. By the 1960s, Western countries had become almost entirely urban as rural agriculture was commercialized and dominated by multinational companies which had centralized control over food production among several major multinational corporations. Mechanization of agriculture was facilitated through the development of profitable urban markets where consumers benefited from the creation of advanced economies. Multinational agribusiness had become so strong that, by the 1970s and 1980s, it even penetrated into economies of poor countries of the global South with their predominantly rural populations. In developing countries, surplus value from low-wage workers and technological advancements has sharply expanded productivity and profits, enriching multinational corporations in rich countries. Even technological innovation applied to manufacturing benefited capital formation and accumulation in the North. Concomitantly, the most impoverished countries in Africa, south of the Sahara, have rarely obtained advanced technology to increase worker productivity. Western foreign investment is intentionally designed to purchase the less advanced technology to maintain dominance over the most impoverished and least developed countries of Africa and elsewhere, ensuring that most profits are realized in rich countries at the top of global production chains (Emmanuel 1982).

Extraction of surplus value in the South and realization of profits in the North through the sale of commodities allows global production chains to benefit rich countries at the expense of developing ones. Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation is thus apropos to understand the dichotomy between workers at the periphery and in the core from the 18th century to the present. Under primitive accumulation, labor works under conditions of obsolete capital accumulation. In many industries, the lack of technological innovation is used to extract profit without commensurate investment, yielding high profits for capitalists. Maurice Dobb has demonstrated that primitive accumulation is used as a means to both increase profits and to threaten workers employed in industries where minimal investment and the subsumption of new technology result in redundancy and mass unemployment.<blockquote>A firm market for the assets with which the bourgeoisie were trading and an elastic and cheap supply of the commodities they were now investing in were required to create surplus value in pre-capitalist societies that exist simultaneously with capitalism. The latter condition may even be considered the more important of the two, since the existence of the positive inducement of extracting surplus to invest in industry was more decisive at that time than the mere absence of deterrents to the sale of other types of assets. To bring about the ideal conditions to extract surplus value, the primary requirements were plentiful reserves of labor and easy access to supplies of raw material, together with facilities for the production of tools and machinery. Without these conditions, industrial investment would inevitably have been discouraged and further progress arrested, however splendid the wealth and status to which the bourgeoisie had previously grown accustomed (Dobb 1946, 183).</blockquote>In the post-colonial era, foreign investment in advanced industrial technology has been relatively scarce in the developing world as exploitation of human labor removed the necessity to increase productivity. Production devoid of modern industrial technology has given rise to higher levels of labor exploitation in poor countries and the expansion of low-cost consumer goods in the imperial center. Rather than investing in new technology, capital extracts profit from superexploitation of workers. The introduction of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s repositioned a share of foreign investments to the South, intensifying the extraction of surplus value of workers and the production of commodities at even lower cost. However, the emergence of the digital economy has further extracted profits, shifting the burden of payment for new technology from new industries to workers, who must bear responsibility for smartphones, e-navigation systems and even—as the drivers for e-navigation technology firms—renting, buying and maintaining auto bikes and motor vehicles.

=== 2. Technological Change and Responsive Representation of Workers’ Interests ===
The introduction and institutionalization of market socialism over nearly 50 years have posed significant challenges for stabilizing China’s rural and urban working class during development of a national economy matching advanced industrial countries’ standards while applying technology to build the economic conditions for a modern socialist economy. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has been instrumental in defending, steadying and improving the conditions of the Chinese working class during this dramatic transformation, which has brought about the concrete foundation for a prosperous socialist economy. Since the opening of the market socialist economy in 1978, the ACFTU has been consistently stretched in adapting to the inevitable vicissitudes of China’s technological development and economic modernization. It has been compelled to develop the capacity to serve a far more diverse working class in manufacturing, construction, social services and, since the 2010s, the digital economy.

With high confidence (based on the author’s research in China labor archives, randomized sample interviews, ethnographic conversations and participant observation), one can say that the ACFTU has successfully mobilized the Chinese working class in all sectors of the economy from industrial enterprises to the platform economy: a formidable accomplishment for any trade union federation and a colossal endeavor for the world’s largest trade union. In 2024, an estimated 400 million workers were ACFTU members; more than all trade union members combined in the rest of the world. To accommodate unionization, Chinese labor law grants workers a legal right to join and form their own unions. Public and private employers must recognize and bargain with ACFTU-affiliated unions to negotiate higher wages and ensure safe working conditions.

=== 3. ACFTU Organizing New Employment Forms and the Digital Economy ===
Unambiguously, trade unions worldwide outside China have failed to organize workers in new employment forms even as labor continues to challenge capitalist exploitation and improve working conditions. Today’s trade unions are weakening, and new forms of worker organization (NFWO), unduly praised by innumerable Labor Studies scholars, are incapable of challenging capital alone. They stand out as popular models among scholars who view nebulous organizations with ties to labor as preferable to strong organizations that have the capacity to represent workers’ democratic interests. NFWOs—including workers’ centers—may have had minor public relations victories but do not challenge capital because they depend on funding from private foundations (Frantz & Fernandes 2018). From 2000 to the present, workers’ centers and advice offices may have received plaudits from the neoliberal press in the West, but almost all have transformed into advocacy organizations bereft of ability to meaningfully mobilize workers, a condition which is replicated throughout most of the global South by labor-based NGOs dependent upon Western funding or donors (Kerswell & Pratap 2019). In the course of 25 years’ research, this author’s honest assessment of new employment forms and NFWOs exposes the deficiencies of Western organizational models and those imposed by Western NGOs in the global South. The best NGO labor organizations may raise worker consciousness and rank-and-file activism but reveal themselves to be no replacement for existing unions formed in the early 20th century. Consequently, precarious and contract labor are on the rise worldwide with almost no representative agency reflecting working class subjectivities (Ness 2023a).

In sharp contrast, the monumental achievements of the ACFTU have been praised as exemplary by the International Labour Organization (ILO). In the last decade, the organization of workers in the rapidly expanding digital economy and new forms of employment has been unmatched by any trade union elsewhere in the world. Notably, the ACFTU is organizing digital workers employed in the burgeoning logistics industries (including trucking, ride hailing and delivery) comprising approximately 200 million workers. Digital platform workers have unique challenges, including regulating the hours of work and meeting wage standards. In China, most digital workers are employed for identifiable technology firms in the ride hailing and delivery sectors and beyond. The ACFTU is advocating for platform workers to be directly hired by platform technology firms, ensuring minimum wage standards and organizing new workers into the union.

As the Chinese labor market transforms through the introduction of new technology, the ACFTU is directing efforts to mobilize in the new forms of employment sectors that conventionally have not had equivalent rights to those enjoyed by industrial workers. By 2021, the ACFTU had achieved notable success integrating workers in new employment forms into its unions. According to an ILO report:<blockquote>By the end of 2021, the number of trade union members newly developed by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions for platform workers exceeded 3.5 million, of which all 12 head enterprises in four typical industries, namely truck drivers, online taxi drivers, couriers and take-away delivery workers, have established their trade unions. (Wei & Wang 2024, 42)</blockquote>In addition, local unions have organized workers and signed collective bargaining agreements with the largest employers in the logistics and delivery industries, which include increased compensation, safety equipment, education and skills training and other benefits. Workers and the ACFTU have significantly increased wages, working conditions and benefits. Trade union organizing of logistics and delivery workers is not limited to China’s largest first tier cities but is occurring throughout China among the largest platform technology firms (Meituan, Ele.me and J&D.com) as the reserve army of labor decreases, fostering greater competition for workers (Wei & Wang 2024). As of January 2024, the ACFTU and its affiliates have mobilized 26.5 percent of platform workers into trade unions, even if a minority are full-time workers (2024, 34).

As the ACFTU is committed to unionizing all new forms of employment in logistics, the digital economy and beyond, it has focused on developing campaigns on the provincial, municipal and district levels. In 2025, it succeeded in organizing workers in China’s leading platform delivery firms as the industry is seeking reliable full-time workers. Unlike Western trade unions, the ACFTU and its affiliates directly bargain with platform technology firms and file grievances on behalf of workers, a model for trade unions worldwide. The ride hailing industry is notorious worldwide for opposing drivers as employees and fighting all forms of responsibility for their welfare. In 2020, a public ballot measure in California, Proposition 22, passed, disqualifying ride haling drivers from being considered employees of Uber and Lyft among other digital riding platforms. Instead, the drivers were classified as independent contractors in business for themselves and disqualified from wages and benefits. The ride hailing behemoths were not even responsible for the health and safety of the drivers. The public law was the bellwether that disqualified all ride hailing workers from becoming employees in the US and worldwide.

By way of contrast, under the directive of General Secretary Xi Jinping, the ACFTU is mandated to mobilize workers in new forms of employment. At a press conference on July 17, 2023, Zhang Xiaohui of the ACFTU stated unequivocally that the federation was holding fast to the directive, stating that “workers in newly employed sectors, including truck drivers, ride hailing drivers, couriers and food delivery workers, have reached 84 million nationwide, becoming an important part of the workforce.” The ACFTU inaugurated a “Three-Year Action Plan for Deepening the Work of Trade Unions for Workers in New Employment (2023–2025),” requiring the trade unions to deploy resources to deepen the mobilization of workers in the new sectors into trade unions (Bo & Jin 2023).

In China, the ACFTU has been successful in unionizing the ride hailing giant Didi Chuxing since 2021. Ever since, ACFTU has been converting ride hailing drivers into employees of Didi and organizing new workers into the union. On July 30, 2025, the Hunan Provincial Federation of Trade Unions successfully mobilized thousands of drivers in search of membership into the union. In 2025, the union expects 20,000 provincial drivers to join the union (Li, W. 2025). The digital technology company has recognized drivers throughout China’s major cities. Didi’s recognition of drivers as both workers and union members of ACFTU affiliates with the right to bargain exemplifies the dramatic growth of unionization in the digital economy which is climbing rapidly throughout China.

This achievement sets the ACFTU apart from other established unions in the world. No other union worldwide has organized even 1 percent of workers in the platform economy, due to fierce employer resistance to recognizing digital laborers as employees; a response which serves as a disincentive for trade unions to organize workers in the industry. At best, workers in the UK and the US have formed independent associations with scant support from established unions. Although Labor researchers in Europe claim that 13.4 percent of workers are organized into unions, almost all are grassroots organizations which do not have collective bargaining agreements with digital technology companies, as noted in Chapter 4 (Vandaele 2018; Vandaele et al. 2024).

Labor analyst Lu Zhang asserts the crucial significance of the transformation of the organization of the labor process in the Chinese workplace through the application of Labor Process Theory (LPT), which examines the whole enterprise including management, supervision and division of labor (Zhang 2024). Factory regimes are not static but a dynamic process as new forces come into effect in response to the application of new technological investments or the absence of advanced technology. As China’s industrial production process develops and modernizes, those industries which innovate contribute to a decline of labor due to productivity growth. Those industries that fail to modernize may also lead to unemployment as workers are rendered redundant. Thus, in China, the state actively supports the development and application of new technology into industrial production to catalyze and stimulate productivity. At a machine tools firm in Guangzhou in April 2025, the enterprise was devoted to investing in new technology and modernizing its machine tools. The enterprise’s plant with markedly more workers had fewer new machines than its plant with cutting-edge equipment. Notably, the firm received financial support and encouragement from the state to increase worker productivity. Suggestively, to the observer, the Chinese-operated enterprise had also invested in skills training to integrate all workers into the technologically advanced production process. Additionally, the firm’s managers reported that its workforce would grow if demand remained strong and younger workers were hired.

However, the introduction of new employment forms outside of industry also expands the number of jobs in the platform economy, which tends to have lower job security. Chinese scholars have documented the ACFTU’s unprecedented achievements in organizing workers in the digital economy and its organizing of assistance to unions outside China in protecting the rights of platform workers. Irene Zhou’s ILO working paper states without reservation, “China stands at the forefront of technological innovation” and is well placed to educate unions on setting standards for platform workers. She concludes that, in response to the demands of precarious workers worldwide, “China is well placed in contributing to better seeing the dynamic of these new forms of worker and to supporting mutual learning between countries” (Zhou 2020, 5).

=== 4. Representing Workers in the Digital Economy ===
China has been making efforts to develop the platform economy and protect platform workers’ rights and interests. With the world’s largest population and a quarter of the global workforce, it stands at the forefront of technological innovation and globalization. Understanding the regulation of digital labor platforms in China will contribute to better understanding the nature of and constraints on workers within these new forms of work and to supporting mutual learning between countries. In an expression of support in June 2024, the ILO recognized China’s leadership in organizing workers employed in the platform economy and its future role in guiding European Union labor representatives to develop social protection for vulnerable workers in the sector.

The rapid introduction of the digital economy is unparalleled worldwide and has captured a large share of new workers in national labor markets. New generations enter these jobs due to demand for their work and will continue to do so. The initial stages of labor relations are typically fraught with controversy in all societies. Low pay and poor working conditions are often abysmal, and workers respond to ameliorate these. Most but not all Western scholars and NGOs deliberately neglect the ACFTU’s achievements, instead seeking to disparage it. Notwithstanding this, the ACFTU continues its efforts, which have expanded under President Xi Jinping to recognize, address and change policy for workers in the new economy. Whilst the ACFTU’s achievements in organizing and protecting new economy workers have not been acknowledged by Labor scholars in the West, they are recognized and highly regarded elsewhere in the world as an exemplar of successful organization. Western NGOs and Labor researchers, however, disregard or criticize the ACFTU’s sustained success in organizing new economy workers and consider improvement of wages and conditions an anomaly.

=== 5. Distortion of the ACFTU Achievements ===
Western NGOs and academic critics distort or completely ignore the ACFTU’s achievements in organizing workers in China’s digital and logistic sectors, and those who counter such unsupported and inaccurate narratives are ostracized. In the digital sector, the ACFTU’s detractors have repeatedly enforced a collective gestalt even when organizational success has been achieved. For example, critics will enforce compliance to their narrative through a focus on shortcomings; for instance, the ubiquitous notion of top-down unionism, which is applied within otherwise correct labor accounts, even when workers are actively involved in advancing the cause. If the ACFTU participates and imposes employer compliance, cynics will focus on bureaucracy rather than the advantages of powerful unions affiliated with the Federation. Paradoxically, a dominant framework for analyzing trade unions in the West is through labor power resources vis-à-vis capital (Bieler 2018; Refslund & Arnholtz 2021; Schmalz et al. 2019; Tattersol 2010), or the capacity to marshal a coalition of forces to confront management and succeed in mobilizing workers. However, under neoliberal capitalism, the weakening of unions and the launching of new digital technology in the platform economy, labor’s power is even further marginalized, and workers and their allies must formulate innovative organizing strategies to confront capital.

A French scholar’s recent study of labor organizing in the digital sector (''Organizing Without Mobilizing: The Platformization of the Workplace and Its Impact on Chinese Trade Unionism'' (Huang 2023)) convincingly details the success of a unionization campaign among food delivery couriers. After platform workers protested independently, the national federation “sought to unionize delivery workers by developing new modes of organization. At the same time, it developed a range of services for these workers. It is only recently that the ACFTU has become involved in the negotiation of collective agreements covering employment conditions and working of delivery drivers.” It is perfectly understandable that the ACFTU would become engaged in organizing after a new labor market like this had come into being. However, Huang’s puzzling conclusion states: “Even if the lack of hindsight makes it impossible to grasp the real scope of these negotiations, it nevertheless raises questions about the reality of trade unionism in China” (Huang 2023, 1). At the same time, the study reveals that the ACFTU example contrasts sharply with the situation in Britain, France and elsewhere in Europe, where delivery workers are shunned by established unions. The Federation has uniquely managed to mobilize and represent workers in the industry despite the ambiguous legal relationship between platforms and workers, the multiple outsourcing and the geographical dispersion of contracting to third party companies which have challenged its traditional union organization patterns. In response, the ACFTU has created special unions at different levels for couriers by “innovating beyond the established system, abandoning the tradition of employer-controlled ‘paper unions’ and potentially gaining substantive bargaining power” (Huang 2023, 2).

In an era of trade union decline and virtually no union representation of drivers and delivery workers, worker militancy and union responsiveness culminating in unionization and improved conditions would be considered an example of success anywhere else. However, the conclusion drawn from Huang’s otherwise excellent case study is that the food delivery workers should not have a strong and effective union with the capacity of subduing the excesses of the private sector.

Western NGOs and academics have devoted significant funding and research in casting organizational success as failure, using code words and inaccurate quotidian positions which denigrate the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the ACFTU. But despite such misrepresentation, motivated by an aversion to socialism, recent surveys of workers reveal the ACFTU has responded rapidly to labor market transformation after becoming aware of poor working conditions, wage abuse and non-payment of social security. Having understood the challenges faced by digital navigation workers and noting reports of worker discord and dissent against low incomes and poor working conditions, the ACFTU started negotiations between workers and firms to address and resolve persistent abuses through tripartite dialogue. The resultant negotiations resulted in direct employment relations between technology companies and workers and worker mobilization and affiliation with branch unions of the ACFTU. As direct employees of the technology firms, ACFTU members can speed resolution of worker grievances through mediation and arbitration for improvement of conditions within labor courts. If the drivers and delivery workers are unorganized, the ACFTU mobilizes them into unions to ensure employers comply with wage rates, safety standards and pensions. In contrast to advanced Western capitalist countries, where the capitalist class rules the economy, the working class is the leading mass social force in China.

As a result of the deepening of socialism with Chinese characteristics, tangible improvements have been achieved in workplaces throughout the country. The ACFTU undertakes to respond to changing material conditions which may alter labor wages and conditions and to challenges by private sector employers, inevitable in any state but far less prevalent in China. National labor law and local trade union practices have dramatically improved labor conditions in factories, the digital economy and beyond in response to technological innovation affecting the political economy. Consequently, the ACFTU encourages local democratic engagement in workplaces throughout industrial sectors, provinces and on the local level through street, neighborhood and district unions to increase wages and improve conditions, including providing social security to workers. In addition, digital and new economy employers must provide shelter for workers in hot weather.

=== 6. Precarity and Disorganization ===
In the 2010s, digitization and development of geographic mapping systems have set the stage for the application of new technology as a highly profitable force which has stimulated hundreds of billions of dollars of capital investment in new service economy startup enterprises in the US and later worldwide. Notably, foreign direct investment has expanded into the global South, above all into states with inadequate public transportation services. Without delay, these new forms have accumulated capital to deploy digital communication technology in ride hailing, food and consumer goods delivery, logistics and even home services. In the process they have disrupted existing forms of capital accumulation and displaced firms which previously had direct relations with workers in the taxi, delivery and cleaning and care industries. On the whole, these industries had been controlled by small businesses with vehicles to rent or sell to drivers and delivery workers. In home services, digitization characteristically involved a direct relationship between a contracted worker and a firm or recipient of services. The new startup firms sought to revolutionize the entire industry and dominate ride hailing, delivery and attendant home services through harnessing digital technology to these labor markets. Notably, the firms were designated technology businesses not service providers, as they did not own the vehicles and did not consider laborers to be their own staff but independent contractors in business for themselves.

Classical Political Economist Joseph Schumpeter proposed that uprooting existing industries through the appearance of new technology and application of new methods of production is vital for capitalist progress. Of necessity, new technology doomed peasants and the working class to economic displacement. Yet, Schumpeter also supported the imperialist system of extraction of profit from workers and resources at the global periphery; especially through the formation of monopoly capital, which is indispensable for capitalist expansion and profitability (Schumpeter 1911/1934). While Schumpeter regarded technological modernization as an essential and positive feature of capitalist development, he all but ignored its effect on rural and urban workers, which Marx examined in ''Capital'' more than 50 years previously. Conversely, Marx regarded capitalism as a destructive and exploitative force on rural laborers and the working class.

=== 7. Advent of the Digital Logistics Economy ===
The inception in 2010 of smartphone navigation apps for ride hailing and delivery was facilitated by the investment of billions of dollars of finance capital into technology companies. These formed and expanded exponentially in creating a new consumer service which removed the capital–labor relationship and expanded a labor market of precarious workers. The presence of the new technology in consumer markets throughout the world would not have been possible without a vast reserve army of workers entering an industry dominated by technology firms. Industrial restructuring in the West and urbanization and migration within and from developing countries expanded this reserve army and set in motion the proliferation of digital applications on platforms for driving, delivery and consumer services (Xu 2023). Precarious drivers and delivery workers were now challenged by aggressive firms devoid of workers and financed by major private investors chiefly in North America, Europe and Southeast and East Asia.

In the West, highly capitalized firms (including Deliveroo, Lyft and primarily Uber) required a large and obedient workforce drawn from a reserve army of labor among workers. Most drivers entering the industry were compliant, migrant, young unemployed workers. Some supplemented their wages through driving on a part time basis. Concomitantly, navigation technology became a major source of employment for unemployed industrial workers and rural laborers entering urban labor markets throughout the world. In China, the rapid development and investment in ride hailing and delivery firms were widespread by 2015. This period saw the emergence of new companies including Didi Chuxing, the leading ride hailing firm, and Meituan and Ele.me, the two leading digital food delivery firms.

=== 8. Proletarianization of Informal Labor ===
Proponents of ride hailing and e-commerce worldwide contend that the new technology greatly benefits economic development and reduces poverty by pushing idle workers displaced by industrial closure, and migrants displaced from the countryside, into gainful employment. As independent contractors, drivers supposedly go into business for themselves. This is not a new idea but a formula which has been invoked since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Even if unemployed and informal laborers can earn a modest income through selling their services on the app, drivers for digital platforms are forced to work long hours with low remuneration, poor working conditions and no social security. In most cases, ride hailing is a stopgap to earn a living for unemployed workers and migrant laborers. The evidence shows that in the West and worldwide, due to persistent low income and dangerous conditions, all but the most impoverished workers are unwilling to sustain the high intensity of work in the personal services economy for more than a few years (Katta et al. 2024; Malhotra & Agrawal 2025; Pankaj & Jha 2024). Ride hailing and delivery drivers are considered self-employed entrepreneurs in business, but they must work long hours to provide for themselves and their families. Most drivers enter the industry due to the scarcity of decent wages in other more productive sectors, and they are not really in business for themselves as they are highly dependent on the technology firm, which can discipline them through withdrawing the navigation systems for any of numerous reasons. All expenses (including purchasing, renting and maintaining e-bikes or motorcycles) are shifted to drivers. While drivers can take out loans, many of them are forced into long-term debt. They must pay for batteries, helmets and other gear, are responsible for accidents, are often subject to theft and incur high levels of personal health risk from stress and fatigue (Cohen 2025; Ray 2024).

=== 9. The Digital Economy under Neoliberal Capitalism and Chinese Market Socialism ===
Internet e-commerce spreads in the West with the support of state policies which deem drivers to be independent contractors and not employees of ride hailing technology firms. California Proposition 22 in 2020, passed with the support of the technology industry, denies drivers the right to employment with the ride hailing firms (Jacobs & Reich 2020). In effect, this bars them from organizing into unions to protect their rights. International capitalists have also expanded outside of the imperialist core to where profit margins are far higher. As sources of super-profitability in North America and Western Europe have been exhausted or stymied from further competing with entrenched private taxi drivers, capital investment has expanded into Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Western behemoth Uber was thwarted in China, as national investment capital poured billions of dollars into its own national ride hailing app, Didi Chuxing, a technology firm formed in 2012 with more than 550 million users by 2023 and approximately 23 million drivers in China (Smith 2024). Chinese investors are the major investors in the navigation app, while most other developing economies rely on US, Japanese and Western European capitalists. However, while Western investors have actively campaigned to disallow ride hailing and delivery workers from becoming workers, China and the ACFTU have encouraged and facilitated the conversion of independent contractors into workers directly employed by ride hailing and delivery firms. Through increasing oversight of delivery and ride hailing firms Ele.me, Meituan and Didi Chuxing, the ACFTU has increased driver rights. It has facilitated direct employment and regulation of the expanding industry to increase wages, occupational safety and labor protections such as unionization and social security. Employers are obliged to acknowledge drivers as workers and to permit unionization and payment of dues to the ACFTU to administer adherence to collective bargaining agreements. This is a development which even Western scholars must acknowledge (Chau 2022).

With its national government and working class expecting the strong ACFTU to ensure precarious workers in the gig economy are unionized and have adequate wages and benefits, China has proved exceptional. Whereas the Uber driver is an independent contractor everywhere else in the world, the American technology firm has been prevented from imposing that model in China, leading to its withdrawal from the economy there. By contrast, the Didi Chuxing Technology Company, China’s most prominent ride hailing company, is typically obliged to negotiate collective bargaining agreements with workers. Didi began operation in 2012 when most drivers, known as “riders,” had not previously been employed by taxi-fleet owners. This differs from the situation in the West (notably, the US), where taxi fleet owners had already ground down any modicum of a work relationship even before the navigation app came into practice. Taxi drivers in the US had continually worked without labor protections since those apps’ introduction in the early 20th century. Since the 1980s, taxi drivers had not been employed by fleet owners but rather leased their vehicles, lacking a direct employer–employee relationship and depending on earning more than they paid out. Taxi drivers had highly precarious earnings as they depended solely on the demand for services (Hodges 2020; Mathew 2005).

In the 2010s (as the navigation app was launched and applied, and as demand grew and ride hailing proliferated worldwide), the employment relationship became even more tenuous when “technology companies” disavowed any work connections. Drivers in such contractual arrangements now have no option but to purchase their own vehicles and are at the mercy of the app controlled by the technology company for customers. Additionally, drivers are assessed by customers, who are not obliged to tip them for rides. Instead, the transportation app companies like Uber and Lyft and so on ask customers to rate each driver on the quality of their ride, including the relative luxury of the automobile, the time from pickup to drop-off, courteousness and other intangibles. These in turn inform algorithms which are based on multiple factors unconnected to the driver’s proximity to the customer.

=== 10. Precarious Independent Contractors ===
Western investments in privately controlled ride hailing and e-commerce navigation apps were projected to enrich foreign venture capitalists, technology firms and an emergent comprador class through monopolizing investment to exploit domestic labor. The distinction between comprador and national capital is pivotal to grasping the contrast between imperialist exploitation and national economic investments intended to foster economic development. The former is motivated by international capitalist investment and extraction of profits from the periphery. The latter is driven by a motivation to advance economies at the periphery. Accordingly, Chinese support for technological advancement and implementation through delivery technology firms prohibits foreign competitors and is integral to the development and modernization of the economy. Unlike most developing countries, where ride hailing and delivery navigation apps are designed and operated as a replacement for mass transit systems, in China, driver and delivery transportation apps complement modern, state owned, urban metro systems.

Proponents of ride hailing and e-commerce worldwide contend that the new system greatly benefits economic development and reduces poverty by pushing idle workers in the informal economy into the capitalist marketplace by going into business for themselves. This is not a new idea but a formula which has been invoked since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. However, even if some peddlers, taxi drivers and for-hire service providers can indeed increase their income through selling their services, most are forced to work long hours for low remuneration. Most are unable to sustain work in the personal services economy for more than a few years or to improve their standards of living. Drivers may think they are self-employed entrepreneurs in business, but they are forced to work far harder and longer to provide for themselves and their families. Drivers also incur major costs for purchasing and maintaining motorcycles. While drivers can take out loans, the informal sector forces more drivers into debt. The ride hailing industry bears a resemblance to micro-lending by the World Bank. Presented as a means to lift the poor out of poverty, micro-loans are in reality a way of extending capitalist control over highly dependent populations. Cyclists and workers for the ride hailing firms are responsible for purchasing motorcycles on credit which may be provided by banks associated with the ride hailing firms. They are thus more completely dependent on the firms (Go-Jek or Grab) than they were as private drivers. They must pay for fuel, helmets and uniforms, are responsible for accidents and incur high levels of personal health risk from stress and fatigue, driving four times as much as before the introduction of the apps. Go-Jek is not yet profitable but once it has pushed other taxi driving and transportation options out of the system, it will have no competition; drivers will then have no alternative but to register with them (Damanik et al. 2025).

This unique relationship between the rise of technology companies which do not employ workers and labor is documented by abundant research around the world on the detachment of capital from the means of production and the shifting of the burden to laborers in the expansive platform economy. Even as some trade unions and drivers have sought to organize their own fledgling labor organizations, government legislation in most countries has deemed the workers to be service providers in business for themselves. This transformation has been made possible by the development of apps and geographic tracking programs connecting drivers to customers. However, Chinese laws applicable to digital workers have advanced farther and are continuously updated to reflect the changes in the platform industry.

China has advanced legislation which protects platform workers through properly categorizing them as workers, providing the fundamental rights which accompany worker status. The impetus for improving the condition of workers has been advanced by General Secretary Xi Jinping, emphasizing the necessity for digital workers employed as couriers, online workers, truck drivers and others to be granted labor protection directly through the platform enterprise.

Since 2020, the ILO has issued numerous reports praising China for developing labor protections for digital workers (Zhou 2020). The country is advancing legislation which protects platform workers through properly categorizing them as workers and providing the fundamental rights which accompany worker status. The impetus for improving the condition of workers has been advanced by General Secretary Xi Jinping, emphasizing the necessity for digital workers employed as couriers, online workers, truck drivers and others to be granted labor protection through the platform enterprise. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and the ACFTU are at all times adapting to the changes in the industry to ensure the formation of a legal employee relationship with platform technology companies (Xie 2022).

=== 11. Organizing Digital and Platform Workers into Trade Unions ===
Scholars of the digital economy focus on the significant transformation of the work relationship under the platform economy and the challenges faced by laborers in the new economy contributing to higher levels of informality and precarious labor (Rani & Gobel 2023; Woodcock & Graham 2019). Unlike industrial or public sector employers, the rapacious platform economy has successfully insulated itself from trade unions and government regulations in both the West and most developing countries. In Western Europe and North America, existing trade unions do little more than publicly support the rights of digital workers. Consequently, some digital workers may engage in periodic stoppages and even fewer form autonomous associations and organizations. Almost all established unions are severely lacking in the capacity to tangibly defend worker rights. Instead, they self-represent their interests through collectives, online forums and other nebulous organizations (Cini et al. 2021). At best, established unions are cooperative towards digital workers but most do not have the organizational power and resources to represent them. In the absence of union recognition among most workers in Europe, digital laborers protest only infrequently unless blatant abuses are perpetrated by technology firms. Certainly, if digital technology firms were to support organizing, unions would likely represent them (Vandaele 2018; Vandaele et al. 2024). However, historically it has been more common for unions to shun workers who could potentially be organized and mobilized since they are reluctant to recruit members who might unsettle their jurisdictional membership bases.

In ''Global Labour Unrest on Platforms'', Trappmann et al. (2020) contend that, in sharp contrast to the belief that workers have a capacity to challenge highly capitalized firms, they are in fact intimidated and consigned to their powerlessness. Labor scholars Schmaltz, Ludwig and Webster (2019) consider the capacity to gain and wield power resources indispensable to effectively challenging global capitalism.

=== 12. Case Study: Organizing New Economy Workers in Shanghai ===
To demonstrate the ACFTU’s strong support for workers in the new economy, we look at Shanghai as representative of the country as a whole. The city has been selected as it reflects the progression of a distinct organizing model for digital workers in the ride hailing and food dealing industries by unions on street, district and municipal levels. The city has been among the first in China where ride hailing and delivery technology have expanded rapidly for new economy workers, a labor market which was previously unfamiliar to conventional forms of trade union labor mobilization and organization. The examples below will focus on the rollout of new digital companies, including: Snouqi, Shenzhou, Yidao and Meituan.

Shanghai, with nearly 25 million residents, is the second largest city in the world. It is dedicated to the improvement of an efficient and environmentally sustainable transportation system which corresponds to the economic, civic and ecological conditions of the city and region. As a directly administered municipality, Shanghai develops policies which are relevant to the quality of life in the city. A central element is advancing a transportation development scheme for Shanghai, an ongoing process which corresponds to evolving changes in the municipality.

In October 2022, the Shanghai Metropolitan Transportation Commission issued a White Paper on Transportation Development in Shanghai to develop an integrated system conforming with the national goal of advancing the economy and serving the people. The White Paper accentuated a “people-oriented” integrated transportation network to provide a range of convenient travel options benefiting all citizens, from youths to seniors and focusing on a “high-quality healthy life.” To meet this goal, the document emphasized reliable travel options extending into the suburbs of the city. Central to the plan was unceasing improvement and integration of a unified taxi and ride hailing platform to supplement Shanghai’s mass transportation system.

Digital platforms and logistical networks are central to plans to modernize booking and waiting stations, encouraging carpooling and emphasizing public transit to reduce dependence on automobile use. Shanghai’s transportation plan is directed to “strengthen the integration of transportation space with the ecological environment,” improving energy consumption, ecological protection and low-carbon emission. Logistics and driving are essential features in improving the working and living conditions of truck drivers and ride hailing and delivery workers (Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission 2022).

To accomplish the task of developing a transportation system which focuses on human needs and ecological sustainability, the municipal government and the ACFTU recognized the imperative to improve and standardize the e-navigation platforms’ wages and working conditions for their rapidly increasing labor force. As the digital platform economy has emerged and expanded rapidly, the ACFTU has had to respond quickly to the unique and distinctive needs of workers in an often-unregulated technology industry with few rules governing the status and conditions of drivers in the private sector. For antagonistic Labor Studies scholars in the West, the platform economy was a target for opprobrium as critics do not acknowledge the specific material conditions in the new industry that require the ACFTU to evaluate and respond effectively. Western Labor scholars ignore or do not recognize that the application of new technology to the natural world requires responding to the material needs of workers. These can of course only be diagnosed after workers have expressed concerns and grievances. Likewise, labor laws regulating an industry can only take place after they are perceptible by workers and the union.

In Shanghai, once the platform economy was introduced, the ACFTU responded quickly to address the economic and occupational concerns of workers. Most importantly, the ACFTU intervened to ensure that the industry (which had eschewed drivers as employees worldwide) recognized workers as employees and would allow it alone to negotiate agreements on their behalf once the employee relationship had been standardized. Undeniably, regularizing digital ride hailing drivers and delivery workers as employees is a painstaking process not without complications and instances of failure due to unforeseen circumstances. Independent contractors in this industry remain a challenge for the union, which must respond as and when workers agitate and appeal to it for help.

Shanghai’s multiple unions at street and district levels have effectively and promptly responded to the demands of the city’s mushrooming ride hailing workers, and in 2018 the city became the first in China to develop such representation, just over five years after the private platform economy was established. As workers in the private economy, or non-public enterprises, represent most of the labor force in China, the ACFTU has established policies to address worker concerns. First and foremost, a scientifically grounded Marxist perspective must diagnose technological innovation and then recognize the conditions of workers in the new economy. Some Western Labor Studies scholars do not consider that the organization of labor follows the application of technological change. Instead, they expect workers to oppose outcomes before they are applied to the workplace; a position which defies any grasp of political economy.

==== 12.1. Essential Role of Shanghai’s Digital Ride Hailing and Delivery Workers ====
In 2018, the ACFTU’s 17th Congress highlighted the significance of “deepening trade union organizational work” in response to the challenges of applying new technology. Dongming Wang, ACFTU Chairman, emphasized that the five years between 2013 and 2018 had been marked by significant change.<blockquote>These five years have seen the further enhancement of the political, progressive and mass character of trade union organizations and trade union work, the continuous advancement of rights protection and service work, the deepening of trade union reforms and the continuous strengthening of party building in the trade union system and the powerful demonstration of the role of trade unions in the overall work of the party and the country (Liang 2018).</blockquote>A focal point of the Congress was to fulfill PRC General Secretary Xi Jinping’s “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” focusing on the reform of trade unions in non-public enterprises, the establishment and membership of trade unions for employees and protecting their rights and interests and the construction of trade union teams to respond to the economic transformations in private firms, which employ most workers in the economy.

==== 12.2. ACFTU Mobilization and Membership in Shanghai ====
In July 2016, two years before the ACFTU Trade Union Congress, the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU) had commenced pilot projects through the Baoshan District Trade Union to mobilize digital ride hailing workers and establish trade unions to safeguard rights and manage trade unions in non-public enterprises. Subsequently, 18 pilot unions were formed in enterprises, within communities, termed “street level unions,” government development zones (Special Economic Zones) and in 16 districts under the governance of the Shanghai Municipal Federation of Trade Unions. In this way, the federation is dedicated to strengthening grassroots trade unions within non-public enterprises through devoting staff, funds and resources to organizing and enforcement (Liang 2018).

In contrast to the common practice among Western unions of organizing dues paying members into their unions only to disappear until the next round of collective bargaining negotiations with management, SFTU branches are actively involved in increasing services for what it calls “New Employment Forms of Workers.” In April 2024, the Shanghai Qingpu Trade Union affiliate of the ACFTU established a specific legal-services center specifically for “New Employment Forms of Workers” within designated companies. For example, a legal supervision committee was formally established in the headquarters of Shanghai Yunda Express, a logistics services firm providing delivery services and road freight transportation. The committee offered couriers legal services and care packages, lawyers, legal education and rights-protection policies in the industry (Longxiang 2024).

==== 12.3. China’s First Digital Food Delivery Worker Trade Union ====
On January 1, 2016, the Putuo District Online Food Delivery Union Federation was established as China’s first union of its kind at the headquarters of a food ordering platform for workers in third party delivery companies. It subsequently began at each food delivery station. The union formed in response to the decentralization and flexibilization of new forms of employment and the demand for representation to address critical work issues in the new sector. Before the formation of the food delivery union, the Shanghai Putuo District Trade Union had researched the essential conditions of online food delivery workers and strived to provide caring and targeted services to them, earning the trust of both platform enterprises and employees and rapidly expanding membership in this essential yet demanding, sector of the digital economy (Qian 2018). Consequently, before formation of the online food delivery workers union, SFTU conducted in-depth research by deploying a trade union organizer to “experience the life of an online food-delivery worker first-hand” through working as a driver for a platform. In advance of even working on the platform, in spite of working at breakneck speed, the union staff member could not meet the specified delivery times and learned that drivers were required to upload a personal photo, health certificate and pay a deposit of ¥100 RMB through the crowd sourcing platform. Once on the job, he experienced significant impediments to delivering to customers over 72 hours of work. In advance of the unionization, the SFTU researched employer practices, administered questionnaires and directly visited delivery stations to learn about the primary occupational concerns and dilemmas workers experienced on the job.

The SFTU conducted a comprehensive study of the nascent food delivery platform industry to discern the organizational structure, labor management, compensation and demographics of delivery riders in advance of commencing an organizational campaign. Unlike unions in the advanced capitalist countries, where a main objective is to recruit dues paying members, here the union conducted in-depth research to gain understanding of the material conditions in the industry and to appropriately represent and advance the concerns and interests of workers through unionization. The SFTU found the primary challenges for workers were “excessive flexibility, insufficient safety, and imperfect protection mechanisms.” It then formulated a “protective umbrella” which would extend legal rights and protect the interests of workers. The advantage of the SFTU’s affiliation with the Communist Party of China was that not only could it bargain over wages and working conditions but also enforce rights through promulgation of laws protecting workers’ interests. Finally, SFTU Chairman Mo Fuchun hosted a seminar to research and study the employment conditions of online food delivery workers at Ele.me, the second largest online food delivery platform, headquartered in Shanghai. Ele.me was initially ambivalent about or opposed to the benefits of forming a trade union, apprehensive that it would increase labor costs and reduce profits (Hong 2014). But the SFTU and Putuo District Committee encouraged Ele.me to recognize the establishment of a delivery worker trade union, the Federation of Trade Unions of the Online Food Delivery Industry, representing 16,000 workers at third party companies operating in partnership with Ele.me in Shanghai (China News Service 2018; Qian 2018). The Shanghai Putuo Trade Union, a district branch, played a decisive role in the unionization of food delivery workers through exploring distinctive new models which are unique to the platform economy. Subsequently, districts, municipalities and provinces throughout China organized food delivery workers (Daily Worker 2022). As part of its effort to register food delivery workers, the ACFTU has formed a representative negotiation system with members employed at Ele.me, according to Li Ke, dean of the School of Labor Unions at China University of Labor Relations. The mobilization and enforcement plan encompasses labor law enforcement and dispute mediation (Ke 2025). The food delivery union is not a paper union, but standardizes compensation, provides labor rights protection, legal services, skill promotion, welfare and other member services. The task of organizing dispersed gig workers employed as subcontractors for Ele.me or Meituan is not equivalent to mobilizing and organizing typically enthusiastic and informed workers in state owned enterprises or even large-scale private manufacturers which had emerged and expanded in the 1990s.

==== 12.4. Wuhu City Federation of Trade Unions Officials’ Experiential Research ====
In compliance with the General Secretary Xi Jinping’s directive to mobilize workers in new employment forms in logistics and the digital economy, ACFTU district trade union federations across China are conducting research to learn about the constraints which workers regularly encounter on the job. In August 2025, ten union officials of the Yijiang District Trade Union Federation (YDTUF) of Wuhu City in Anhui Province engaged in participant observation to directly experience the multiple challenges of food delivery workers. Through direct experience on the job, union officials became immersed in the daily work of food delivery workers. Zhang Chunliu trailed a food delivery worker to understand the day-to-day demands, which included completing 20 deliveries within two hours. She gained familiarity with the primary tasks of taking orders and fetching meals to transport to customers and learned that the job entailed multiple tasks that were complicated by significant logistical complications and physical work, including carrying food up several floors in apartment buildings without elevators in the hot summer and restrictions on riding bicycles in some residential complexes. The rules limit the number of orders which can be delivered and lower driver earnings. Other obstacles include bottlenecks during peak delivery times, as riders have to wait to pick up orders.

The comprehensive on-the-job research of union representatives of the YDTUF prompted the Anhui Provincial Federation of Trade Unions to expand its “grassroots immersion work” among workers in new forms of employment. The Wuhu City Federation of Trade Unions required all trade union officials to engage in mandatory “experiential research” among platform companies and industrial parks. This prompted the federations to establish pre-employment training schemes for new delivery riders, upgrading the amenities and services of union service stations and developing policies to allocate deliveries on platforms during peak delivery hours to limit order delays for union members. Engaging trade union officials in new forms of employment provided acute awareness of workers employed outside of office buildings and factories, with new policies to respond to their most vital concerns. Holistic trade unions reinforced their mission to protect the rights and expand the skills of workers (Hua 2025).

==== 12.5. Trade Union Density Generates Worker Mobilization ====
The prodigious achievements of organizing “new employment forms” since 2018 have inspired the ACFTU and its constituent unions to consolidate and amplify mobilization in the digital economy throughout China. In December 2022, the ACFTU issued the “Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Work of ‘Bottom-line Construction’” to codify standards in the sectors and to stimulate democratic management among workers to advance their demands, notably welfare benefits, subsidies, extra breaks during inclement weather conditions and other measures to protect workers. In 2021, the ACFTU launched a three-year union drive to build worker power among digital logistic workers, including truck drivers, ride hailing and food delivery workers. The campaign directed ACFTU representatives to directly respond to worker demands for union representation as well as to engage in a rigorous campaign to conduct research and organizing among workers in new employment forms. Three years later, in 2024, the campaign succeeded in organizing 18.3 million new union members among logistics, digital and new economy workers (SCIO 2025).

In practice, trade unions responded to expand democratic management among drivers. In August 2022, SFTU and YDFTU and their members prevailed on food delivery giant Meituan to increase democratic management among workers in “new employment forms.” Similar initiatives have sprouted among unionized delivery workers at Ele.me, especially to create mechanisms to mediate disputes between workers and management and to raise compensation and improve conditions, physical examinations and preventative care. These were concerns particularly prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic and extremely high temperatures, which exposed new-economy workers to high levels of risk while protecting vulnerable populations in need of services and delivery of food and essential supplies (Wang and Liang 2022).

In addition, the governments on the provincial and city level have bolstered labor mediation and negotiation to resolve labor disputes, notably for workers’ claims against dispatch agencies. According to Chinese Workers (2024, 21), on the municipal level, nationwide, the Chinese dispute resolution program has given workers far more power, “breaking through the ‘last mile’ in resolving grassroots labor disputes” through addressing distinctive worker concerns rather than applying a uniform approach throughout the country (Chinese Workers, 22).

In Shanghai, trade union organizing in the digital sector is pervasive and ongoing and new unions are formed to directly represent workers in diverse sectors of the economy. In December 2024, the Pudong Express Industry Trade Union Federation held its first congress. The Pudong District Union actively encourages workers in “new employment forms” to join to improve and standardize their earnings and working conditions (Jing’an News 2024a).

For Labor Studies scholars submerged in Western labor organizing models which are often platitudinous, lackluster and mostly theoretical in nature, the Shanghai online food delivery organizing campaigns, which significantly improved wages, benefits and working conditions, provide tangible evidence of improving the lives of workers which are almost never organized in Western Europe and North America. The examples of successful organizing in Shanghai and other municipalities throughout China demonstrate that, almost always, the workers, trade unions and the CPC have popular support and can marshal collective resources to compel private companies to adhere to decent labor standards. If the power resources are insufficient to resist rapacious managers in the private sector, the ACFTU and its constituent unions are persistently adapting their mobilization strategies to increase the power of workers. Capacity is a significant feature of successful organizing campaigns, and the widespread success of bottom-up and top-down organizing demonstrates that power resources are derived from the rank and file, as well as local community demands to upgrade services through improving the wages and working conditions of digital workers. Undoubtedly, the success of organizing digital platform workers is also engrained in the nature of a socialist workers’ state, the CPC and ACFTU trade unions, all of which are dedicated to empowering and improving the lives of workers.

The ACFTU has flourished through high trade union density in Shanghai. In many respects, Shanghai is an unparalleled international union city as high density encourages an acceleration of trade union organizing and membership among non-union workers in the non-public enterprises which proliferate across the city. Workers in Shanghai and throughout China are not required to join unions but are highly motivated to do so by their grassroots nature, which regards digital workers respectfully and responds to the personal and economic needs of workers and their families in the digital economy. As advanced by Jane McAlevey (2018), “whole union organizing” through building meaningful relations with workers and communities has not been adopted by trade unions in the US but is a pervasive practice in the Baoshan District of Shanghai and throughout China. When grassroots unions encourage non-unionized employees to join unions, even among “micro-enterprises” with only 10–20 employees, it stimulates growth and enhances the power of workers who have subsequently been able to augment their technological skills.

As ride hailing drivers have proliferated in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, trade unions have formed in buildings, streets, parks, communities and villages. For those drivers in the digital economy in Shanghai too busy to sign up, trade unions facilitate organization and membership through the convenience of the Shengongshe app and WeChat. These simplify organization into nine district-level trade unions, facilitating services for workers in domestic services, logistics, delivery, medical care and online meal delivery, freight delivery and so on across the districts of the Shanghai Municipal Federation of Trade Unions (Liang 2018).

In April 2024, the Shanghai Putuo District ACFTU formed the first online car hailing industry trade union federation in the Shanghai region, representing more than 2,000 online car hailing drivers. This is poles apart from the experiences of established union organizing worldwide. The enthusiasm for having a delivery union which includes benefits and common activities is palpable. According to Mr. Feng, a driver from nearby Anhui Province:<blockquote>I have been driving online car-hailing cars in Shanghai for 8 years and I have been driving for Jugao for 5 years. After arriving here, I feel very different, especially the Xinyang Park has been provided us with warmth during the Mid-Autumn Festival and Lantern Festival and organizing cultural and sports activities. When I learned that I could join the union, I signed up early. … Joining the union will help us coordinate and resolve driving disputes, rights protection, personal medical insurance, social security and other aspects in the future. It is much better than being in the dark! (Shanghai City Spirit 2024)</blockquote>The Shanghai logistics firm values the presence of a union which creates an experienced, professional and stable workforce with modern facilities in which to take breaks and eat hot meals and which has plans to expand to offer professional skills training, haircuts and other trade union benefits, as drivers maintain the security of a stable income. When drivers’ vehicles are damaged or under repair, management provides replacement vehicles to prevent loss of wages. Unequivocal trade union support for ride hailing drivers in Shanghai is expanding. For example, in September 2024, during the Mid-Autumn Festival, Didi Shanghai signed a “Model Workers and Craftsman Assisting Enterprises” agreement with the Shanghai Jing’an District Federation of Trade Unions. This expanded services and benefits in collaboration with Didi Shanghai to assist with personal matters, career development, health protections and “multi-dimensional trade union services for drivers” (Jing’an News 2024b).

The ACFTU district unions in Shanghai effectively negotiated improved labor conditions for digital workers, especially ride hailing and food delivery workers who suffer from extreme heat and humidity in the summer. During the summer, due to the extreme levels of heat, drivers typically have more customers and are typically working longer hours. To ameliorate the effects of the high temperature and cope with the humidity, in July 2024, the Jing’an District Federation of Trade Unions and the Pengpu Town Federation of Trade Unions, local union affiliates of the ACFTU in Shanghai, requested that Didi, China’s leading ride hailing technology company, build 20 cooling stations so drivers could take breaks and receive refreshments in a pleasant atmosphere with cool cushions. The trade union also requested that automobiles have air conditioning for both drivers and passengers and requested that Didi subsidize the cost of using air conditioners in vehicles through sharing in the energy costs of operating the vehicles (Chen 2024).

In sharp contrast to the symbiotic relationship between trade unions and platform workers in China, Western ride hailing and delivery workers unreservedly strive for trade union representation but are shunned due to legal and organizational barriers as well as a proclivity among trade unions for organizing only among employers (with substantial numbers of potential members) who will not oppose unionization, thus adding to the union coffers through union dues. The outcome is the creation of well-meaning yet ineffectual associations termed “indie unions.” These primarily serve to boost the spirits of defenseless workers who have little option but to quit rather than remain gainfully employed in the new industries.

=== 13. Trade Union Organization of Logistics and Trucking Workers ===
As the Chinese labor market shifts from manufacturing towards logistics and delivery as a consequence of robotization and investment in highly productive means of production, the rapidly rising labor market of trucking workers is considered by the ACFTU of significant importance. The ACFTU is relentlessly adjusting to the transformation of the Chinese labor market on national, provincial and municipal levels to foster organizing strategies to facilitate mobilization and unionization. In logistics and trucking, an industry which is also dominated by the platform economy is growing rapidly throughout China. Consequently, the ACFTU is devoting resources and staff to research the demands of workers. Through multifaceted dialogue with truckers in the industry and studying the unique nature of their everyday jobs, it aims to shape strategies which best suit the subjective interests of workers throughout the country. The rapid growth of the National Truck Drivers Union (NTDU) in China is emblematic of the prodigious endeavors of the ACFTU to ascertain and grasp the most significant concerns in the burgeoning industry and to mobilize workers into the union. On July 28, 2025, Ma Zhengqiu of the ACFTU reported that the NTDU had grown to 5.9 million voluntary members. The massive scale of organizing is reflected in the statement of Vice Chairman Zhengqiu at the Ministry of Transport in the most recent ACFTU report:<blockquote>Currently 12,000 new business trade union federations have been established at the municipal and county levels across China and leading platform companies in the road freight industry have achieved near-complete unionization at their headquarters and provincial branches. (Wu 2025)</blockquote>To fathom the significant consolidation of the NTDU, it is essential to underscore that workers in China are not required to join trade unions but sign up voluntarily. To simplify organizing truckers and logistical workers, the NTDU has established a “Workers’ Home” app and have set up unionization bases where truck drivers frequently park and rest, as well as other locations where they congregate. The union also draws on existing networks of truckers to establish and enforce wage, benefit and working condition procedures which assist them, including accident insurance, medical examinations at no charge and legal assistance. These campaigns have succeeded in mobilizing new members. The NTDU and ACFTU expect to mobilize over 600,000 truck drivers into unions in 2025 alone, the vast majority working for platform enterprises. Consequently, Zhengqiu emphasizes the magnitude of “building in key areas, building in industries and building as a safety net to promote platform enterprise unions to directly absorb workers in new employment forms into platform enterprise unions.” Accordingly, the NTDU has developed the proficiency of organizing logistics and trucking workers directly through platform enterprises. She adds, “We will build on the previous work of ‘building in key areas, building in industries and building as a safety net’ to promote platform enterprise unions to directly absorb workers in new employment forms into platform enterprise unions” (Wu 2025).

[[File:Figure 4 Dialectics of Chinese Labor.png|thumb|552x552px]]
Figure 4 Per capita annual income of urban and rural households, 1978−2012 (Source: Derived from National Bureau of Statistics (2024) China statistics yearbook (2024) 4–9 average wage of employed persons in urban non-private units by registered statistical category. Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics. <nowiki>https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm</nowiki>)

[[File:Screenshot 2026-07-30 at 18-25-08 9789004761490-74520-2.pdf.png|thumb|506x506px]]
Figure 5 Per capita income ($US) and Engel’s coefficient of urban and rural households, 1978–2012 (Source: China statistical yearbook (2024) 11–2 per capita income and Engel’s coefficient of urban and rural households,1978=100 (Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China) <nowiki>https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm</nowiki>)

[[File:Screenshot 2026-07-30 at 18-25-12 9789004761490-74520-2.pdf.png|thumb|506x506px]]
Figure 6 Average wages in China by ownership type, 1995−2023 (Source: China statistical yearbook (2024) 11–2 per capita income and Engel’s coefficient of urban and rural households, 1978=100. (Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China) <nowiki>https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm</nowiki>)

=== 14. Conclusion: Anti-China Propaganda and ACFTU Exceptionalism ===
Around the world, the formation of new technology firms using digitized communication has made the employer–labor relationship redundant. National governments have supported such companies and trade union responses have been lackluster at best. Almost everywhere in the capitalist West, digital workers have had no representation. The development of telecommunication through the mobile phone has in large measure established a new relationship between capital and labor and transformed the study of labor relations. In the 2000s, the emergence of the platform economy made it possible to use labor without establishing a direct relationship between the firm and worker. The platform economy expanded across the globe and shifted the obligation of directly paying labor for its services. According to the capitalist, such workers were in business for themselves but in reality, they were tethered to their apps, and technology companies could operate through algorithms which allowed them to provide services without the firm or company as the intermediary. Almost immediately, the labor–management relationship was broken, and technology companies became intermediaries between drivers and customers, extracting surplus value from workers.

In clear contrast to capitalist economies, in China, the ACFTU-affiliated trade unions have rapidly responded to driver needs through engaging in comprehensive labor market research, learning from workers about abuses and engaging with drivers to represent their concerns. Notwithstanding, most Western Labor scholars have disregarded this significant trade union participation in improving the conditions of workers through mobilization and unionization.

Undoubtedly, the emergence of technology companies has formed a new political economy which undermines the organizational power of workers through unions in capitalist and socialist countries. Yet, the literature on China, frequently advanced by self-proclaimed socialists and social-democrats, only recognizes capital and workers without recognizing that the Chinese state, CPC and the ACFTU advance holistic trade unionism through bottom-up and top-down practices. Both have the legal authority and capacity to determine the relationship between them. Such scholars do not consider the unique capability of socialist party trade unions (Chen 2018; Franceschini & Sorace 2022; Yuan & Zhang 2025). Numerous academic journals have proliferated in the last 20 years for the express purpose of disparaging the prodigious accomplishments of China under market socialism. Often embedded in leftist terminology, they are oblivious to the continuity of the PRC as a socialist workers’ state and its undeniable expansion of labor rights and conditions from 2012 to the present. Scholarly articles from each of the aforementioned scholars engage in inconceivable disparaging rhetoric and are transparently advanced to oppose the ACFTU. They are alluded to for the purpose of demonstration, collectively contending that the trade union federation is non-responsive and even not a union at all.

In the context of labor relations, Western Marxist opponents of the ACFTU and its constituent unions neglect the latter’s significant accomplishments in defending the Chinese rural and urban working class, even as major studies from the ILO and scholars within China show a remarkable capacity to organize workers in the new economy. Typically, focusing on shortcomings, these Western critics neglect the complications arising from a materialist perception of the unfolding changes which ineluctably occur in the real world. In fact, the ACFTU and its affiliate unions have continued to advance the Leninist and Maoist model of trade unionism devoted to protecting and expanding the skills and rights of the Chinese working class. In contrast to Western advanced capitalist states and most developing states, the Chinese model of trade unionism tirelessly responds to the complex needs of workers in a modernizing global economy.

== Workers, Subjectivity and Holistic Trade Unions ==
<blockquote>Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the suppression of the old society by the new. (Mao Zedong (1945) On Contradiction, Selected Works, Vol. I, 314)</blockquote>

=== 1. Trade Unions and the Principal Contradiction ===
How do Chinese trade unions organize and represent workers to build working class power? To answer this crucial question, this chapter seeks to measure the efficacy of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) through interviews with workers and stakeholders. It measures efficacy in the context of three considerations which are drawn from Mao Zedong’s analysis of historical materialism, rooted in the concept of the principal contradiction (Mao Tse-Tung/Mao Zedong 1945).

To claim that the nature of capitalism, imperialism, the state and globalization are static fails to recognize dialectical materialism as the driving force in history. Mao’s analysis of contradiction advances the concept of the principal contradiction which is inflected by dialectical materialism, where history always alters material conditions and class struggles.

Decidedly, under capitalism, the principal contradiction in the production process, the extraction of surplus labor, is transformed by the modification of material conditions which occur through dialectical materialism and is not temporally or spatially fixed. Modification of production directly transforms the relations of production within every phase of capitalism. Thus, for Mao:<blockquote>According to materialist dialectics, changes in nature are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in nature. Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society by the new. (Mao Zedong 1945, 314)</blockquote>Unequivocally, if new technology is integrated into the production process through the introduction of modern means of production within the labor process, the relations of production between owner and worker will also change. The subsumption of capital into the development of modern machinery, instruments and robotics will almost always increase the reserve army of labor. But it will also increase productivity and demand for skilled workers. Conversely, preserving obsolete machines to protect workers may also eventually generate unemployment and the erosion of the capacity of a state to modernize as industrial production becomes inefficient. However, it is mistaken to be certain that workers will not resist through class struggle.

For Mao, the principal contradiction is not always apparent and is conditioned by secondary contradictions, such as the opposing forces of capitalism and feudalism or owners and workers.<blockquote>[I]n capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. The other contradictions, such as those between the remnant feudal class and the bourgeoisie, between the peasant petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, between the proletariat and the peasant petty bourgeoisie, between the non-monopoly capitalists and the monopoly capitalists, between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism, among the capitalist countries and between imperialism and the colonies, are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction. … In a semi-colonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions presents a complicated picture. (Mao Zedong 1945, 331)</blockquote>Under Chinese market socialism today, the introduction of new machines does contribute to unemployment for those who are not trained in new skills. As redundant labor enters the labor market, they enter new jobs that do not provide equivalent wages and working conditions. But within China’s socialist market economy, the ACFTU must also revise its organizing strategies to correspond to the emergence of new industries without wages and conditions equivalent to those in manufacturing. During this interregnum, the ACFTU must research and study the emerging industries to identify and apply effective strategies to improve wages, benefits and conditions.

Under the Chinese socialist market economy, the ACFTU is obligated to create conditions which strengthen the workers’ state as envisioned in 1949, at the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by the Communist Party of China (CPC). But how does the Chinese working class direct the policies of the state? Torkil Lauesen, echoing Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, asserts that as a workers’ state, in the final analysis, the PRC operates in the interest of the working class. Lauesen applies the principal contradiction to grasp how China remains a workers’ state despite the presence of class differences between employers seeking profit and surplus value and workers:<blockquote>The changing principal contradiction has been the main reason for the shifting course of the CPC against the headwind of the capitalist world system. If capitalism is controlled, it can contribute to the development of the productive forces and better conditions for building a socialist society. But for this to happen, it is of vital importance that the working class and the peasantry retain state power. The “opening up” of China created capitalist billionaires, but as a class, they do not rule the country. (Lauesen 2024, 269)</blockquote>For Mao Zedong, the principal contradiction is always subject to change within a socialist state, and while the working class may have setbacks, the long-term objective of the Communist Party and the state is to achieve socialism which represents the distinctive historical development and practices of China, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a concept which is misunderstood by foreigners (Boer 2022).

The principal contradiction’s transformations are based on fundamental international and internal challenges. Since 1949, Chinese Communists have persistently strived to modernize and build a modern economy and have encountered opportunities and challenges. In 1978, under Deng Xiaoping, China shifted towards market socialism to modernize economically through encouraging investment in technology, a process which unfolded over nearly 50 years. This era has not been monolithic but has instead comprised contingent responses aimed at improving the country’s working class conditions and standard of living. To understand the labor movement’s changes, it is necessary to recognize the phases of the opening up rather than envisioning an unbroken period of continuity. Throughout, the ACFTU has had to adapt to the transformation of the material conditions and relations of production and distribution in response to modernization and technological change while ensuring that the working class persists as the dominant social force. At the outset, opening up indeed led to adversity for a preponderant rural population bonded to agriculture and subsistence. Subsequently, the ACFTU was pressed to address the challenge of a floating population migrating from rural to urban regions and it remains dutifully committed to meeting changing requirements as the economy has shifted from agrarian to manufacturing and digital labor.

Today, China’s heterogeneous economy remains rooted in the land, retains a large manufacturing sector, and in the last decade has branched out to the digital sector. The ACFTU must thus distinguish agrarian, industrial and digital workers with diverse needs yet collectively sharing analogous class subjectivity and interests.

The second consideration entails understanding how the ACFTU mobilizes the working class as a collective force and maintains socialist power to advance its interests. Under market socialism, the ACFTU must organize workers in the public and private sectors of the economy. The public sector controls the principal heights of the state, which reveals China’s socialist nature; most of the Chinese economy is dominated by state owned enterprises (SOEs) even if most workers are employed by private enterprises. Yet, workers employed in SOEs comprise only 20 percent of all laborers in the urban economy. About 80 percent of China’s workers are employed in the burgeoning private sector. Certainly, the private sector is dependent on state investment to modernize and advance technology. However, workers in private sector firms tend to have less secure jobs as technological change fashions new realities. The ACFTU must ceaselessly represent the population and improve the condition of workers, as the subjectivities of workers in China are not the same, and economic change has a direct influence on those who find themselves in different circumstances based on their training, education and status as workers with employee contracts or as third party contractors. The ACFTU must strive to hold every employer accountable for providing workers with direct contracts. However, as this is not the case, the ACFTU is permanently addressing these changes and striving to keep up with new forms of employment (NFE), as seen especially in the period from 2015 to 2025.

Finally, the archival and ethnographic research will show how Chinese workers measure up to workers throughout the world and provide an indication of how the Chinese labor movement compares to workers worldwide. The directive of the ACFTU is to mobilize workers within the context of market socialism. In this context, the research examines the holistic nature of the ACFTU and shows that it is based on bottom-up activism, top-down investigation, analysis and remedies that are consistent with the class interests of China’s working class. In this way, this chapter helps demonstrate how Chinese workers organize through the ACFTU.

Chinese workers, like all other workers, organize themselves, and the ACFTU mobilizes them to build trade union power through a socialist mobilization of power resources to achieve their demands and improve wages, working conditions, social insurance and pensions through unified bottom-up and top-down power supremacy. In the West, ideas of bottom-up organizing are advanced to demonstrate that workers are engaged in self-activity. Yet, it is not sufficient to have only bottom-up organizing in the absence of a strong and vibrant trade union organization (Schmalz et al. 2019).

The research is intended to elucidate how the ACFTU and the Chinese trade union organization can effectively utilize strategic approaches to foster worker mobilization which both recognizes worker aspirations and achieves the improvement of their wages, working conditions and social insurance.

=== 2. Holistic Trade Unions and Top-Down and Bottom-Up Organizations ===
In the West, notably the US, the labor movement has steadily declined from 35 percent of all workers in the 1950s to 10 percent today. In response to the decline, a multitude of strategic responses have been advanced, from rank-and-file bottom-up organizing to stem the downturn and increase membership and union density to increasing the financial resources and centralized power and discipline of the union to practically impose unionization. Others advocated mobilizing migrant workers, increasing worker democracy in unions, on-the-job collective action and striking as antidotes to increase membership or labor–management cooperation and concessionary bargaining (Ashby 2022; Milkman & Wong 2001).

From 2015 to the present, as the power-resource model has largely failed, the dominant approach to labor unions among Western leftists has centered on fostering anarchic and autonomous rank-and-file participation and jettisoning notions of building resilient and durable unions as an alternative to existing bureaucratic unionism. As attempts to construct powerful and disciplined unions through devoting resources to organizing have been unsuccessful for the first two decades of the 21st century, organized labor is on the defensive worldwide. In the US, Supreme Court rulings have eroded labor union power in the public sector, the mainstay of organized labor. In 2025, US president Donald Trump has prohibited trade unions among federal workers, a policy which has done away with collective bargaining for more than 1 million federal workers, encompassing 1 out of 15 union members in more than 12 US agencies (Glass 2025; McCartin 2025). The Trump Administration’s attack against trade unions representing workers in federal agencies has further eroded working class confidence in established unions. The widespread erosion in the capacity of existing trade unions has shifted scholarly interest towards spontaneous collective action in the absence of unions. Some critics have suggested that trade unions are spent organizations which have been overtaken by insurrections, anarchistic riots and, more recently, a fetish which should be dispensed with as a defining standard of working class organization (Atzeni 2021; Clover 2016).

The elevation of anarchist and spontaneous forms of worker organization reflects the breakdown of trade unions in the West. In contrast, the Chinese holistic approach to trade unions encourages democratic working class self-activity while establishing strong and effective unions.

Since 2000, as trade unions worldwide have been in free fall, Labor Studies scholars have begun to advance the concept of bottom-up mobilization as an alternative to top-down organizing. The concept is based on the belief that trade unions had not previously attended to the demands of workers in and out of unions but had advanced their own self-interest through growing their memberships. The increase in variously termed “bottom-up organizing,” “whole-union organizing,” and “worker-to-worker organizing” suggests that working class enthusiasm for trade unions had declined and these new methods were essential if labor was to organize into unions and improve standards of living and working conditions. Bottom-up and whole-union organizing denote that trade unions allow workers (both those in their unions and the majority of workers who remain outside them) to engage in common activities to advance their interests, and that trade unions strive to understand the daily lives of workers (Lynd & Lynd 2012; McAlevey 2018). Some scholars have asserted that on-the-job actions independent of unions and strikes exemplify the best of bottom-up organizing, implying that all significant transformation is a consequence of workers and movements rather than organizations and parties (Blanc 2025; Loomis 2018). As trade unions have continued to decline into the 2020s, Labor scholar Maurizio Atzeni maintains that the importance of trade unions is overstated and constitutes a form of “trade union fetishism” which does not reflect the interests of the working class. Thus, the organizational and ideological power should be discarded and replaced by foregrounding spontaneous working class “struggle” against capital (Atzeni 2021). This anarchistic form of organizing certainly occurs through spontaneous activity of the working class in every workplace, but the idea of abandoning trade unions is equivalent to discarding organization of any kind. This was a perspective which had been advanced by anarchists, in the early 20th century, but it was rejected by Lenin in ''What Is to Be Done?'' as antithetical to forming working class consciousness and effective organizations, and liable to culminate in an economism which negated the significance of the working class (Lenin [1902] 2020).

However, when bottom-up organizing or class-struggle unionism which is associated with higher levels of democracy and workers’ control over their own destinies precludes strong and vigorous trade unions which direct labor in organizing trade unions in the interest of workers, considering the retrospective efforts to place worker self-activity against organizational capacity is a false construct. It evokes the altruistic yet ineffective Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an insurgent trade union of the early 20th century as well as contemporary anarchist variants today, which encourage rank-and-file unionism in the absence of robust organization. Historian Melvyn Dubofsky shows that class struggle unionism in the absence of a strong revolutionary organization is destined to failure:<blockquote>Wobbly doctrine taught workers how to gain short-range goals indistinguishable from those sought by ordinary, nonrevolutionary trade unions. Able to rally exploited workers behind crusades to abolish specific grievances, the IWW failed to transform its followers’ concrete grievances into a higher consciousness of class, ultimate purpose, and necessary revolution—to create, in short, a revolutionary working class in the Marxist sense. (Dubofsky 2000, 269)</blockquote>Contrast the amorphous IWW organizational structure with the democratic and still revolutionary trade unionism of the ACFTU. On June 9, 2025, Wang Chun, chairman of the Shanxi Provincial Federation of Trade Unions, identified the key tasks of building holistic unionism through bottom-up democracy and top-down power resources and channeling the spontaneous democratic dynamism into concrete gains for the working class:<blockquote>First, we must focus on ideological and political guidance to further consolidate the common ideological foundation for the unity and struggle of industrial workers; second, we must focus on democratic management to better safeguard the status of industrial workers as masters of their own destiny; third, we must focus on skill enhancement to gradually improve the skill formation system for industrial workers; fourth, focus on growth and development to create a three-dimensional career development space for industrial workers; fifth, focus on rights protection and services to enhance the sense of achievement, gain, and happiness of industrial workers; sixth, focus on making contributions to the cause to give full play to the leading role of industrial workers; and seventh, focus on expanding the workforce to continuously consolidate the class foundation and mass foundation for the Party’s long-term governance. (Li, Y. 2025)</blockquote>

=== 3. Chinese Trade Unions ===
Chinese and socialist trade unions diverge significantly from the prevailing models in Western capitalist states. While both strive to build working class power, their doctrinal forms differ and are predicated on the distinct class natures of capitalist and socialist states. The model of trade unionism which emerged in the West in the early 20th century and continues today is established on the basis of “pure and simple unionism” and the domination of capitalists over workers. Labor economist Selig Perlman celebrates trade unionism under US capitalism as the outstanding form of union representation, viewing improved wages and working conditions on the job as the unchanging and persistent aspiration of the American worker since the formation in 1886 of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. To Perlman, labor’s methods, even outside the immediate vicinity of the job interest:<blockquote>show no more change than can be accounted for by the changing environment. This steadiness of labor’s self-integration into the evolving American society is of significance, not only to the labor movement itself and to its theorists, but even more importantly, for its defense of democracy against totalitarianism. As labor in this country utterly rejects any idea of “class hegemony,” it is thus a bulwark of the principle of “unity in diversity,” upon which Western civilization rests. (Perlman 1951, 63)</blockquote>The rigid and self-interested stance of labor organizations under capitalism in the US and the West foreshadows the eventual decline of trade unions from the 1980s to the present in the US and the world. Certainly, trade unions have formed as opposing models to resist the archaic “pure and simple unionism,” but most have been forbidden by the state or deemed “against the law” by liberal bourgeois states, notably the United Electrical Workers in the US. In the 1970s and 1980s, activists sought to transform unions into progressive or even revolutionary organizations, but almost all these formations were suppressed by the state or by leaders advancing Perlman’s “pure and simple” unionism which had predominated and defeated movements for more expansive equality. Pure and simple unionism implies that unions should place rank-and-file workers’ pragmatic economic demands over more ideological social and political concerns of building working class power. However, as economic demands had become dominant from the 1920s to advance the material interests of their own members, US trade unions abandoned any pretense of class politics and working class trade union solidarity.

=== 4. China’s Holistic Trade Unionism ===
The general critique of bottom-up enterprise trade unionism by Labor Studies scholars who oppose China is based on a partiality to the Western model of unionism which opposes any constructive developments of the ACFTU and its affiliate unions since China’s opening up and introduction of market socialism in 1978. Not one research study and interpretative article in the references originates from outside the West. Moreover, Elaine Sio-leng Hui and Chris King-chi Chan (2015) exclude the work of authoritative Chinese scholars and even US researchers who, at minimum, acknowledge the swift pace of authentic trade union organization which is initiated, on the one hand, through worker demands for higher wages, benefits and improved working conditions within public and private enterprises, and on the other hand by the organizing campaigns which originate through the ACFTU and its industrial affiliates on all geographic levels. The inherent bias can be found in the article’s use of references, which value only Western sources critiquing the ACFTU.

In contrast, the holistic-union approach to organizing (bottom-up from workers and top-down from the trade unions) aims to combine building power at the workplace with the support of workers, local and regional unions, the ACFTU and the Chinese state. Western Labor Studies scholars dismiss democratic trade union elections in China, falsely contending that union elections have always been a top-down process controlled by the ACFTU and the CPC. In effect, Western Labor scholars claim that no matter what the trade union federation does to support workers, it is incapable of addressing worker demands. However, Hui and Chan (2015) found evidence of the emergence of bottom-up union elections from 2010 to 2014. This development was viewed derisively from the Western standpoint as trade unions, employers, and the Chinese state were also involved in a tripartite system which they deemed to be advancing top-down influence over the unions. This analytic perspective advanced the ideal union to be bottom-up rather than top-down, a view which has increasingly been promoted by Western scholars. Consequently, they found the Chinese model to fall short of their ideal of union democracy, a concept which had been put forward among scholars in the 1990s as trade unions were in decline in advanced capitalist countries of the West (Lynd & Lynd 2012).

In place of viewing a strong supportive union as advancing rank-and-file democracy through engaging worker demands and seeking to expand their rights, Western advocates for greater union democracy, while well-meaning, have neglected the question of building union power, or the power resources approach put forward by Schmaltz, Ludwig and Webster in their prominent intervention on building the efficacy and capacity of trade unions (2018). The power resources approach examined the reservoir of organizational influence which would contribute to successful unionization. However, bottom-up researchers have all but neglected the question of union power in an era when Western and world trade unions have been in free fall because of the weakness of unions vis-à-vis employers under neoliberal policies within increasingly rapacious capitalist states.

To critics of the ACFTU, it is impossible for the Federation to sufficiently advance the interests of labor in a state which is directed at improving the conditions of the working class. The China Labor Bulletin (CLB), an NGO supported by US and Western governments and private NGOs (1994–June 2025), is the most prominent example of the absolutist position that every ACFTU initiative is flawed. Even as the CLB acknowledged that the ACFTU and its affiliates had conducted democratic elections, it warned against the potential of possible trade union intrusion in unions, or what should be viewed as the ACFTU’s facilitation of elections and commitment to union democracy at the grassroots level. Notably, the CLB was often cited as the authoritative source by Western corporate media, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Guardian and others. Like anti-PRC NGOs based in Hong Kong, the media published false narratives without corroboration from actual sources in China (Wong 2021). A mark of the ACFTU’s success was the closure of leading NGOs like the CLB, funded by USAID. The CLB claimed to be monitoring strikes but was based on misleading information provided by informants in China who traveled to Hong Kong for training by CLB’s staff. Undeniably, funds to operate the CLB were withdrawn by USAID in spring 2025 in part because of the NGO’s failure to stimulate mass strikes in China. If the CLB, the most prominent labor NGO to have monitored Chinese labor activity, had been effective, the withdrawal of funds would not have caused it to fail in its effort to motivate collective action by the working class in opposition to the ACFTU and the PRC. Instead, an effective trade union organization enjoys legitimacy among all strata of the broader Chinese working class. Most CLB and other Western Hong Kong based NGO activities had centered around unprovable critiques about unprovable ACFTU manipulation of elections, and labor disputes that were exacerbated by NGOs like the July 2018 protests disrupting production organized by the Western NGO-funded Migrant Workers Center at the Jasic Technology Co. in Shenzhen. The dispute over overtime wages and formation of a trade union came after the Pingshan District Trade Union of the ACFTU had already begun organizing an enterprise union at the firm.^1 These events were typically organized in Hong Kong through agitating a handful of workers who were given false information about labor law which did not inform them of China’s extensive wage-complaint mediation and arbitration process involving the extensive system of government administrative labor courts.^2 The failure of the CLB to document any systematic and authentic violations of Chinese labor law by the ACFTU was the primary reason for CLB’s decision to terminate operations (Leung 2025; RFA Cantonese 2025; Stevenson 2025).

Western NGOs apply a strictly Western perspective of trade unionism, as if all other formations of trade unionism fall short of the ideal model: a weak, independent trade union which operates within the contours of a capitalist market economy. Western labor academics engage in damning indictments of Chinese trade unions irrespective of the latter’s achievements.

^1 In July 2018, a small group of workers were pressured by an employee of a Western-funded NGO, Labor Force, to seek overtime wages and holiday pay, culminating in protests by several workers at the Jasic Technology factory in Shenzhen in July. According to reporters at the scene, the workers protested, held banners, stormed the factory and temporarily interrupted production. Subsequently, 19 members of the organization also stormed the local police station demanding the release of five organizers. All 24 were released within one or two days after receiving reprimands and warnings from authorities. But protesters returned to the police station and received extensive coverage on WeChat and other social media platforms. However, the NGO organized event gained the support of Chinese university students who had been acclaimed in the West. But the disruption by the workers organized by the Labor Force NGO was primarily designed to receive external consumption and discredit the union. The Western NGO achieved its goal in engineering an international controversy and gaining significant Chinese and Western media attention on news platforms and websites promoting opposition to the ACFTU. After the incident, Jasic workers said the NGO misinformed them about availability of an official legal dispute system which would resolve the dispute. Even before the incident, in May 2018, the Pingshan District Trade Union intervened and was resolving the worker complaints and facilitating the formation of an enterprise-level trade union at Jasic. The union also provided advice to Jasic about complying with labor law (Xinhua News Agency 2018). Predictably, the incident proved to be fodder for Western antagonists of the ACFTU, whose evidence was based on hearsay and false and distorted details of the event from the foreign news media and US government funded NGOs like Human Rights Watch and anti-China university activists.

^2 As a participant observer, the author had access to NGO funded opponents of the PRC in Hong Kong who were hostile towards China. The organizations include the China Labour Bulletin, Asia Monitor Research Centre and China Globalization Monitor among others, from 2014 to 2021.

In 2010, the ACFTU advanced a position of supporting proactive trade unionism directed at forming and fortifying trade unions in the private enterprise sector of the economy comprising 75–80 percent of China’s workforce. The ACFTU has comprehensively analyzed the actual work of enterprise trade unions and unanimously agreed that enterprise trade unions are an important organizational and working basis for our country’s trade unions. With the deepening of reform and opening up and the development of the socialist market economy, our country’s economic relations and labor relations are becoming more complex, and enterprise trade unions are facing many new situations and new challenges. Trade unions at all levels must further enhance their political awareness, awareness of the overall situation, awareness of potential dangers, and sense of responsibility, earnestly implement the working principle of enterprise trade of promoting enterprise development and safeguarding the rights and interests of employees, unifying their thinking, strengthening confidence, and working hard to build enterprise trade unions into a home that employees trust. (GZU Faculty and Staff Union 2010)

But proponents of the Western model of trade unionism felt this was not good enough. In 2015, Labor scholars Hui and Chan suggested that the ACFTU’s decision to assist fledgling enterprise unions was tantamount to interference with bottom-up organizing and would halt the upsurge in rank-and-file unions and direct elections in the private sector which they saw as a positive development and revealing a rise in bottom-up trade unionism in China (Hui & Chan 2015). According to Hui and Chan, the ACFTU is promoting democratic, bottom-up unionization of workers through advancing transparency, worker democracy and local control over union affairs. Notably, they seek to discredit the ACFTU’s proposals to strengthen democracy and transparency through local elections and honoring the decisions of union members in enterprise unions, as well as initiatives to curb corruption by encouraging “workers’ directors and workers’ supervisors” to disclose it.<blockquote>Large-scale enterprises should improve the union-organization network, establish union branches, union groups and union activist teams and strengthen the construction of female employee organizations in enterprise unions. They should respect the dominant position of members, adhere to the member (representative) congress system and the permanent member representative system, promote openness of union affairs, and continuously improve the cohesion of the enterprise unions. (GZU Faculty and Staff Union 2010)</blockquote>Drawing exclusively on the omnipresent Western sources critical of the PRC, Hui and Chan ignore its nature as a socialist state. They assert that the shortcomings of the ACFTU lie specifically in the effort to build an effective system of accountability within the local and regional trade unions, the ACFTU and enterprise managers and to advance training of representatives through “trade union universities.” Western critics deliberately ignore the ACFTU policies [d]irected at the “construction of the socialist core value system” and “enthusiastically advanced “the great character of the working class” within enterprise unions (GZU Faculty and Staff Union 2010). The dominant literature from opponents in the West prefers to depict a spectacle of conflict within socialism over accountability, class consciousness, worker democracy codified by the ACFTU and CPC and local control of enterprise unions.

=== 5. The Chinese Working Class Today ===
The Annual Report on the Status of Chinese Workers for 2023 shows that employed workers dropped from 51.16 percent of the labor force in 2021 to 49.89 percent in 2022, a decline which has continued from 2014 to the present. However, consideration of this decline must consider that the population in urban areas is growing (Chinese Workers 2024, 11).

It is significant that, as China’s economy matures through higher productivity (in particular, with the rapid expansion of robots), average incomes have moderated within the socialist market economy. Notwithstanding this, average wages in the non-private sector continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace. Consequently, the 2022 wage gap between private sector and public sector workers has expanded from 1.70 times to 1.75 times year on year, and urban wages among urban workers are about twice as high as those of rural workers.

==== 5.1. Social Insurance and Pension Expansion ====
Social insurance (including old age insurance, unemployment insurance and work related insurance) are also growing. About 80 percent of all workers are covered by old age insurance. Taken together, the expansion of benefits in China is moving towards full coverage for all retired workers in the next decade (Chinese Workers 2024). The Chinese government minimized the deleterious consequences of COVID-19 and a potential decline in pension contributions by instituting preventative plans to contain and reduce the pandemic. In addition, the government is now promoting a “multi-pillar” plan to meet the needs of an aging population and safeguard the pensions of China’s expansive labor force, adjudicating cases to defend workers in economic disputes with private management.

==== 5.2. Labor Disputes ====
The Chinese government is highly transparent and rigorous in reporting about labor disputes, as well as about economic downturns which impact workers, reflecting the anti-corruption initiative advanced by General Secretary Xi Jinping from 2012 to the present. These advances have been ignored by the Western media. By comparison, government reporting on economic trends from outside China is typically far less exacting. China openly records labor–management conflicts in the private sector in its annual statistical bulletins, which are reported openly in the media. The annual bulletin ''Chinese Workers'' documented that labor–management conflict adjudicated by the labor courts expanded from 2020 to 2022, owing to a decline in workers’ median income in the private sector relative to that of workers in SOEs. Over that period, labor dispute cases handled by mediation and arbitration bodies increased to 341.3 million workers: a 20.2 percent increase from 2021 (Chinese Workers 2024, 12). Growth in adjudication of labor disputes reveals a government highly committed to resolving conflict in a state where labor laws are far more stringent than in any other country (2024, 10–13). For example, adjudicating and resolving labor disputes in the US is virtually impossible as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) there has a protracted dispute resolution program which favors employers. In most instances, even those workers represented by trade unions are conflict averse and wages, benefits and working conditions established by collective bargaining agreements are openly flouted by private businesses.

ACFTU encourages workers to advance claims against employers as evidenced by the dramatic growth in mediation and arbitration bodies. The government measures the success rate of labor–management dispute resolution. In 2022, national arbitration bodies closed 96.9 percent of the 3,162,000 cases filed and 72.5 percent of all arbitration cases were finalized, mostly in favor of workers, recovering ¥66.2 billion, or $US9.5 trillion (2024, 13). Having solicited public opinion on how to improve the dispute resolution process, the Ministry of Justice established an online system in 2019. Since 2023, members of the ACFTU and constituent trade unions on the grassroots level have been able to file complaints online rather than taking time off from work and establishing an independent dispute arbitration resolution mechanism (Government Gazette 2023; Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China 2019; Wang 2025). (See Figures 7 and 8.)
'''Figure 7''' Work stoppages, 2018–22 ''(Source: Derived by the author from labor dispute cases and number of workers involved, 2018–2022 statistical bulletin on the development of HR and social security. Chinese Ministry of HR and Social Security)''

'''Figure 8''' Average wages in China by ownership type, 1995−2023 ''(Source: Derived from labor dispute cases and number of workers involved, 2018–2022 Statistical Bulletin on the Development of HR and Social Security. Issued by the Chinese Ministry of HR and Social Security)''
[[File:Screenshot 2026-07-30 at 18-19-49 9789004761490-74520-2.pdf.png|thumb|875x875px]]

==== 5.3. Shift from Manufacturing for Export to Domestic Production and Services ====
The Chinese government has developed advanced industries to increase domestic demand and so spur economic expansion. In this way, Chinese workers will benefit directly from state-of-the-art consumer goods and rely less on exports to generate foreign currencies. For an excessively long period since 1978, China’s economy has developed through technological innovation and higher productivity. Foreign revenue has been reinvested in domestic industries. For far too long, due to unequal exchange in trade with the capitalist West, Chinese worker compensation has been devalued, notably in North America and Western Europe. From about 2010, as Chinese workers’ incomes have increased, the economic policymakers have nurtured a domestic consumer market to benefit Chinese workers rather than rapacious foreign consumers in the capitalist West, who have long benefited from acquiring markedly undervalued products. Westerners, especially in the US, have taken for granted low-cost Chinese products and multinational corporations have treated China as their own backyard where they can dictate the cost of consumer goods. However, the regeneration of the ACFTU has increased Chinese worker wages as it has increased the costs of consumer goods for foreign consumers. However, Western tariffs and trade restrictions have generated a renaissance in the development of original technology in China, including digitization, information systems and artificial intelligence (AI). The commitment to developing new technology for improving wages and working conditions was a central theme of a conference commemorating the ACFTU’s centenary:<blockquote>To adapt to the rapid development of new technologies, new business forms and new models, trade unions at all levels are constantly innovating their organizational forms and ways of joining and actively promoting convenient methods such as online application for membership and collective registration for membership. Employees from platform companies, small and micro enterprises, and social organizations have successively become union members and enjoy the benefits offered by the union. (Li, Z. 2025)</blockquote>Industrial innovation has steadily intensified the renovation and establishment of production and service industries, increasing pressure on China’s industrial labor force as manufacturing industries have closed. Rising migration to urban areas has created a flexible labor force and attendant unemployment among the urban working classes, a labor market change which has not gone unnoticed by the socialist state and the ACFTU as the number of new jobs has declined from 2018 to 2022 from 13.61 million to 12.06 million with a concomitant decline of 4.12 million in employment among workers aged between 16 and 59. Further industrial diversification through digitization has restructured the nature of work through flexibilization of labor. By 2022, 200 million workers had entered flexible jobs, stimulating the ACFTU to adapt to address the demands of workers employed on a range of digital platforms, including logistics, delivery, streaming and others (Chinese Workers 2024, 36–38; NBSC 2022).

==== 5.4. Implications of the Expansive Growth of Labor Flexibilization ====
Flexible employment is rapidly expanding in China. However, significant differences exist in terms of cities, wage rates, gender and age. Zhilian, a recruitment and research agency, found that between 2019 and 2024 the proportion of all employment positions in the flexible economy climbed sharply from 8.4 percent to 15.2 percent of all jobs in China. The Institute for Economic and Social Research (IESR) at Jinan University attributes the near doubling of flexible jobs to the COVID-19 pandemic, government support for the adoption of new technology and rapid acceleration of the digital economy (IESR 2025).

In the majority of Western countries, most jobs in the digital economy pay low wages and shift the risk to the worker, whose legal status is almost that of an independent contractor or “in business for oneself.” Such workers consequently lack workplace safety, must obtain health insurance on their own, lack pensions and are not entitled to unemployment insurance or social security for retirement. Platform workers include laborers contracted for single tasks, including home repairs and assembly, gardening and homecare labor: what Ursula Huws defines as “consumption work” which both exploits labor and increases consumer dependence on the commodification of common requirements for survival and subsistence through digitization of the private and public spheres (Huws 2014). Cloud work in the West is composed of crowdsourcing workers who perform tasks worldwide. The iconic Amazon Mechanical Turk performs labor in poor countries of the global South with low GDP per capita, allowing the multinational corporation and Western consumers to benefit from the low cost of labor in obtaining services for a fraction of its cost in the rich countries of the North. In addition, cloud work includes high-wage labor performing programming and other skilled information-technology development. Collectively, digital-labor demand is dominated by low-wage labor performing ride hailing, delivery and home-care work on the platform or services performed overseas, such as web design, accounting and business services.

In China, flexible labor in the digital economy is growing and consists of about one-third of the total labor force, with sharp differences between new first, second, third and fourth tier cities, where traditional employment is the norm even as the state seeks to modernize the economy through expanding digital and AI to foster higher productivity, modernization and attendant reduction of high-intensity labor. In view of government initiatives to spur technological advancement, the Institute of Economic and Social Research (IESR)^3 expects flexible employment to expand as traditional labor intensive employment declines. Location based flexible work in logistics does not require academic education and high skills, while most cloud work in China compensates employees with higher wages than they would receive in the West. In China, labor is typically not contracted to poor countries in the global South to seize on unequal exchange of trade (Emmanuel 1972/2025; IESR 2025).

^3 The IESR is a leading Chinese socioeconomic labor, and policy research institute at Jinan University, in Guangzhou, PRC: <nowiki>https://iesr.jnu.edu.cn/2024/0426/c17699a811578/page.htm</nowiki>.

IESR data analysis displays a marked trend which contradicts the mounds of research among Western Labor Studies researchers suggesting the rise of a Chinese flexible labor force correlates to lower wages. On the contrary, due to worker demands for job security and representation and the direct responsiveness of ACFTU trade unions, flexible worker membership in trade unions has expanded significantly. The IESR reports that the wages of flexible and digital worker are higher than those of workers in “traditional employment” such as manufacturing and production industries.<blockquote>In general, new flexible employment positions offer higher salary levels and there are also obvious distribution differences within them. According to the IESR, 24.2 percent of traditional employment positions are in the salary range of ¥6,001–¥8,000. Among new flexible employment, location-based positions account for as much as 44.9 percent in the ¥10,001–¥15,000 range, far exceeding the 22.1 percent of traditional employment and 24.3 percent of cloud based positions. Cloud based flexible salaries are more concentrated in the ¥6,001–¥8,000 and ¥10,001–¥15,000- ranges, accounting for 24.2 percent and 24.3 percent respectively (IESR 2025).</blockquote>The nostalgic yearning among US and Western policymakers, manufacturers and workers for a regression from information technology, digitization and AI to the industrial era is a conundrum even for mainstream economists. By contrast, the Chinese government supports and finances subsumption of capital into manufacturing as a means to rapidly move towards robotization of labor intensive industrial production in factories to foster the development of digital and AI jobs which permit workers to spend more time with their families and communities as well as engage in meaningful personal activities which enhance the quality of their lives. Our interviews with a cohort of 50 Chinese workers in four first tier cities from January through March 2025 finds that the overriding concern of many workers is for job flexibility to care for their children or furthering their own education and training. The requirement for flexibility encompasses all skill levels, geographic locations, industrial sectors and laborers with or without local residence status in urban centers. (See Chapter 5 on ACFTU recognition of the rise of digital labor and successful national, provincial, municipal and district level union campaigns to organize digital workers.)

=== 6. Working Class Subjectivity and the ACFTU’s Significance to Labor ===
To directly understand the concerns of workers in China, interviews were conducted among representative workers in a range of industries in the private (non-public) and public sectors in cities and regions throughout the country (see Table 4). We conducted survey interviews and ethnographic interviews to determine the attitudes and perspectives on the ACFTU. We now turn to our interviews and assessments with Chinese workers from November 2023 through April 2025 in cities across the country. The research includes interviews with more than 100 workers using a range of methods in different localities. The interviewees were all randomly selected. About 50 percent of the interviews were structured and allowed for workers to discuss their attitudes towards working in China and the role of the ACFTU. In addition, the other 50–60 interviews were unstructured ethnographic interviews with workers, union members and leaders and managers in non-public enterprises in Guangzhou, Donnguan and surrounding Guangdong Province.

The interviewees include resident workers, migrant workers and workers contracted by third party agencies, encompassing laborers who did not have formal labor contracts with the companies by which they were employed. Randomized, structured and ethnographic interviews were conducted among workers, managers and trade union representatives in the cities and provinces shown in Table 4. The interviews were intentionally conducted in distinct geographic spaces and across industrial and job categories.

The interviews represent the central theme of the research: an inquiry into working class subjectivity among workers. Open ended questions focused on worker cognition of their contribution to the labor process and the significance of the CPC and the local branch of the ACFTU in representing and defending working class interests, The interviews applied a grounded historical materialism advanced by Karl Marx in ''Capital'' (1867) and Friedrich Engels in ''Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'' (1907). For Marx and Engels, class consciousness is a direct extension of the material being of the worker, which shapes class subjectivity expressed by the communist party and representative union. The party and union are the organs which reflect the material interests of the working class, and it is through associating working class subjectivity with the party and trade union organization that their interests in the material world are expressed. Working class subjectivity rejects idealism, abstraction and cultural and philosophical concerns which are detached from the natural world and political economy, which are grounded in dialectical materialism and scientific socialism (Ness 2024).

The ethnographic interviews focused on worker job satisfaction and employer skills training in the manufacturing sectors as well as wages, working conditions and social insurance in all economic sectors, including among digital and logistical workers. A fundamental finding is that employers are introducing new technology within workplaces which significantly rely on higher skills to increase productivity, even among businesses with fewer than 100 workers. The nature of work in many middle-sized factories has shifted from largely unskilled labor on assembly lines to a larger share of skilled workers operating high technology means of production at higher wages. Work satisfaction is improved as employees can complete most of the tasks individually instead of working on far more alienating assembly lines. Workers in modern factories are encouraged to have high levels of creativity and can better appreciate the work process and their role in the production of tools, products and commodities.
'''Table 4''' Geographic locations of interviews, November 2024–April 2025
{| class="wikitable"
|'''Directly controlled municipalities'''
|'''Province'''
|'''Cities'''
|-
|Beijing
|
|
|-
|Shanghai
|
|
|-
|
|Fujian
|Fuzhou City
|-
|
|
|Xiamen City
|-
|
|
|Lianjiang County
|-
|
|Guangdong
|Donnguan
|-
|
|
|Guangzhou
|-
|
|
|Shanwei
|-
|
|
|Zhuhai
|-
|
|Hebei
|Langfang City
|-
|
|Heilongjiang
|Harbin City
|-
|
|
|Shuangyashan City
|-
|
|Henan
|Nanyang
|-
|
|Jilin province
|Changchun City
|-
|
|
|Yanbian/Yanji
|-
|
|Sichuan
|Chengdu
|-
|
|
|Yibin City
|-
|
|Henan
|Nanyang
|-
|
|Shandong province
|Weihai City
|-
|
|Zhejiang province
|Hangzhou City
|-
|
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''Note: I am indebted to crucial support from Pan Yan, Adrian Ortega Camara, Alex Witherspoon, Sreyashi Choudhury and six journalists who conducted interviews with workers, including Leah Chen, Leslie Wang, Sijia Xiao, Jia Xu, Noelle Yi and Xinyu Zhang.''

==== 6.1. Labor Perspectives and Outlooks in China’s Socialist Market Economy ====
From November 2024 through March 2025, ethnographic interviews were conducted among workers in an array of industries. Most workers were laboring in NFE which have emerged in China and worldwide in the ten years from 2015 to 2025. Moreover, almost all were floating workers who had only recently migrated from the countryside or were recently unemployed workers entering the digital labor market. Among the latter, workers were seeking work in the aftermath of industrial modernization in the socialist market economy and the inescapable expansion of a reserve army of labor in search of employment. Unlike capitalist market economies, employers in the Chinese socialist market economy do not exploit workers through driving down labor costs.

Consequently, most ethnographic interviews in the survey were conducted with laborers who were primarily young and unskilled, many of whom, due to the expansion of the digital economy, had gravitated towards jobs in the industry. The significant finding is that most workers did not intend to remain in most sectors of the digital economy but planned on moving on to industries requiring training and higher skills. Nevertheless, most workers in NFE recognized the necessity to increase remuneration, dependent on gaining a larger share of revenues from the platform economy as well as improving working conditions, which were also largely uncertain in emergent labor markets. For example, food delivery workers discover that access to residential communities could sometimes be a challenge and that working conditions in increasingly frequent high summer temperatures have significant consequences. Just as workers were acclimating to NFE so too were China’s trade unions. In view of the incipient nature of the digital economy it is essential to consider the distinct spatial and temporal factors to understand workers’ perspectives and their material reality in the natural world as digital economy workers employed in ride hailing, delivery, other logistics, care work and additional labor markets which depend on the platform. Working class subjectivity assumes unique forms of labor which class conscious trade unions must research, analyze and absorb for workers to have agency through new strategies reflecting the unique labor process which has emerged. The nature and forms of exchange within the digital economy are categorically dissimilar from those in manufacturing, retail, services and conventional labor markets which are based on a direct exchange between the worker and the firm. In the worldwide platform economy, most workers are not employed by firms but are considered to be working for themselves. But in China, a large and growing number of digital workers are becoming direct employees of firms and negotiate their remuneration, health and safety and social security through trade unions.

Organizations can only represent the class conscious interests of the working class after recognizing the nature of an industry and the constraints which are imposed on workers. A newly formed labor market requires accountable trade unions to conduct significant research and partake in the labor process as it evolves and takes shape. A responsible trade union must develop strategies which reflect the nature of the industries and the labor process inherent to workers. Socialist trade unions have unique responsibilities absent for most capitalist trade unions, which are primarily motivated by increasing membership and defending the leadership of the organization. As a rule, trade unions under capitalism both support and fear new members who will pay dues but also have the potential to threaten the authority of leaders who are isolated from them. A genuinely effective trade union organization must operate in parallel with workers through representing their subjective interests in the creation of an agency with the capacity to unify and liberate labor (Lukács 1923/1999). And it is through agency that a trade union can grasp the dialectical understanding of the principal contradictions which workers confront through their labor.

In view of the necessity of recognizing and learning the material interests of workers, mobilization into trade unions must occur with detailed understanding of the primary practices and contradictions which emerge and are developed over time and, in due course, epitomize a new industry. Successful trade unions will emerge only after workers and trade union organizations develop a cognitive capacity through experience and research, share and perceive the contradictions and adopt an organizational form which is in harmony with workers.

In an industry which experiences a high rate of turnover among precarious workers who may move from one job to the next, any trade union seeking to organize requires extensive research and persistence as working class continuity is in a constant state of flux. A responsible trade union must not only respond to the demands of workers but also proactively advocate for the imposition of new laws and regulations governing employment status and wages and benefits. If a labor market is structured to operate with an irregular workforce where many workers do not plan to remain over the long term, trade unions must respond in a way which reflects this process and workers’ highly precarious material conditions. It is insufficient to conclude that workers are simply too difficult to organize. Instead, trade unions must understand: the trajectory of workers employed in a chaotic industry with high rates of turnover; the nature of the political economy; and the plans of workers to remain or exit a specific industry. Trade unions must also consider how workers can remain in the labor market and transcend conditions of precarity. If labor turnover is high, unions must develop conditions which improve job security, the labor process and education so that workers can survive and prosper in an emerging labor market which is in high demand. Technology should not translate into precarity.

The interviews with workers reflect these significant factors and must not be separated from the underlying nature of a class conscious trade union organization, an understanding of a nascent industry and the most pivotal concern: what the principal contradictions are confronting workers. Thus, the interviews are intended to help understanding of these underlying factors and the relationship of workers to unions and of the tactics and strategy the ACFTU uses alongside socialism with Chinese characteristics.

==== 6.2. Worker Engagement with Unions ====
The interviews demonstrated that most workers who do not intend to remain in their industries were less likely to engage in the activities of their trade unions. Unskilled workers are primarily focused on wages, working conditions and benefits and depend on trade unions to negotiate and ensure that employers respect and honor agreements and abide by applicable Chinese labor laws. Participation in trade unions typically occurs when workers seek resolution of grievances over pay, working conditions and benefits. Commonly, worker participation in their trade unions occurs only after they have grievances. Otherwise, in industries with transient workers who do not plan on remaining over the long term, laborers are highly capable of addressing and amicably resolving disputes with management. If workers have individual or collective complaints which cannot be settled with employers, they are highly aware that disputes can be taken to their trade unions, which in turn commonly settle grievances directly with employers. If unions are unable to reconcile disputes with management, China maintains a significant network of administrative labor courts to address worker concerns. A frequent problem is that workers do not have direct contracts with management, an issue which has increased with the expansion of the private sector.

==== 6.3. National Union Density Signifies Working Class Capacity ====
In China, most workers are directly employed by firms and represented by labor unions which can be summoned to resolve disputes. The combination of direct employment and union representation is a distinctive feature of China, not found in most other countries. Workers count on ACFTU affiliates to access additional benefits or, in the event of unresolvable disputes, to respond to their call for assistance. It is noteworthy that China is both the second largest economy in the world and has the highest trade union density rate among all countries except Iceland.^4 As the largest economy in the world, it is notable that China has the highest trade union density rate among countries with populations of 1 million or more, exhibited by the share of workers who are trade union members. In sharp contrast, trade union density rates in advanced capitalist countries are significantly lower among private sector workers.

^4 One of the smallest countries in the world, Iceland has a population of 300,000 and a 90 percent trade union density rate.

In non-socialist states, workers are usually afraid to express concerns over employer breaches of pay rates, working conditions and benefits (in stark contrast to Chinese workers, who recognize their labor rights). But, where workers have significant individual or collective grievances, in most instances, no trade unions exist to represent them. Rarely, if ever, do workers file legal complaints against their employers in labor courts. In most instances, workers are unaware of their rights as workers and of the procedures to file labor complaints which are adjudicated in labor courts. The interviews show that workers in China are not compelled to learn the complex intricacies of labor law but can take their unresolved grievances with management to trade unions. One interviewer reflected that, because employers are aware of the labor law and consistently abide by their obligations and because Chinese unions are ubiquitous, workers, whether members or not, do not relentlessly oppose management but instead seek out means to improve careers or their jobs. One interviewer concluded that the most significant issue for workers is career development and employment continuity:<blockquote>Most workers prioritize their own career development, income stability, and the possibility of obtaining better working conditions within the company. Their interest in unions is often limited to understanding whether they can access certain additional benefits or dispute resolution mechanisms. (Yi 2025)</blockquote>A significant finding is that older workers have greater knowledge of their rights and the benefits of trade unions than younger workers who are entering the labor market for the first time or have only recently begun to work. Yet, young workers are highly conscious of their rights even if they are unaware of the significant role which the ACFTU and its affiliates play in enforcing wage rates. An essential finding emerging from the research is that the ACFTU and its affiliates have not sufficiently publicized their instrumental role in defending workers’ wages and rights. Even Wang Dongming, chair of the ACFTU, has underscored the shortage of publicity of the work of the trade union federation.<blockquote>We must improve and perfect the systems and mechanisms for engaging with workers and the general public …. We must continuously improve the skills and level of cadres, especially young cadres, in engaging with the masses. We must strengthen investigation and research, conduct the Ninth National Survey on the Status of the Workforce in a thorough manner, leverage the role of trade union think tanks, assess the facts and implement practical measures. (Wang 2022)</blockquote>Thus, the trade union federation’s independent research shows the requirement of encouraging a “welcoming, studying, publicizing and implementing” ACFTU as a means to develop cadres among the young to educate the masses of the present and future. Dongming stresses: “We must continuously improve the skills and level of cadres, especially young cadres, in engaging with the masses” (2022).

==== 6.4. ACFTU: Catching up with the Private Sector to Expand Formal Labor Contracts ====
The vast expansion of China’s urban labor force over the past 40 years has presented the ACFTU with daunting challenges to absorb hundreds of millions of workers. These expose the necessity of enhancing direct contact with workers in order to support establishment of direct labor–management contracts which would lead to higher benefits among an array of private sector firms. In the past decade, the substantial expansion of the NFE has diminished the share of workers who lack labor contracts with private firms and amplified trade union recognition of the enormous task of regularizing workers as formal employees. In the absence of formal labor–management contracts, workers are unable to avail themselves of social insurance, housing provident funds and pensions. The interviews illustrate that expanding union membership must also involve private sector employers establishing direct employer–management relationships with their workers, a task which a growing number of large firms (e.g. JD.com/Meituan/Ele.Me) recognize and now address. However, the ACFTU must expand its effort to focus on small private sector firms to establish contractual relationships with their workers, who are often left behind. Yet again, rapid economic change opens new tasks for the ACFTU.

==== 6.5. Footloose Labor and ACFTU Representations ====
Transformation of the Chinese political economy through the rise of floating laborers is expanding footloose labor in the burgeoning urban centers and poses new challenges for the mobilization of workers who seek improved conditions. To achieve this objective, the ACFTU must expand its presence through local district and street level unions to facilitate working class subjective interests. It creates agency through cultivating working class activism and directly safeguarding laborers’ interests as they seek a greater voice at work. In many cases, this objective also requires educating inexperienced employers who are unfamiliar with Chinese labor law to protect workers through timely payment of wages and provision of occupational safety measures. Most laborers with direct employer contracts are informed of their rights on the job. Yet, as the share of employers with fewer workers grows, the ACFTU is obliged to expand its representation, especially in third and fourth tier cities with nascent and expanding economies. Most workers entering these labor markets are cognizant of the ACFTU and its charge of expanding their interests through representation. Certainly, some workers are unable or unaware of their right to form unions straightaway as employers in new businesses have not established labor contracts with workers. Once a sufficient cohort of workers employed at a single employer appears, laborers can then petition the local branches of the ACFTU for membership. But some workers undoubtedly fall through the cracks. In the interviews, we found that those workers who could not form unions were working independently without direct contracts, typically among workers in the digital economy. Branch union ACFTU representatives are attentive to the necessity to catch up in restructured labor markets in China’s urban centers. The requirement to continuously recognize and identify working conditions in these new labor markets represents a significant task in a socialist state where the ACFTU is responsible for representing and protecting all workers.

Concurrently, the ACFTU’s challenge has been to respond to regional, national and global crises over the past 15 years; examples include the Great Financial Recession in 2008 and the ensuing economic downturn of the global capitalist economy and the COVID-19 pandemic which began in 2019. More recently, the ACFTU has had to contend with the economic gyrations set in motion by the US government’s chaotic tariff policies under Donald Trump in 2025. Consequently, workers have an array of experiences, and the ACFTU must reflect the roiling demands which workers confront. As such, the ACFTU is expanding its presence as China urbanizes.

==== 6.6. China’s Precarious Workers and ACFTU Trade Unions ====
Although the floating population of internal Chinese migrant workers frequently lacks job security equivalent to that of urban workers, the interviews revealed that employers did not violate wage laws even for workers without direct employment contracts. Among this cohort, the interviews suggest that most young workers employed in precarious jobs and the digital economy were seeking to improve their employment skills and job qualifications in preparation for their future careers. Still, the ACFTU was defending their economic interests in low wage jobs. Concomitantly, the workers also considered membership in the ACFTU as a means to higher wages and benefits without recognizing that the trade union federation was also defending or seeking to defend their wages, benefits and security as they were employed in lower waged jobs.

The interviews corroborate research on the extensive expansion of the digital economy in China and the challenges which workers face in gaining labor contracts and trade union representation. Clearly, those who seek utopian precision from Chinese unions eagerly critique the ACFTU without considering the necessity for it to research and organize workers. Moreover, in most cases, workers are mobilized into unions only after appealing to the ACFTU for assistance. But those who expect unionization as soon as workers join the industry are demanding the highest standard of effectiveness of the ACFTU, which can only respond to worker appeals and then afterwards plan organizing campaigns as it researches the industrial context. In fact, the ACFTU has been remarkably successful in unionizing, for example, digital workers. It has progressed in just a few short years to encourage national digital firms like JD.com and Ele.Me to directly employ workers and sign union recognition agreements with guarantees of living wages, occupational safety and benefits including social security. But, as the interviews demonstrate, where delivery drivers, couriers and cleaners often work for small and disparate firms, either directly, with third party labor dispatch agencies, or in the absence of a labor contract, the ACFTU must continuously mobilize, especially among floating workers employed in third and fourth tier cities in Sichuan and Guangdong provinces.

The ACFTU must assess and develop strategies for mobilizing workers and negotiating with management to raise wages and improve working conditions and benefits. Certainly, it is a formidable task to mobilize workers employed by different digital companies all at once. But, as the industry consolidates into major ride hailing, delivery and courier firms, the ACFTU is steadily improving working conditions and demanding employers pay social insurance. Still, a not insignificant share of digital workers do not plan on remaining in the industry but view their jobs as expedient temporary stopgaps as they gain new skills. One interviewer found that among the migrant workers interviewed, all regarded their jobs as temporary or as a means of increasing their income given the flexible working hours in the industry.

Most workers strived to gain employment contracts and trade union representation. However, the interviews demonstrate that expanded labor education is important in widening worker rights and trade union representation. Workers were cognizant of the advantages of joining unions. Unlike workers in capitalist countries, they were particularly supportive of the ACFTU and its affiliates as their representatives and did not want private union representation. One male worker adamantly opposed the Western model of private trade unions, asserting that he did not trust unions established by non-official organizations precisely because ACFTU government-run unions would be far more effective in resolving labor disputes. In particular, the worker said that the ACFTU was effective because the state was trustworthy and would not succumb to the risks of corruption or personal connections with employers, allowing workers to gain concrete benefits. Nonetheless, even in a socialist country with the world’s highest trade union density rate, too many workers were not aware of their rights., too few workers were aware they had the right to join unions and that employers were prohibited from discriminating against activists. As Chapter 7 will demonstrate, workers employed in China’s nascent digital labor-market economy successfully joined unions while digital workers in capitalist countries were prevented from doing so. As noted in Chapter 5, the International Labor Organization acknowledges that China stands alone in succeeding in regularizing and mobilizing the logistical (NFE) labor market into unions. By contrast, mobilization of these workers in the new economy was nil in every capitalist economy even if workers tried to form unions. In North America and Western Europe, NFE workers identify as being exploited, with no rights and little hope of joining any official union even if they are members of workers’ associations (which are no more than advocacy groups). For example, Uber, the leading digital company in the US, does not recognize its drivers as workers or even contractors but as private businesses with access to the Uber app. Even though drivers for Uber are required to conform to the technology company’s rules, and their performance is rated by customers (with determining algorithms which reward and punish them as individuals), they are deemed to be independent businesses, not workers. Workers in the US have no union which can represent them vis-à-vis digital technology firms and in rare instances pay dues to membership organizations which have no legal right to provide representation. The rapid increase in the number of delivery workers in the 2020s has not yielded a single representative union in the US. Likewise in Western Europe, workers sometimes form associations to share experiences, but no representative organization. Still, worker advocates pay tribute to these organizations as symbols of hope, especially because they are independent unions which emphasize individuals over class. In fact, these are nothing more than associations to share common despair. Independent and autonomous unions are extolled precisely because they have no official representatives and exemplify bottom-up unions. But if workers have legal claims, these workers typically have no representatives, and their complaints are not heard at labor courts as they are not considered employees (Però & Downey 2024; Vandaele 2020). It is puzzling that as Uber expands its power over the digital labor market, workers have no recourse but to join advocacy organizations to which they must pay dues. Some of these “unions” are even members of the US peak trade union federation AFL-CIO (e.g. Taxi Workers United), even if they have no collective bargaining agreement in the ride hailing industry. The dynamics of precarity are growing in the global North and South (Johnston & Pernicka 2021; Mathew 2005; Yasih 2025). Unions in the US have no right to enforce labor laws through the National Labor Relations Board even if these indie unions can go to court to assist drivers charged with motor vehicle violations. In New York City, the law was changed in 2025 to charge delivery workers on bicycles or motorized bicycles for violating traffic rules, like running red lights. These charges have enabled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest and deport undocumented workers (Maag 2025).

==== 6.7. State-Owned Companies ====
The interviews make clear the distinctions between SOEs and private sector firms. Workers in SOEs tend to remain employed in their firms over the long term while those in private enterprises often pass from one job to another higher paying one. Some workers employed for private enterprises are transient laborers and only intend to hold their jobs temporarily. They are therefore not inclined to join unions but recognize their value in defending them while they secure higher paying jobs or are in training for higher skilled jobs. These workers may also include floating migrant workers, recent high school or college graduates, and those previously made unemployed because of technological change and declining demand. Western scholars tend to falsely conflate short term workers’ disengagement with indifference when workers are traversing from short term employment to permanent jobs which better match their education, training and work preferences. Nevertheless, the ACFTU and its sectoral, geographic and enterprise unions remain committed to mobilizing low wage workers as well as those who do not have contracts with firms. If workers are performing the same tasks for a subcontractor, workers seek to gain official contracts with the lead enterprise and unionize into provincial, district and street level unions which represent them in specific industries. Ride hailing is a case in point. As digital firms search for reliable and skilled delivery workers, competition is growing and wages, conditions and benefits are improving. For example, the leading corporations in the Chinese digital economy are shifting from using workers hired through third party contractors to directly employing workers and are cooperative with ACFTU trade union representation. In 2025, labor shortages have spurred delivery courier JD.com to reclassify workers from being independent contractors to full time couriers who are provided with high wages, social security, housing funds and insurance. In turn, JD.com’s competitors Meituan and Ele.me have been forced to directly employ drivers, increase wages, improve labor standards and provide social insurance to compete for workers. The ACFTU and its district union affiliates have mobilized workers and employers to codify labor standards in the delivery industry, including medical, unemployment, injury and maternity insurance cover and even a providence fund for housing (Lu 2024; Quinn 2025; Yang, C. 2025). By contrast, most trade unions outside China, including those in Western Europe and North America, have a distant relationship with digital logistics workers in the e-commerce sector, who are viewed as a potential nuisance and interloper and best sustained by labor NGOs. In the best instances, trade unions and NGOs function as watchdogs over industries they cannot organize (Ford & Gillan 2025; Frantz & Fernandes 2018).

=== 7. Trade Unions under Chinese Market Socialism ===
To comprehend the Chinese labor movement and the role of the ACFTU, it is essential to grasp the nature of trade unions under socialism. Almost all detractors employ Western benchmarks of trade unionism as metrics, which distort the charge, nature and function of the ACFTU and its affiliates. If one utilizes historical and contemporary analogues drawn from the apogee of trade unionism in Western Europe, North America and advanced capitalist countries, it is highly likely that the assumptions and judgments will be based on inaccurate and misleading inferential analogies with conclusions which are irrelevant to Chinese labor history and contemporary practice. Commonly, four critiques are advanced by self-described progressive and socialist opponents of the Chinese trade unions and its labor movement:

# Chinese trade unions reject independent trade union endeavors advanced through spontaneous activities which are unsanctioned by the ACFTU and CPC. Consequently, the ACFTU opposes industrial democracy, viewed as the embodiment of the most progressive unions.
# Industrial democracy is anathema to the CPC and prohibited if rank-and-file leaders in trade unions seek to act in what they perceive to be the interests of the workers. In this way, the ACFTU and the Chinese state have rejected on-the-job work actions in contemporary China, notably since the 1980s. Accordingly, critics contend that the ACFTU denies members the right to self-activity and job actions to protest wages and working conditions, including work stoppages and strikes, which are the most effective weapons of the working class. During the Cultural Revolution and prior to the opening up, Chinese workers possessed a far more advanced right to participate and determine production activities in the workplace. Under market socialism, as replaceable workers, the rights of Chinese workers have been significantly reduced (Andreas 2019; Li 2023).
# The ACFTU and the CPC forbid the formation of trade union political factions which are independent of the CPC and deprive workers the right to self-expression through advancing a partisan ideology or politics which deviates from the CPC versions. Promoters of independent politics think that Chinese workers seek to develop and expand anarchism, social democracy or even competing communist or socialist parties (Ruckus 2023) As a result, Chinese workers are limited to operating within the ACFTU and may not develop an independent oppositional politics. This perspective is highly prevalent among NGOs which have formed after the 1980s, notably the now defunct China Labor Bulletin which developed and expanded with the support of foreign government funding (notably USAID, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)). Hong Kong and Taiwan-based bodies promoting US and Western notions of regime change could not operate without foreign funding. According to the former CIA agent and best-selling author William Blum, “The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.” This is an assessment shared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2024).
# A final critique advanced by political organizations which consider themselves “non-revisionist” is that China was a socialist state under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong from 1949 through 1976 and reached the apogee of communism during the Cultural Revolution, or what they call the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” They contend that after Mao’s death, China and the CPC betrayed the Maoist socialist project through the opening up and the development of a socialist market economy. Under the leadership of the CPC, the ACFTU also abandoned the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Paradoxically, this perspective is advanced by ultra-left political parties and scholars who are devoted to Mao yet consider the market reforms a kind of capitalism in the service of the Chinese bureaucratic state which emerged in 1978.

The introduction of the socialist market economy in 1979 with the formation of four state-supported Special Enterprise Zones (SEZs) is viewed by opponents as a wholesale abandonment of the socialist ideals of the Chinese Revolution and as elements of an ineluctable transformation towards a state capitalist economy. That the Chinese state and the CPC had ultimate control over SEZs is a reality which is rarely acknowledged or considered in the context of socialist political economy and the necessity of market development as a catalyst in China’s economic development, considered by CPC leaders as the principal contradiction. In the absence of development, the Chinese economy could not emerge as a socialist market economy. This notwithstanding, in the absence of a historical material analysis, Marxist ultra-leftists who viewed Chinese socialism as socialism under Maoism and unchanging rejected economic development under a socialist state which did not perfectly conform to their utopian ideals. For utopian socialists, or non-revisionist Maoists, Chinese socialism was to remain motionless in perpetuity. Most critics, chiefly among Western Marxists, did consider that the Chinese socialist state sought to develop its economy and improve living conditions, a dynamic advanced under Mao from 1949 to 1976. Ultra-left critics do not account for the continuous transformation required under socialism in China which began in 1949 and continues to the present. Political economist Tiejun Wen (2021) suggests that China has undergone a succession of economic crises from 1949 to now. In each historical conjuncture, the Chinese socialist state was compelled to adapt to the principal contradictions which the state confronted. Wen acknowledges that the transformation from 1978 to about 2002 represented an era of economic hardship for the Chinese rural working classes, just as the state encountered economic challenges under Mao. In ''Ten Crises'', Wen posits that the socialist state returned to what he calls “pro people” policies from 2003 and then had to confront the global financial recession and attend to the distortions occurring under the first 25 years of market socialism. The state definitively began to adopt socialist policies under Xi Jinping, who has presided over the amplified socialization of the economy and the recognition of the ecological threat which global capitalism posed for China and the world from 2015 to the present (Wen 2021). Rather than considering socialism as an unbending dogma, the CPC responded to the changes in the political economy which the state has confronted since its origin in 1949 to the present.

=== 8. How Do Trade Unions Form in Capitalist Countries? ===
To understand Chinese trade unions, one must comprehend prevailing trade unions in capitalist states, notably national trade union affiliates of the dominant International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Standard Western Labor research considers the Western labor–management trade union model which emerged in North America and Western Europe in the early 20th century, founded on employer dominance over the workplace, as the touchstone business model by which all workers resist through class struggle. The working class emerges victorious when employers succumb to the mobilization campaign directed by professional staff organizers and employers surrender to unionization of their firm. In the mid-20th century, employers under pressure from collective action by workers bargained with union representatives to achieve collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) with management governing wages, conditions and benefits.

Commonly, workers’ movements spurring the formation of industrial unions dissipate once elites in workers’ organizations gain control and curb the aspirations of the dispossessed seeking power. Piven and Cloward fault leaders for the failure to maintain militancy and for the ultimate demise of the organizations which originally formed as a result of disruptive insurgencies. “When the tumult is over, these organizations usually fade, no longer useful to those who provided the resources necessary to their survival” (Piven & Cloward 1979, xx). The view that workers and “poor-people” can only advance their interests when they maintain disruptive power reveals the weakness of working class organizational forms and the basis/explanation for their failure to maintain durable and effective power. In bourgeois liberal democracy, working class organizations are typically controlled by elites, a decisive factor in their failure to maintain continuity. Additionally, the organizations are formed under the framework of a capitalist economy.

Consequently, in the capitalist West, working class organizations acquiesced to class compromises which superficially protected them from the arbitrary repression and despotism of employers which constituted standard practice. Even non-union firms were persuaded to improve labor standards in response to mass organizing from the 1930s through 1970s, when the New Deal labor accords in the US began to disappear. Other models, which circumscribe the activities of employers through state policy and enforce labor rights through trade unions and labor courts, providing irrefutable power to labor, are not considered to be trade unions. For Western scholars of Labor Studies, the subordination of labor in every realm of the workplace is the archetype of the trade union. If employers in the West violate agreements or discriminate against workers, trade unions may file grievances, which typically fail through arbitration and are rarely taken to the courts. In the West, filing and adjudicating legal disputes are lengthy and drawn-out processes, and most dismissed workers must find new jobs out of economic necessity before a grievance is decided in court (Baichuan 2019).

= The ACFTU and the Consolidation of China’s Socialist Economy =
<blockquote>The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. … I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. (Albert Einstein, 1949)</blockquote>

=== 1. Why a Book on the Chinese Labor Movement? ===
The most prevalent accounts of China and its labor movement by Westerners are motivated by adversarial perceptions which mislead and manipulate readers with complex and challenging dynamics, seemingly unending changes in material conditions and realities, human experiences and institutional practices.

This book does not attribute motivations for conclusive yet often false narratives and analyses by Labor Studies scholars. However, popular accounts, descriptions and histories inform human cognition, perception and action, which in turn guide labor conditions and trade union activity. So, rather than presenting a familiar interpretation which confirms established opinions among Western readers without contesting them, here I strive to understand China’s labor institutions relative to the goals and objectives of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and the Communist Party of China (CPC). I assert that the party, trade union federation and thousands of constituent unions operate with unalloyed commitment to advancing the socioeconomic interests of China’s working class.

In 1978, China’s leaders endeavored to develop a plan to dramatically improve the standard of living for the country’s working class. The policy, known as “the opening up,” gave rise to the emergence of market socialism, setting into motion a planned industrial economy. In this book, I have attempted to distinguish honest from misleading criticism. Certainly, the transfer of hundreds of millions of workers from the countryside to urban areas has led to transitory disruption, as Robert Weil highlighted in 1996 when he observed that China’s peasantry had endured a period of social dislocation and adversity. Regrettably, Weil, who directed most of his wrath against US imperialism, did not live to see the noteworthy achievements of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the determination of its leaders to improve the conditions of its working class (Weil 1996). Indeed, market socialism eventually tackled the principal contradiction of solving poverty and delivering a high standard of living and modernizing the economy, a challenge which the PRC encountered from its origins (Wen 2021).

The opening up set off investment in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and overall efforts to make state owned enterprises more efficient. Most significantly, technological investment in the means of production has resulted in the migration of rural workers to urban areas to work in China’s burgeoning industrial economy.

Today, the CPC is committed to integrating migrant workers into the mainstream of the working class. In October 2024, the party accentuated its importance in an official opinion:<blockquote>Cultivate migrant workers into high-quality modern industrial workers. Focusing on industrial transformation and upgrading, strengthen skills training for migrant workers and widely implement the “Study and Dream” program. Promote the integration of migrant workers into cities, further relax and expand urban settlement policies, and ensure equal access to basic urban public services for migrant workers. Increase public legal services to benefit migrant workers, protect their legitimate rights and interests, and promote stable employment. (Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the PRC 2024)</blockquote>All forms of mobility have material and social consequences for both origin regions and destinations. China’s internal migration from rural to urban areas is far and away the largest distinct population shift in human history. As such, urbanization has had ongoing impacts for the capacity of the ACFTU to respond to the reconstitution of labor markets from agrarian to urban, and then from industrial to new forms of employment among logistics and digital workers. Most opponents of China from left to right share a common view that the ACFTU is ineffective because it is affiliated with the CPC, but this view is based on specific moments when the Federation was researching and mobilizing to respond to labor market changes. The demographic shift which has refashioned China’s labor market is monumental. In 1980, about 90 percent of China’s population of nearly 1 billion lived in rural regions. Today, China’s 956 million urban dwellers compose 67.5 percent of China’s population, but the population of the country’s rural areas still constitutes nearly 500 million.

Alone, China’s rural inhabitants would form the third largest country in the world. Rural land represents China’s safety net as it is all owned by the state, as is urban land. While all change is arduous and demanding, nearly 50 years after the institution of market socialism, every Chinese citizen continues to be entitled to return to rural areas and farm the land for sustenance. As Xinyu Lu of East China Normal University claims, China’s collective economy and socialism with Chinese characteristics preserve the rights of the working class:<blockquote>Collective land ownership in rural China differs from the land tenure systems in socialist countries like the Soviet Union, which is why it may have played a crucial role in determining the success of “Chinese-style modernization.” The nationalization of urban land and the collectivization of rural land form the foundation of the Chinese worker–peasant alliance. When viewed through a Marxist lens, the urban–rural dichotomy is considered an inevitable outcome of capitalist development and a challenge commonly faced by Global South countries during their developmental processes. (Lu 2024, 298)</blockquote>In the context of the resiliency of Chinese socialism within a market economy, Western Labor scholars would do well to absorb the significance of Tiejun Wen’s instructive lesson that economic development cannot be solved instantly by governments but necessitates study and the passage of time to effectively respond to challenges. Only utopians and non-revisionist thinkers who do not consider dialectical materialism accept as true that revolution will lead straightaway to communism.

=== 2. The CPC and ACFTU Guide Economic Development and Shield the Working Class ===
Despite the formidable challenges to economic development faced by China under market socialism, Western Labor scholars remain captives to the ideology of immediate unmediated outcomes in the absence of agency or institutions. Most do not take into account the significance of organizations for achieving economic development at the same time as improving wages and conditions for China’s working class. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not evaluated in comparison to analogous challenges for capitalist states, which typically have not considered the interests of workers. Paradoxically the weakness of organizations and institutions in the West is a fixation and commodification of superficial individualism, turmoil, the spectacle and autonomy in the absence of a genuine capacity to sustain and codify success.

Lacking accountable political parties which diligently advance the interests of the working class, Labor Studies researchers in the West take solace in fleeting events of the past as trophies rather than in practical work of today which is planned methodically to survive the test of time. Western Labor research about working class institutional formations in China and the South is frequently condescending and maintains a perspective rooted in social imperialism. Economic planning under market socialism and the formation of labor organizations suitable to the political economy of China do not conform to Western archetypes; instead, they are ridiculed and dismissed as incompatible with authentic models which emerged in Western Europe and North America. However, as this book shows, Labor research in the West does not consider the reality that Chinese trade unionism emerged and affiliated with the CPC at the same time as Western industrial models in the 1920s.

Consequently, Western Labor research about the PRC and the ACFTU has been nearly universally negative. One is extremely hard pressed to find even a single article published over the last 40 years or so which provides an accurate portrait of the ACFTU and its prodigious accomplishments. Opponents engage in deductive reasoning to convey the ideal political system for trade unions as liberal-bourgeois democracy operating within an economy integrated into the world capitalist system. This incongruous perspective fails to consider material conditions in the natural world. In China’s case, the shift from a rural working class to a predominantly urban working class. Yet, Western Labor scholarship which criticizes China is silent on the relentless decline of trade union membership in the West to near irrelevancy, government crackdowns on public sector trade unions, court decisions narrowing the ability of trade unions to grow strong, the absence of democracy in Western-style trade unions and the rise of right wing populism among the working class: characteristics of institutional decay. Predictably, Western Labor scholars do not consider trade union growth as an indicator of success, since it implies (in their view) that workers are forced to join trade unions. On the contrary, compulsory membership is an objective of Western trade unions which seek closed shops and funding from member dues. As noted, the ACFTU and its affiliates have never aspired to require workers to join unions to receive equivalent wages and benefits.

=== 3. Socialism, Trade Unionism and Industrial Policy ===
This book also has argued that the successful development of socialism in one state requires the coordination of the communist party and trade unions to grow and meet the needs of the working classes. Even if a communist party gains power, the state must guide economic development in urban and rural regions. In the two most prominent cases, the Soviet Union and the PRC, the state, under the party’s leadership, formulated socialist economic planning to advance the capacity to serve the working classes. In times of crisis, the communist parties in both countries were obligated to deviate from the course which some left opponents consider sacrosanct: the preservation and development of markets under the overarching leadership of the party. Under such conditions, the function of trade unions is to represent and advance the interests of the working class charted by the Communist Party and adhere to the principles of the dictatorship of the proletariat. V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong both formulate a similar approach to the organization of trade unions under socialism.

To diminish the possibility of a bourgeois restoration, trade unions are required to overpower petty bourgeois influences in the trade unions. For Lenin, the primary threat to the party emerged from Socialist-Revolutionary Mensheviks and anarchists, viewed as bourgeois forces and the fount of opposition to socialism.<blockquote>Only among these trends has any considerable number of people remained who defend capitalism ideologically and not from selfish class motives and continue to believe in the non-class nature of the “democracy,” “equality,” and “liberty” in general that they preach. It is to this socioeconomic cause and not to the role of individual groups, still less of individual persons, that we must attribute the survivals (sometimes even the revival) in our country of such petty-bourgeois ideas among the trade unions. The Communist Party, the Soviet bodies that conduct cultural and educational activities and all Communist members of trade unions must therefore devote far more attention to the ideological struggle against petty-bourgeois influences, trends and deviations among the trade unions, especially because the New Economic Policy is bound to lead to a certain strengthening of capitalism. It is urgently necessary to counteract this by intensifying the struggle against petty-bourgeois influences upon the working class (Lenin 1922/1973, 195–196).</blockquote>The requirement for economic development in China was advanced by Chairman Mao Zedong in February 1948 as a decisive requirement in building socialism and economic development through advancing the productive forces. Mao considered urban trade unions duty bound to join forces with industrialists. In his directive on industry and commerce, the significance of industrial development was paramount:<blockquote>A sharp distinction should also be made between the correct policy of developing production, promoting economic prosperity, giving consideration to both public and private interests and benefiting both labour and capital, and the one-sided and narrow-minded policy of “relief”, which purports to uphold the workers’ welfare but in fact damages industry and commerce and impairs the cause of the people’s revolution. Education should be conducted among comrades in the trade unions and among the masses of workers to enable them to understand that they should not see merely the immediate and partial interests of the working class while forgetting its broad, long-range interests. (Mao Tse-Tung/Mao Zedong 1977/2021, 199)</blockquote>CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 2025 address to the ACFTU on its 100th anniversary validates Mao Zedong’s 1948 directive, which had been pursued continuously by the CPC and produced concrete results for the Chinese working class over more than 75 years of unwavering struggle to realize economic modernization:<blockquote>One hundred years ago, at the closing of the Second National Labour Conference, the slogan “struggle, struggle, struggle to the end” resounded throughout the venue, inspiring millions of labourers to persevere and forge ahead during the turbulent revolutionary years. Today, the Party leads over 1.4 billion people who are advancing with high spirits on the new journey of Chinese-style modernization. The times are different, missions and tasks have changed, but the spirit of arduous struggle, united struggle, and unremitting struggle will never change. Let us unite more closely around the Party Central Committee, work solidly with our feet on the ground, strive to forge ahead, struggle and dedicate ourselves, embrace the new era with creativity, forge new glory through struggle, and turn the grand blueprint of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation into reality one step at a time! (Xi 2025)</blockquote>To restate a central argument of this book, striving for economic modernization under socialism compels all government institutions to be dedicated to a common mission, which takes time and effort to achieve. Economic modernization is normally accompanied by social dislocation, as Weil makes clear. But it is irrational to expect instantaneous outcomes. Torkil Lauesen reminds us that socialist economic development is gradual and methodical and is accompanied by challenges from internal and external forces (Lauesen 2024). Just as spontaneity must be consolidated to empower the working class, economic planning is not the equivalent of realizing economic development and the improvement of living conditions for workers and peasants.

=== 4. Western Labor Studies and Social Imperialism ===
Research on historical materialism and the natural world is not composed of absolutes, conclusions or the end times. Historical materialism is implanted in dialectical conflict among imperfect human beings with impurities, gradients and asynchronous predispositions. Purity and “non-revisionism” can only exist in the subjective mind: equating principles which are ethereal within nature is intolerable.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way that genuine evidence casting the ACFTU’s achievements in a good light is unsuitable to Western Labor scholars, creating a catch-22. Both the presence and the absence of actions are always undesirable. Verifiable findings which may reveal positive attributes about the ACFTU are ensnared through incontestable truths and subjected to ad hominem attacks impugning its integrity. The occurrence or absence of labor disputes is an example of this deductive reasoning which only leads to no-win double binds. For example:

# In times of labor tranquility and the absence of strike activity, critics argue: The decline in strike activity in China can only be explained by the authoritarian character of the CPC and the ACFTU. The decline in strikes and the absence of mass labor disruption reveal the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state.
# In times of labor conflict sparked by the ACFTU and elevated labor demands, critics argue: The rise of strikes in China suggests that the working class is opposed to the communist ACFTU as a representative of its interests. Growing labor conflict is an indicator that trade unions are unresponsive to workers.

Accordingly, regardless of whether or not the ACFTU initiates organizing campaigns, they can never contribute to the benefit of workers.

Most Western Labor scholars do not account for the fact that unions are organized spatially and the ACFTU represents workers in millions of labor disputes every year through labor courts which typically decide swiftly. More than 95 percent of all cases are decided on behalf of workers, who are almost always accompanied by ACFTU representatives. Collectively, Western Labor scholars agree to cast China unfavorably. Most have a reflexive reaction to the CPC and ACFTU as authoritarian and repressive, or what they call “the party-state.” All scholarship deriving from within the PRC is viewed with distrust. In many instances, the very concept of the working class is downplayed, and individual action is elevated.

As demonstrated in this book, Western Labor Studies is in many ways authoritarian. Irrespective of empirical research which shows the effectiveness of the ACFTU in organizing and representing workers, the conclusions must find fault in China’s trade unions or conclude with hyperbolic ad hominem attacks against the ACFTU. Increasingly, Labor Studies assessments of China rely on NGO accounts and interpretations of organizations, practices, and events over those which evenhandedly and honestly evaluate the history, facts and data, which may not conform to the anti-China dogma. Many NGOs are funded by corporate foundations, via the US State Department through the National Endowment for Democracy and, up until 2025, the United States Agency for International Development.

=== 5. Actual Labor Disputes in China ===
A litany of books and academic articles has been published on low wages and poor working conditions in foreign subcontractors operating in China; for example, Foxconn Technology and Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings, subcontractors for multinational electronics and athletic footwear, both headquartered in Taiwan. In the aftermath of several disputes in Shenzhen, notably suicides by Foxconn workers in 2010, the ACFTU organized workers to form an enterprise level trade union with democratically elected leaders. Likewise, the ACFTU stepped in and resolved the pension dispute at Yue Yuen when workers went on strike. In each case, conditions dramatically improved as the ACFTU organized local enterprise trade unions. Subsequently, democratically elected enterprise unions negotiated significantly improved conditions for workers. But before a trade union can act, it must learn and develop strategies to combat multinational employers and their subcontractors in Taiwan.

Notwithstanding this, the literature wholly ignores the question of unequal exchange (Emmanuel 1972/2025), which is undoubtedly the most significant cause of low wages in the global South through the depreciation of the value of workers’ labor. While residents of the global North are beneficiaries of unequal exchange, the cost is shifted to those in poor countries. However, the CPC and the ACFTU counter this through increasing wages for workers producing high quality products in China. For example, in September 2023, Foxconn, the contractor for Huawei and Apple, hiked wages for workers and in turn the cost of mobile phones. The subcontractors for both Apple and Huawei’s increased wages to ¥8,500–¥9,000 in 2023, or US$1,200 to US$1,300 a month. ACFTU organizing is increasing wages for workers along with competition for labor among subcontractors. Western consumers accustomed to low cost smartphones and technology are now paying more for their electronic products (Global Times 2023).

According to Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, wage growth among Chinese workers and attendant higher cost products are a threat to multinational corporate profits in the US. The dramatic growth in wages is reducing wage disparities between China and the US, which have been the basis for unequal exchange and superexploitation. In August 2025, Hickel and Sullivan assessed that Chinese labor costs have risen to $8 per hour. “Capitalists in the core states are now desperate to do something to restore their access to cheap labour and resources. One option—increasingly promoted by the Western business press—is to relocate industrial production to other parts of Asia where wages are cheaper” (Hickel & Sullivan 2025).

=== 6. Towards an Accurate and Reliable Evaluation of the Chinese Labor Movement ===
Most assumptions about and opinions on Chinese trade unions are formed in advance of obtaining proof, and, on occasion, entirely in the absence of evidence. Accurate assessments are not formulated on the basis of claims based on partial truths but on “realities” which are unable to be disproven. According to such confirmation bias, interpretations are only acceptable if they verify opinions. Inferences which contradict conclusions are dross which must be discarded as they challenge deductive truths. Accordingly, incontrovertible truths are advanced by adversaries of the PRC. Those who object or even contest the established tenets advanced by such hegemonic certainties are deemed to be heretics and offenders who must be isolated and purged.

To recapitulate, this concluding chapter summarizes the primary claims based on research in the foregoing chapters. Above all, the main thrust has been to understand the ACFTU on the basis of its goals and objectives, not those of Western bourgeois standards. Additionally, the ACFTU is the most salient example of holistic unionism unifying worker democracy with trade union accountability. The CPC plainly calls for workers’ democracy in trade unions. In a recent statement, the PRC underscored its commitment to democratic trade unionism:<blockquote>Improve the democratic management system of enterprises. Improve the democratic management system of enterprises and institutions, with workers’ congresses as the primary form. Major matters affecting the vital interests of industrial workers must be reviewed and approved by the workers’ congresses in accordance with the law and the charter. Uphold and improve the system of employee directors and employee supervisors, deepen factory transparency, and actively utilize digital technology to provide more precise and convenient services for industrial workers’ democratic participation. (Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the PRC 2024)</blockquote>Western Labor scholars pervasively oppose the Chinese model rooted in a party–union alliance, even as it has proven effective in representing workers and improving their quality of life. The Chinese trade union model rejects the spontaneous and anarchic unionism which is gaining influence among labor analysts and is frequently found in the West in response to declining trade union density and government and corporate efforts to undermine working class power. The success of holistic socialist trade unionism under market socialism suggests that the CPC–trade union model is appropriate for countries on the periphery in search of balanced development. In coordination with the International Labour Organization, the ACFTU is assisting trade unions in Asia and the Pacific to foster trade union growth and building working class organizational power in contrast to the ineffective prototypes advocated by the International Trade Union Confederation, centered on economism and the subordination of labor to capital (ITUC 2025).

As more Western Labor Studies literature repudiates its own models of trade unions, and others contemplate syndicalist unions deprived of power, the Chinese socialist model offers a realistic and constructive alternative for the reconstitution of socialist party-trade unionism throughout the global South. At present, a growing number of unions are seeking to build socialist alliances: for instance, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). However, in the absence of a strong and resilient vanguard party dedicated to advancing workers’ long term class interests, even strong trade unions like NUMSA are limited in their capacity to develop socialism. Nor can they compel governments to invest in necessary technology to stimulate sustained socialist development. Socialist unions like NUMSA in capitalist states like South Africa are thwarted and vulnerable to capitalist investments intended to extract surplus value from their members. Consequently, it is necessary for a socialist vanguard party to lead a socialist trade union as the CPC, the ACFTU and its affiliates have done, where rank-and-file democracy is encouraged through state owned workers’ unions, enterprise unions and, at the grassroots, municipal and street level branches, with the support of the central federation.

=== 7. Party Affiliated Trade Unions ===
This book argues that the ACFTU is a working class organization comparable to other trade unions worldwide which affiliate with a political party to advance the interests of the working class. In May 1925, at the Second National Labor Congress in Guangzhou, 166 trade unions all over China convened to form the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, dedicated to fostering working class unity under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. At the outset, the ACFTU affiliated unions organized geographically to represent and advance the worker struggles erupting on a municipal level (China Workers’ Daily 2025). The formation of trade unions in China reflected the political experiences of workers. From the outset of trade unionism in the early 20th century, political struggle was not on the national level, a pattern which continues to the present. Ching Kwan Lee and critics of the ACFTU and CPC contend that the PRC prevents nationwide strikes, which are therefore cellular and inhibited by the state. However, China’s trade union structure and practice were always local, even before the Chinese Revolution and formation of the PRC (Lee 2007). Furthermore, this book contends that the aim of many trade union federations is to align with a party which seeks to advance the interests of the working class. In this manner, the ACFTU alliance with the CPC is analogous to the relationships between the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party in Britain, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) and the Social Democratic Party in Sweden, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party) in Brazil, and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) among several other trade union–party alliances in India.

The ACFTU–CPC alliance is distinctive as it has retained power for a century. Like other socialist and communist trade union federations, the ACFTU strives to represent the entire working class rather than segments of the working class based on ethnic or confessional identity. China’s ACFTU is a mass organization operating in the context of a socialist state. To comprehend the ACFTU, one must grasp how trade unions operate under socialism as opposed to capitalism. Just like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the CPC is designed to reflect the subjective interests of the working class and functions within the context of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Unquestionably, working classes reflect the natural world and dialectical materialism. Thus, the party and trade union must reflect the collective interests of a diverse and endlessly changing Chinese working class.

= Conclusion: All-China Federation of Trade Unions—the Transitional State and the Chinese Working Class =
<blockquote>Communism is not a state of affairs to be established, not an ideal to which reality must adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)</blockquote>In view of the extensive size of both domestic and foreign sectors of the economy and the presence of market forces in both, class conflict continues in China. However, remarkably, under the Communist Party, conflict does not take an antagonistic form, as in a society in which capital has supremacy. In a transitional state, the Communist Party can advance a socialist model through its political command over the economy. Through central planning, the PRC mediates this contradiction. Hence, the position of the Communist Party is that the current “principal contradiction” focuses on raising living standards of the Chinese people and addressing unbalanced and inadequate development.

=== 1. The Chinese Transitional State ===
The PRC Constitution establishes the elements of the transitional state as it strives toward socialism. In doing so, the Chinese transitional state must pivot to respond to the principal contradictions while also serving the working class as it develops a socialist mode of production. Concomitantly, China’s trade union model operates under the guidelines that Lenin and Mao specify—prioritizing the working class through the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). The Federation is duty bound to carry out the Communist Party’s directives and respond to the demands of the working class laboring in all sectors of the economy. The CPC Constitution directly recognizes that class contradictions remain in the PRC but in 2022 they are no longer the principal contradiction.

The Communist Party Constitution declares:<blockquote>owing to both domestic factors and international influences, a certain amount of class struggle will continue to exist for a long time to come, and under certain circumstances may even grow more pronounced, however, it is no longer the principal contradiction. (The State Council 2022)</blockquote>The Communist Party sets policy through adjusting the economic policy in accordance with changing domestic and global political economy. Transitional states have had to defend hard-won state power. On the other hand, it has been necessary to interact with the world capitalist system to develop their productive forces. Moreover, transitional states must endure and counter the challenges of a sequence of oppositional forces within the world capitalist system that form the principal contradictions, notably neoliberal capitalist globalization. Neoliberalism represented the fundamental adversary from the 1980s to the present, and the Chinese state and CPC were compelled to respond to global pressures to defend their development project. China, governed by a communist party, has remained relevant in a world system dominated by counter-revolutionary forces.

China’s economic accomplishments have been made possible through the alliance between the CPC and the working class. This book demonstrates that the ACFTU has been more decisive in advancing the conditions of the proletariat than other countries of the periphery with “free” trade unions imposed by the legacy of the imperialist core, forcing trade unions to abide by capitalist principles.

Chinese workers are dedicated members of their trade unions and the Communist Party without seeing this as an antagonistic relationship as both CPC and ACFTU complement one another to improve the conditions of the working class. The PRC transitional state permits government and non-public enterprises, and both political forces and market forces are developing the economy. To be sure, this presents complex choices and the CPC must make difficult decisions on the path forward. For example, the dilemma of how to use generated surplus: for immediate consumption or investments in production to generate future consumption. State-owned enterprises are under the direct or indirect control of the party. In SOEs, the Communist Party represents workers through the ACFTU and sets policy through managers. Undoubtedly, conflicts of interest can occur when workers are seeking to improve their conditions by appealing to an SOE’s management, which also includes representatives of the Communist Party. But the presence of the CPC also contains the likelihood of resolving conflict for the benefit of the security and progress of the transitional state.

Western anti-communist Labor research has constructed a false binary between the era of Mao Zedong and his successors. It neglects to take account of the significant challenges that China has confronted from its foundation as an undeveloped agrarian state in 1949 till now. In ''Ten Crises: The Political Economy of China’s Development (1949–2010)'', Tiejun Wen disputes this perspective and contends that, throughout its history, the Chinese state has encountered crises which have challenged the state–capital–worker relationship. According to Wen (2021), China’s economic crises have not been ideological or political but rooted in endogenous and exogenous factors which have no bearing on the socialist perspective of the CPC’s leadership. Rather, they were genuine contestations which have concretely appeared, and which state and party leaders were compelled to address.

=== 2. Western Critiques of the Chinese Labor Movement ===
The ACFTU is the largest national labor federation of unions in the world, which on the surface appears similar to other national trade union federations in structure, organization and form. The ACFTU is among the oldest labor organizations in the world, having been founded by communists more than a hundred years ago in the 1920s and subsequently outlawed by the Chinese Nationalist Government in 1927. When the CPC gained power in 1949, the ACFTU was reestablished as a trade union with limited functions though, as the country transformed from a semi-feudal peripheral economy into an industrial economy integrated into the world economy, it took on an ever-larger role in representing workers in the workplaces. China is typically viewed as a socialist economy which transformed into a neoliberal market economy following the Mao era, but it is crucial to recognize that, since 1949, the country has been industrializing in response to a succession of economic crises and the challenge to modernize. Thus, from 1953 to about 1960, China placed greater reliance on the industrialized Soviet Union for economic development. In contrast to the strict demarcation of economic policy between Mao’s era (1949–76) and the post-Mao, Deng Xiaoping/Xi Jinping era (1978–present), it is far more accurate to depict the PRC as experiencing a series of ten crises, as Tiejun Wen (2021) contends.

The ACFTU maintains features similar to those of national unions across the world, representing workers in ten national industrial unions and in each of the 31 provinces of the PRC. Moreover, the ACFTU is composed of 5.3 million grassroots labor organizations throughout the country. In 2018, it claimed to represent 300 million workers across 6.4 million enterprises, far more unionized workers than in any other single nation (ACFTU 2018). Moreover, the ACFTU claims more trade union members than the two largest international labor federations: the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), claiming to represent 191 million workers in August 2024 (ITUC 2024); and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), claiming 105 million members in 133 countries in August 2024 (WFTU 2024b).^1 Even using ITUC and WFTU 2024 membership statistics, the ACFTU exceeds the sum total of both federations by about 500 million workers. In 2024, the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that the ACFTU has been actively encouraging workers to join unions in “new forms of employment” (NFE) including the digital economy. These are deemed to be the most challenging sectors, which have excluded trade unions outside of China. Tu Wei and Xueyu Wang found the ACTFU had been:<blockquote>[a]ctively exploring ways to encourage the lorry drivers, online taxi drivers, couriers and riders to join trade unions. Implementing online applications for union membership, and innovative service contents and service models; (2) Initiat[ing] consultations with industry associations, head enterprises or representative organizations on piece-rate unit prices, commissions, labour quotas, labour protections, rewards and punishment systems in the industry.</blockquote>In addition, the ACFTU is initiating applicable laws, regulations and policies through pilot projects to prevent occupational injuries; and implementing legal services which directly apply to platform work and to resolving disputes which may arise between management and workers in the digital sector, while providing vocational and jobs-skills training and even mental-health support services (Wei & Wang 2024, 42).

Even if workers are not organized in these challenging digital sectors of the economy, China’s union density rate (measuring the share of the platform economy’s workers who are in unions) is about 25 percent when in the rest of the world barely any workers in the sector are members of trade unions. In addition, the ACFTU is fostering legislative changes to improve working conditions. Workers in emergent digital sectors of the platform economy, logistics, ride hailing and so on have only recently become the object of organizational efforts by grassroots unions in major urban centers (including Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other large municipalities), but this mobilization on multiple levels is a remarkable achievement.

Western research on the ACFTU is uneven and lacks rigor and in most instances ignores statistics and data compiled by the Chinese government as well as reports by the ACFTU and its provincial, district and street-level affiliates. Most analytic and interpretative perspectives are derived from Western Labor Studies and sociology literature. Certainly, some have conducted research but there are few dependable Western sources on the Chinese labor movement available. China Labor Studies sociologist Ching Kwan Lee (2007) formulates a critique of trade union activity under market socialism through ethnographic research interviews from the late 1990s to 2003, a period of extensive change from an agrarian economy to market socialism. The conclusions, which seem predetermined, are not nuanced nor do they take into consideration the immeasurable necessity for the ACFTU to respond to social dislocation and unemployment. The primary aim is to discredit the trade union federation. Not once does the book provide evidence of positive trade union responses to technological change and industrialization. Moreover, the book does not reflect on the primary beneficiaries of the initial stages of opening up: Western multinationals who invested in Chinese manufacturing and benefit from the unequal exchange of trade between Chinese workers and Western consumers. Both Western investors and consumers profited from low wage labor at the expense of Chinese workers. It was only after Chinese wages and working conditions improved that opposition from free market capitalists emerged. Their profit margins were not as high as expected due to the ACFTU and the CPC’s commitment to organizing labor and improving the conditions of the Chinese industrial working class as well as those who had entered the service and logistics sectors, which primarily serve domestic requirements rather than foreign multinationals. Lee’s examination of the Chinese working class as the Chinese political economy was seeking to modernize is striking for the way it debases a genuine endeavor to modernize the economy which the PRC had strived for since its formation in 1949.

Western Sinologists are fixated with “the spectacle” of the mass demonstration and rally against the party and state rather than protests directed at foreign multinational firms, which have steadily advanced in the 21st century. To diminish working class activism in China, Lee conjures the term “cellular activism” in ''Against the Law'' (2007) to imply that most activism is directed at local authorities rather than the CPC and the Chinese state. To be sure, Lee is correct, but “cellular activism” may reveal support for the PRC and opposition to changing the nature of the socialist state. Directing protest against local authorities is the most effective technique to gain concessions and represents a form of “bottom-up” unionism or “organizing from below,” terms applied by Western Labor scholars to identify best practices in union organization.
^1 The WFTU was formed in London at the close of the Second World War in 1945 by anti-fascist and socialist unions sympathetic to the USSR and the Third International. It was initially organized by 53 national and international organizations representing some 60 million workers comprising a range of unions, from the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the US to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in the UK. A majority of the unions were and remain sympathetic to communism and socialism, including the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the USSR, the General Confederation of Labour in France, the Chinese Federation of Labour and Confederation of Labour, and the Confederation of Workers in Latin America. The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s culminated in 1949 with the split of Western trade unions away from the WFTU into the US-dominated International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), as a political and labor front against communist trade unions which formed a significant part of the WFTU. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the WFTU declined to a nadir of 48 million workers in 2005 but has since relocated to Athens, Greece, as its membership has increased to 105 million, a large majority of whom are in countries of the global South (WFTU 2024a). Since the end of the Cold War, the ICFTU (now the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)) has deprecated the WFTU as a communist organization which failed to transform into a liberal or social-democratic international organization. Yet ITUC has maintained a Cold War ideology even after its end in 1990 through its staunch opposition to trade unions that did not join its support for Western capitalism and opposition to all existing communist states. ITUC enjoys far greater resources, in part because a large share of its membership resides in rich Western societies of the global North, has the capacity to employ representatives at high wages and enjoys an active presence through international sectoral labor federations. But the WFTU’s opposition to privatization, economic inequality, informal and precarious labor and poverty has significant purchase among the rural and urban working classes of Africa, Asia, Latin America and poor countries more generally. In contrast to the ITUC, the WFTU does not support Western imperialist states of Western Europe and North America, which are viewed as engaging in extractive policies which do not contribute to development but instead foster pervasive poverty, economic imperialism and neocolonialism.

=== 3. Occupational Safety: United States and China ===
A significant problem with Western Labor Studies is its propensity to identify shortcomings and policy concerns as they occur and not to update the research when the ACFTU responds to labor market transformations. In the real world, institutions respond upon learning and absorbing information and then afterwards enacting and implementing policies directly. Moreover, unlike in the US, the ACFTU in China implements policy which will remain unaffected by electoral shifts. Thus, in the US, when the Democratic Party holds power, the National Labor Relations Board and other government institutions may issue policy directives but often they never come to fruition due to a later shift to the Republican Party, which selects anti-labor officials and adjudicators. Five year plans are intended to prevent evading and equivocating on the implementation of labor policy precisely because of the necessity to put laws into practice. Realization of policy directives cannot occur instantaneously even in the best of circumstances. Consequently, China’s five year plans account for the passage of time in improving labor conditions. In sharp contrast, US labor institutions are not held accountable for the absence of enforcement of workplace safety laws passed over 50 years ago. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is notorious for its indifference to enforcing violations by private business.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act did not become a federal law until 1970, a half century after mass production industries dominated the US industrial landscape. Yet, according to most accounts, OSHA has not appreciably improved workplace safety in the US. According to Michael Felsen, in 2021, more than 50 years since the passage of OSHA:<blockquote>an average of 16 workers died each day from traumatic injuries at work, totaling 5190 in the course of the year. Add to that figure an estimated 120,000 deaths annually from occupational illnesses. In 2021, employers reported almost 3.2 million workplace-related injuries and illnesses. But because under-reporting is so common, it is believed that in private industry alone, the toll of work-related injuries and illnesses is somewhere between 5.4 million and 8.1 million each year. (Felsen 2024, 133–134)</blockquote>According to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), in 2021 (the last year a report was published, due to the absence of sufficient inspectors) it would take OSHA 190 years to inspect the 7 million workplaces under its jurisdiction in the US due to the shortage of staff. Due to hiring freezes, OSHA cannot be considered a serious workplace safety monitoring and enforcement agency (AFL-CIO 2023). Fatality rates in the US are rising, and, in most cases, OSHA is unable to document violations, especially in those industries which are most dangerous: agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, logistics, mining and other extractive industries. A disproportionate share of fatalities is among Black and Latino workers. Without explanation, from 1970 to 2020, only 128 criminal cases involving worker deaths have been prosecuted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, an inexplicable average of 2.56 cases a year (Felsen 2024).

Conspicuously the US is not a signatory to the hallmark ILO resolution promoting occupational safety and health worldwide (C155, the Occupational Safety and Health Convention of 1981), a convention which has been ratified by China, Cuba, the Russian Federation, Vietnam and Laos. In contrast, the major states which have not ratified the convention along with the US are France, Germany, Indonesia and India.^2

Undeniably, most China Labor Studies scholars in the West have a general interest in solving the perceived problems but most make blanket assertions outside the parameters of what is possible and the limitations of what is impossible. A blind spot among Western scholars is the failure to consider the shift of the working class from agrarian labor to urban industrial work. The share of Chinese urban workers has grown from about 10 percent to over 65 percent in just 35 years. Even if China Labor researchers recognize the magnitude of urbanization, most largely pay no attention to the challenge posed to the CPC and ACFTU of incorporating nearly 1 billion people into urban areas. Instead, they point to the shortcomings of the CPC and the trade unions and focus on the deficiencies of specific segments of the Chinese working class under market socialism (Solinger 2022). To a fault, practically all China Labor scholars engage in cryptic terms without explanation. For instance, the term “party-state” is used disparagingly without explaining that China is in fact a state dominated by the Communist Party and the ACFTU and must abide by directives advanced by the CPC. The inference is that China should have a multiparty system and unions with a range of political perspectives. Using a Leninist perspective, the working class party must retain authority and trade unions retain discipline in supporting the party in which they are affiliated. In most states, party and trade union discipline is a virtue as it contributes to accountability to a worker’s state.

Western Labor scholars mock the sincere effort to modernize an agrarian workers’ state into an urban advanced workers’ state, drawing on anti-communist code that is meaningless for all but those who strive to study China. For instance, Western Labor Studies scholars like Dorothy Solinger use the term “regime” to describe the Chinese government and “strongman” in place of Chairman Mao Zedong. One can only conclude that there is both a lack of academic sincerity and a political agenda behind these and other efforts to debase the Chinese socialist state and its people. Periodizing specific moments in Chinese history since 1978, Solinger suggests that from 1949 to 1976 the Chinese were more contented and comfortable than after the opening up. Unquestionably, the Maoist era contributed to major advances in life expectancy, caloric intake and the quality of life. But how is it possible to contend in the year 2022 that the Chinese state is calculatingly seeking to devalue human lives? This double bind reveals a disingenuous effort to focus on shortcomings of the Chinese socialist project to eradicate poverty following the most arduous years of transforming the country from an agrarian to a modern urban socialist economy. Both suggesting there were better times and asserting that the Chinese working class is even more impoverished today through drawing on specific population cohorts is also incorrect. For Solinger and the expansive circle of opponents of the Chinese state, the implication is that, after Mao, poverty is expanding and the destitution of the Maoist era has been superseded by a new impoverished urban working class today (2022, 1–8). To be charitable, this pervasive position and condescending rhetoric have been pervasive in every period from the formation of the PRC in 1949 to the present. Alarmingly, the circle is expanding as academic funding for research on China expands.
^2 The ILO convention regulates all forms of economic activity in the workplace, and all signatory countries are subject to penalties for non-compliance. ILO Occupational Safety and Health Convention 1981 (No. 155) calls on all member states to formulate, implement and periodically review a coherent national policy on occupational safety in the light of national conditions and practice, and in consultation with the most representative organizations of employers and workers, occupational health and the working environment, aiming to prevent accidents and injury to health arising out of, linked with or occurring in the course of work, by minimizing, so far as is reasonably practicable, the causes of hazards inherent in the working environment. The convention also protects workers from disciplinary measures because of actions properly taken by them in conformity with the policy. Employers also bear responsibility for paying all costs associated with implementing the policy (ILO 2025).
The perspective contradicts numerous studies in the West showing that the Chinese workers movement was both militant and more democratic (Pringle 2011). Tim Pringle’s account of the innovative experiments of the ACFTU in 2011, driven by the working class, is no longer accentuated as positive commentary on the trade union federation is verboten in the Labor Studies literature (Pringle 2011).

Much of the Western literature is drawn from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or research and secondhand accounts about workers. Some researchers use official Chinese government statistical research, but the data is slanted to demonstrate an erosion of working class economic conditions over the past two decades; a view which is wholly incorrect, not just on the basis of flawed interpretations of Chinese sources but also due to a failure to acknowledge even Western accounts of a dramatic improvement in standards of living.

The main narrative is to disparage China for its exploitation of the working class, though there are variations on the theme. Some scholars, who typically wish to demonstrate the erosion of the conditions of the Chinese working class and the rise of an authoritarian state under the neoliberal reforms and so forth, share a common position with the neoconservatives in the West that Chinese workers are highly exploited and that their conditions are worsening as the ACFTU fails to represent their interests. Slightly more realistic scholars are more charitable, conceding that the ACFTU has reformed itself in response to worker demands over the past two decades. Yet among this faction, the ACFTU is viewed as responding only to pressure applied by the PRC, not in response to the rising class consciousness and working class subjectivity of workers, many of whom are migrant workers or their children whose conditions have appreciably improved in the Deng years (c.1978–93). Taken together, opponents of the ACFTU are propagating distortions and misinformation which are drawn from most of the academic literature.

Paradoxically, the ACFTU’s critics comprise a disparate patchwork of opponents, from the far right to the far left, including corporate opponents of trade unions in China and right wing economists, Labor Studies researchers in the West, NGOs, and opponents of the Chinese state more generally, including Western trade unions. A primary opponent of the ACFTU is the Western left, including anarchists, autonomists, social democrats, Trotskyists and, incongruously, those who claim to be supporters of the legacy of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution, and even some who are self-described anti-imperialists.

=== 4. Measuring the ACFTU by Western Metrics ===
This chapter asserts that Labor critics of the ACFTU are engaging in Western institutional metrics of and perspectives on work, labor, unions and even class which are inapplicable and superfluous to China’s labor regime. Moreover, and consequentially, the ACFTU and its provincial, municipal and street (local level) affiliates are placed in a catch-22 dilemma by Western Labor Studies scholars, who mostly oppose the Chinese state and apply standards incongruous to the developing political economy which no other country even approaches. Further, most critics condemn the PRC for an erosion of conditions from the Maoist era even as, on every measure, prosperity has flourished in the aftermath of the shift to the market economy. For example, China’s labor regime is castigated by some for high levels of unrest and by others for having too little. By way of illustration, in ''Against the Law'', Ching Kwang Lee contends that labor militancy is expansive but is circumscribed and does not spread into a social movement which destabilizes and implicitly overthrows the Chinese socialist system (Lee 2007).

Lee’s view is that work stoppages, strikes and general social upheaval necessarily contribute to improved wages and working conditions. Thus, all things being equal, higher social discontent and work stoppages are a dependent variable for higher standards of living and working conditions. Such Labor critics do not distinguish the historical practices and path dependence of state policies but apply a universal metric devoid of historical, political, organizational and economic classification. However, the short and long term historical evidence outside China reveals that, more often than not, strikes and labor unrest do not contribute to improved conditions but often to failure, with the state almost always supporting capital. Frequently, workers are not only recurrently sacked but also imprisoned and even killed by state security forces.

Neglecting how all capitalist states seek to engender business profitability, stability and social cohesion, Lee’s portrait represents almost all Western Labor Studies literature in presupposing that labor militancy by definition contributes to improved conditions. However, when one examines strikes and labor unrest in the West, one finds a record of failure. For example, when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike in August 1981, President Ronald Reagan sacked all workers involved within 48 hours, and the union was decertified 2.5 months later. Of the 13,000 PATCO workers, only 10 percent who did not go on strike remained in their jobs, despite the fact that the union had endorsed Reagan for president and most members were armed forces veterans (McCartin 2012). If Reagan could dismantle a professional union, the course was set for the erosion of unions throughout the country. By 2023, a year of labor mobilization and upsurge in the US, only 6.0 percent of all private sector workers were represented by trade unions, a decline from 6.8 percent in 2022 (BLS 2024).

An examination of three major strikes in the global South between 2005 and 2013 demonstrates that Chinese workers were not fired, imprisoned or killed for engaging in strikes, in sharp contrast to practices in most developing countries, especially India and South Africa (Ness 2015; Pun 2005).

Consequently, whether genuinely or not, Western opponents of the ACFTU are invested in demonstrating that the Federation is ineffective and lacks autonomy from the Chinese state without considering that an institutional form of class conflict was formed in 1949 and continues to this day. Certainly, low wages and conditions cause labor unrest and union responses to address the problems. Thus, the terms “party-state” and “party-union” are proffered to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the ACFTU due to its affiliation with the CPC. Instead, an accurate assessment of Chinese labor organizing and the ACFTU is holistic, denoting bottom-up demands from workers seeking remedies and top-down outcomes and resolutions fostered by the ACFTU. In turn, the ACFTU frequently anticipates and identifies labor market changes and their impact on workers. In reality, opponents are responding to the presence of a strong and effective union which seeks to alleviate and improve workers’ wages, working conditions and social insurance.

=== 5. Labor Unions and Political Parties: a Comparative Global Analysis ===
To recognize the efficacy of the ACFTU, it is necessary to assess labor organizations worldwide, a question addressed in Chapter 3. Since the early 20th century, Labor scholars have recognized the significant connection of working class strength to strong labor based political parties.

While trade union–political party alliances have been considered positively, Labor Studies scholars make an exception for the significance of labor based parties in socialist countries; and, since 2000, Chinese unions have been inexplicably excluded from calculations of the organizational power of the working class, despite the fact that they have a robust labor federation which is affiliated with the labor based CCP. Rather, the ACFTU is derided and scorned by most Labor Studies scholars because it is linked to a political party, despite it far exceeding Western trade unions in promoting working class interests.

While it is important to consider the ACFTU within the context of a socialist state, when one compares today’s trade union federation to Western trade union models from the past, the ACFTU is decidedly more effective.

In 1900, the Labour Party in the UK was founded by the Labour Representation Committee and affiliated with the Labour Party to elect 13 of the 39 members of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. In addition, members of labor unions today are ex officio members and often delegates of the Labour Party. The UK’s TUC, the national labor federation, predated the formation of the Labor Party and, even if it is not unequivocally affiliated with the latter, has historically been the primary force exercising power and influence over Labour Governments in Britain. Its constituent unions have participated directly in the party and almost always endorse its candidates in elections (Allen 1968).

At its apogee in 1946, almost all unions in Britain were affiliated with the Labour Party. Though membership declined marginally with the party’s embrace of neoliberalism under Prime Minister Tony Blair (1994–2007), taken together, British as well as European trade unions are synonymous with their labor-based parties. Irrespective of government policy and the rise of neoliberalism, UK trade unions have not broken their relationship with Labour as it drifts to the right on labor conditions but have reluctantly remained aligned with the party (Hyman & Gumbrell-McCormick 2010). Trade unions in general must not criticize and mobilize against their federations and labor-based parties. In those instances when trade unions have denounced Labour Governments, they have risked expulsion from the federation, as was the case in 2004 when the Labour Party of Britain expelled the RMT (National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport Workers) and several other trade unions for disparaging Tony Blair’s opposition to renationalizing the railway system (Wring 2005).

Generally, with several exceptions, a similar pattern of loyalty despite bitterness against the trade union federation appears in Western Europe and North America, with the notable exception of the US, where the Democratic Party frequently breaks with working class positions advanced by trade unions. In the wake of the decline of trade unions and the support of the Democratic Party for neoliberal policies, the US working class have had no institutional representative. Consequently, workers are supporting populist Republicans.

The erosion of labor unions as representatives of the working class against capital in the neoliberal era has been pervasive and absolute, particularly in Western Europe and North America. In the West, labor is regarded as a casualty of the application of market reforms and the removal of constraints on capital. The attrition of labor unions here has left workers defenseless against capital flight, industrial restructuring and the closure of unions, which have endured since the foundation of mass production industries and the Fordist factory model. In the absence of established unions, scholarship has shifted to new forms of labor representation: NGOs, workers’ centers and autonomous unaffiliated unions (Ness 2014). But the most significant consequences of the disappearance of unions have been poverty and inequality. Sociologists Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck assert that the loss of the state in governing labor policy and the erosion of trade union institutions has given rise to higher levels of inequality and job insecurity:<blockquote>What happened to work and workers as the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era—the postwar settlement, as it is sometimes called—was replaced by neoliberal capitalism? What are the losses, the gains if any, and how, if at all, can the losses be recovered? Are growing inequality, widespread precarity, stepped-up market pressure on wages and employment conditions, the intensification of work, declining social protection and mounting tensions between work and family life inevitable or incurable, or can they … be mitigated? In short: can remedies be found for the ailments of a neoliberal labour regime, and how exactly should they be conceived and applied? (Dukes & Streeck 2023, vi)</blockquote>To diminish this challenge to social cohesion and living standards which neoliberalism has created, it is necessary to craft a form of industrial citizenship. Dukes and Streeck, who are not China scholars, dismiss the country’s trade union model in a few sentences as the antithesis of industrial citizenship without even examining its state owned enterprises (SOEs) and widespread union membership, direct elections and labor participation in decisions (2023, 75). Yet, their concern is focused on the West, where unionization has disappeared, and not the global South, which has never had a modicum of viable unions outside of core sectors. This notwithstanding, the Leninist model of trade unionism is not rooted in industrial democracy as perceived by Western Labor Studies scholars but in a holistic model of bottom-up and top-down unionism wherein worker demands are typically assumed by the ACFTU, and labor’s demands are transmitted to employers.

Most Labor Studies scholars evaluate trade unions exclusively from the narrow Western perspective with a preconceived notion that workers’ organizations must resemble those of the US. This view fails to consider the numerous forms of labor representation present outside the West. Moreover, this defective perception does not seek to augment the power and influence of unions but maintains a constrained and inflexible notion that union democracy is synonymous with independence from political parties and the state. Paradoxically, unions with the highest rank-and-file participation are linked to parties which seek to define state policies. If one’s definition of the ideal trade union is to have weak and ineffective influence and highly circumscribed capacities to bargain and negotiate with employers and influence state policy, the US model is best.

Labor historian Marcel van der Linden comprehends a world system beyond the rich countries where labor unions had become phlegmatic even before the institution of neoliberal reforms which eroded their representational and bargaining capacities and promoted a fear of challenging management and engaging in strikes and other job actions. One consequence of weak unions is that workers in the West have decreasing interest in joining them.<blockquote>One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that the world’s working class continues to grow, while, at the same time, many labor movements are experiencing a crisis. The absolute and relative growth of the global working class and its increasing interconnectedness might suggest that the world labor movement is growing stronger. Nothing could be further from the truth. Traditional labor movements are in trouble almost everywhere. They have been severely enfeebled by the political and economic changes of the last 40 years (van der Linden 2023, 315–316).</blockquote>Still, the fact that most workers in rich Western countries are not even members of trade unions may also denote that unionization does not have significant consequences on wages and conditions. In addition, state social welfare systems which unions advocated for on behalf of the working class in the West paradoxically diminished interest in union membership. In short, though neoliberalism has produced inequality and intensifying socioeconomic conflict through rising populism and xenophobia, it is also obvious that labor in Western Europe, North America and other wealthy states has transformed into a labor aristocracy benefiting from the inequality of trade between nations, inasmuch as workers in poor countries of the global South are paid a fraction of the wages for equivalent labor, a drawback to achieving global working class solidarity (see e.g. Edwards 1978; Emmanuel 1972/2025). In the last two decades, a new wave of scholars has emerged to demonstrate the long history of unequal exchange under capitalism as production at the periphery and distribution in the core intensifies (Brand & Wissen 2021; Hickel 2018; Kerswell 2018; Lauesen 2018; Ness 2015; Ricci 2019).

However, van der Linden is another scholar who shares the implicit but unsubstantiated perspective that all labor conflict in China, which must always be positive, occurs outside the ACFTU as the latter is linked with the CPC, rather than recognizing the holistic connection between rank-and-file workers and the trade union. In a footnote, he cites a British citizen who works for Multinational Monitor, an anti-CPC NGO in Hong Kong. Once more, a potentially sympathetic labor historian is subscribing to a position that all labor disputes must end in conflict, even in a socialist state. But van der Linden’s predisposition to oppose the ACFTU is evident in how he views the PRC as a “capitalist economy without independent trade unions” (2023, 317) like those which formed in Europe and North America in the 19th century.^3 He is an independent historian who agrees with the monolithic anti-ACFTU position among Labor scholars and does not address the question of why a party based labor movement is supposedly ruinous for China but not for the rest of the world.
^3 A principal of the organization is a Hong Kong nationalist, Au Loong-Yu, who both expresses repugnance for Chinese nationals as well as opposition to the larger and better funded China Labour Bulletin (CLB) and its leader. The latter, Han Dongfang, has a checkered and dubious political background as an operative for the US government and is a recipient of funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, an arm of the US State Department. Both organizations are now defunct as their critiques have been addressed by the ACFTU as it responded to the emergence and growth of market socialism. In June 2025, CLB officially disbanded (Yu et al. 2013). Effectively, the failure of the anti-China labor NGOs in Hong Kong to resonate with the Chinese working class played a significant part in their closure, along with the end of US government funding.

=== 6. Strengthening Unions through Party Affiliation ===
Robust and disciplined trade unions affiliated with labor-based parties were the primary factor in the growth of unions in the 20th century. The decline in labor based political parties is a function of two principal factors: (1) rising wages in the West and the decline in the working class as a consequence of the shift away from industrial economies; (2) unions’ inability to convince members to support (even labor based) political parties which have shifted towards neoliberalism.

The scolding of China has also given rise to the dangerous rise of rhetoric which is appropriated by right wing populists and the US national security state. The main assertions are that China is a capitalist country which only claims to be socialist to mislead its working class, and that the ACFTU is not a union. The shibboleth that China is capitalist is formulated by liberals, social democrats, sectarian Trotskyists and doctrinaire non-revisionists who maintain a utopian, even religious, conviction devoid of an understanding of historical materialism. Consequently, some share the position of the US State Department on China (Friedman et al. 2024). Their bald assertion (shared by the US State Department, National Endowment for Democracy and the Central Intelligence Agency) is proffered that China is the fount of opposition to its own working class and ecological sustainability, oppresses women activists and imprisons ethnic minorities. Are we to believe that this diatribe is a form of balanced scholarship? This “left” position has serious repercussions which sustain military spending, support economic sanctions and economic nationalism, and contribute in Western Europe and North America to the disturbing growth of xenophobia against migrant workers there who form a significant potential demographic for unions to organize (Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman 2013; Ness 2023b).

Most Labor scholars consider the labor based political party emerged in the 20th century to strengthen the influence and power of labor unions and their members. Political parties of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West were considered essential for strengthening working class power against greedy private sector businesses which had exploited workers without restraint. Consequently, socialist and communist parties in North America and Europe formed and contributed to a dramatic increase in wages, living standards and working conditions (Dubofsky & McCartin 2017; Lichtenstein 2013; Taylor 1989).

Most trade unions in Europe and beyond are directly affiliated with political parties, or what is commonly designated a labor based party. In the US, however, the AFL-CIO is considered an interest group and is not linked directly to a political party even if most of its constituent national unions endorse the Democratic Party, which itself does not view the AFL-CIO as a direct affiliate. Rarely do national unions endorse the Republican Party (viz International Brotherhood of the Teamsters and, periodically, other unions, e.g. the United Auto Workers, which broke with the Democratic Party under Walter Reuther in opposition to its support for the US war in Vietnam). In India, almost every national trade union is directly affiliated with a political party, including communist parties. Why, then, opposition to the ACFTU? This chapter’s hypothesis is that while the ACFTU represents a panoply of interests, its affiliation with the CPC, which holds state power, contributes to cynicism and derision.

Yet, the book argues that the ACFTU’s connection to the CPC confers on its members superior economic and bargaining power. For the CPC, the working class not the capitalist class is the decisive and most significant constituency. Therefore, the ACFTU and its members are given precedence over capital in almost every dispute.

In 2010, the wave of labor mobilizations against primarily private capital posed a major challenge to the ACFTU and the CPC leadership, forcing it to decide whether to uphold its support for the working class or shift support to public and private capital. Most of the Western academic literature critical of China documents strikes and labor insurrections in the period from 2010 to 2013 but does not scrutinize how the Chinese state and the ACFTU responded to the actions as they were unfolding, or to the formulation of policy in reaction. Would the ACFTU, CPC and Chinese state support capital or workers?

=== 7. Too Little Unrest or Too Much Unrest ===
In the aftermath of the strike wave of c.2010–13, critics of the ACFTU, the CPC and the Chinese state engaged in a contradictory debate. Like many other NGOs, the now defunct CLB thrived on distorting facts about the Chinese working class, inflating the number of strikes and job actions for the consumption of foreigners to oppose the Chinese state. In its final years of existence before it folded, the CLB did little more than encourage transparency in democratic elections for union leaders even as most unions in the US did not even hold elections, and when they did, the outcome was typically undemocratic due to manipulation of electoral procedures (Harris et al. 2007).

Labor studies scholars and NGOs share a perspective that too much labor unrest revealed a direct challenge to the Chinese Communist state: If workers engaged in strikes, they were opposed to their employers, their trade unions, the CPC and the Chinese state.

Other opponents assert that too little unrest reveals that workers are highly repressed and discouraged from striking by fear of government suppression and crackdowns, a claim which contradicts official policy encouraging workers to press wage, insurance and working condition claims against employers. Alternatively, they stress that Chinese workers lack class consciousness and are partners in their own repression, an explanation for the failure to form a labor movement. Once again, applying Western perspective to a socialist state, overlooking the nature of China as a “dictatorship of the working class” where oppositional movements are promoted by the US and the West to undermine a socialist state’s efforts to resolve labor-management disputes; precisely the same goal of trade unions in the US (Lin 2020). Apart from strong evidence that workers seek to improve their wages and conditions through their unions, the ACFTU supports worker self-activity to improve their conditions.

Once again, we are confronted with the attempt to apply liberal bourgeois class relations to a socialist state. Jake Lin views production center workers in secondary cities as lacking class consciousness and uninterested in striking. No consideration is offered for the possibility that, rather than lacking class consciousness, workers in the interior might have been content with their work and preferred to settle disputes through labor courts rather than job actions and mass anti-systemic social movements. By contrast, the failure of labor union organizing in the US South from the 1990s to 2020s was attributed to rapacious anti-union lawyers and corporate campaigns in opposition to trade unions, with few placing the onus on the workers themselves. Perhaps workers at foreign automobile factory transplants in the US viewed their jobs as far preferable to those with a lower capital investment in other sectors of the economy (Silvia 2023). Ironically, the current anti-union scholarship derives from Marxist research in the 1970s and 1980s which maintains that workers are apathetic about their jobs, generated primarily in production industries which consider trade unions to be uninterested in and unengaged with workers, who are in turn unmotivated by pride in their jobs or the quality of their work and only engage in necessary labor to earn their pay checks (Burawoy 1982). Harry Braverman (1974) and Stanley Aronowitz (1973) hold a corresponding view that industrial laborers are highly alienated from labor under monopoly capitalism.

Taken together, it is essential to examine the limitations of trade unions and labor movements throughout the world. However, if the US is the archetype for unions, then the Chinese labor movement is far more advanced by almost every measure: organizing and mobilization, trade union density, work actions and the orderly and rapid settlement of disputes through labor courts, which almost always favor workers over managers. Even if the ACFTU is governed by a sclerotic bureaucracy, it at least has the will to improve conditions, and, crucially, Xi Jinping and the CPC are determined to inculcate and deepen community level participation, especially in the industrial centers of Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong and Hebei provinces on the Chinese eastern littoral but also, increasingly, in the country’s growing urban centers located inland (Xu 2025).

Applying a non-Western measure of the responsibility of trade unions, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions represents the interests of the working class under the directive of the CPC. The ACFTU is charged by the CPC to ensure that trade unions organize hundreds of millions of workers and to ensure that workers “actively participate” in advancing the goals of the workers’ state. To underscore the objective goals of the CPC and ACFTU, it is important to quote at length General Secretary Xi Jinping’s remarks at the 18th General Congress of the CPC on October 23, 2023:<blockquote>China’s working class has played the role of the main force in the development of the Party and the country’s undertakings, the cause of the labor movement has made historic achievements, and the work of trade unions has realized all-round progress. Over the past five years, the masses of workers and workers have been concentrating with the Party and struggling with it and have demonstrated an era of boldness and courage in fighting hard battles and carrying heavy burdens in major tasks such as economic construction, scientific and technological innovation, poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, epidemic prevention and control, and disaster rescue and relief. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and trade unions at all levels have strengthened the ideological and political leadership of workers, pushed forward the reform of the construction of the industrial workforce, safeguarded the rights and interests of workers, maintained political security in the field of labor, deepened the reform of the trade union system, and increased the political, advanced and mass nature of trade unions. The CPC Central Committee fully recognizes the significant contributions made by the working class and the new achievements made by trade unions. The CPC Central Committee has high expectations for the new leadership of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.</blockquote>On the subject of the relationship between the CPC and the working class, Xi Jinping calls attention to the significance of leadership, education and the centrality of the working class:<blockquote>It is necessary to strengthen ideological and political leadership, do a good job in the ideological and political work of workers, educate and guide the majority of workers to unswervingly listen to the Party and follow the Party, and ensure that the working class is always the most solid and reliable class foundation of our Party.</blockquote>Xi Jinping further draws attention to the unity of the masses of workers and the CPC to advance the interests of the working class through education and training for the development of society:<blockquote>We should focus on implementing the new development concept, building a new development pattern, and promoting high-quality development, widely and deeply carry out various forms of labor and skill competitions, stimulate the enthusiasm for labor and creative potential of the majority of workers, and give full play to the role of the main force in all fields of all walks of life. We should vigorously carry forward the spirit of model workers, labor spirit and craftsmanship, give full play to the role of model workers and craftsmen as demonstrators and leaders, and inspire the vast number of workers to achieve their dreams through hard work, honesty and creativity. We should focus on the in-depth implementation of the strategy of developing the country through science and education, the strategy of strengthening the country through talents, and the strategy of innovation-driven development, deepen the reform of the construction of the industrial workforce, accelerate the construction of an army of knowledge-based, skilled and innovative industrial workers, and cultivate and create more great master craftsmen and high-skilled talents.</blockquote>Insofar as the PRC is a workers’ state, the objective of the trade unions is to advance the immediate and long-term interests of workers rather than oppose their class interests, which are materially advanced by the CPC.<blockquote>The working class and the broad masses of working people are the main creators of social wealth, and the promotion of more visible and substantial progress in the common prosperity of all people should be reflected first and foremost in the hundreds of millions of workers. Trade unions, as the representatives and defenders of workers’ interests, should earnestly fulfill their basic duties of safeguarding rights and services, focus on solving practical problems of immediate interest to the masses of workers, and pay attention to safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of workers in new employment patterns. They should strengthen the democratic management of enterprises and public institutions, smooth the channels for workers to express their demands, guide workers to safeguard their rights and interests in accordance with the law, and promote the construction of harmonious labor relations.</blockquote>Finally, the ACFTU is charged with deepening the reform of trade unions to advance the interests of the working class. The task of furthering the interests of the working class is enduring and at no point does it come to an end—just as nature and material conditions are transformed through humans, the ACFTU must adapt to changes to defend the collective interests of the working class (Xi Jinping 2023). The Western scholarship on labor is dominated by opponents of the PRC who disparage the state protections and trade union representation as well as minimize the difficult task of improving the conditions of all workers. The opposing positions are refuted by statistical evidence and empirical evidence. Briefly, the central contentions focus on the mistaken position that the CPC and ACFTU are unwilling or failing to address challenges from a burgeoning urban workforce. Even ephemeral research, corroborated by the ILO, shows the allegations are specious.

According to this narrative, the ACFTU is not a trade union in any shape or form but a repressive authoritarian organization which controls workers’ wage demands and represses all forms of dissent. This position is taken by almost all Western Labor scholars who view China in absolute terms and hold the country up to a high bar. As such, they argue that China’s unions lack purity and legitimacy, despite established evidence even by opponents that the ACFTU is both independent from management and that rank-and-file workers elect their own leaders. Moreover, the Western scholars ignore the existence of Chinese labor laws which protect worker rights on the job and set wage rates on a municipal basis. On June 29, 2007, at a time when Western multinational corporations had attempted to exploit the emergent Chinese working class, composed of migrants from rural areas, the Tenth National People’s Congress passed the Labor Contract Law, significantly expanding labor rights through initiating a process of private sector management responsibility towards workers. This migrant population has grown significantly as the urban economy has offered greater opportunity than rural areas. The migrant population numbered almost 300 million workers in 2024 according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Even as the urban workforce grows, migrant laborers have seen their wages and working conditions improve as the ACFTU encourages labor organizing and the state compels employers to adhere to labor regulations. Over nearly two decades, the improved wages and working conditions for workers have further stimulated urban migration at a higher rate than expected. By 2024, Chinese migrant workers employed in retail, logistics and hospitality accounted for 54.6 percent of the national workforces and the proportion was growing (Xinhua 2025a).

The Chinese state and the CPC have established a labor-dispute mediation and arbitration system at workplaces and adopted the Labor Contract Law which went into effect on 1 January 2008. The provisions of the law ensure employment is monitored by state authorities and enshrine the right to leave, workplace safety, enforcement of child labor regulations and prevention of occupational diseases (Labor Contract Law 2007; Xinhua 2025b). Chinese labor laws were expanded in 2008 to provide a range of protections to a migrant workforce which had been exploited by foreign capital. Subsequently, Chinese urban workers have seen their conditions improve even as the political economy has shifted from manufacturing to tertiary services.

William Brown and Xuebing Cao (2024, 169) offer a disdainful perspective on the ACFTU, the most critical element of which is that since Chinese unions do not resemble trade unions as narrowly defined by Western scholars, labor organizations in China are simply not unions but appendages to the CPC and the Chinese state. This insolent interpretation of the Chinese trade union movement applies a European and North American craft union definition drawn from the early 20th century. It does not even reflect the composition of most trade unions in the West in the 21st century. Moreover, this interpretation mistakenly claims that the ACFTU violates the official position of the ILO, the United Nations affiliate which builds tripartite working relationships between labor, employers and the state. In this way, the remit of the ILO is to integrate unions as an equal partner with employers rather than to isolate and separate them from official activities of the state. In this context, the ACFTU serves as an active and fully integrated trade union federation which is highly effective in representing workers against private and public management. Brown and Cao misleadingly apply ILO Convention 98 (which requires unions to maintain independence from employers), but they add that since the CPC controls the ACFTU the union is not independent.

Contrary to Brown and Cao’s assertions, it is the fastidious Chinese state and CPC which confer power on workers seeking to improve wages and working conditions. Why would the pretense of independence confer a higher level of democracy, even for a weak and ineffective union, if a strong employer were to reject the union’s legitimacy as the collective bargaining representative of workers? Moreover, in collective bargaining, especially among state owned enterprises, workers participate directly in framing union demands under strictly enforced Chinese labor laws, a factor which is completely neglected by anti-Chinese Labor scholars. The Chinese government operates comparably to other states and adjudicates disputes between businesses and workers. Likewise, collective bargaining agreements must conform to the prevalent laws of the municipal, provincial and national governments. Jurisdictional power over labor is practiced in every state, but China critics argue that somehow the PRC has a higher bar because enterprises are owned by the state (i.e. the people).

For Brown and Cao, the ACFTU is not a union because of its ties to a party and a state. But such links are precisely what most unions seek to have: gaining traction with an effective and popular political party which takes power and influences state policy. Since the Labor Contract Law was launched in 2008, the ACFTU has increased its effectiveness in recognizing workers. Nonetheless, critics use an outmoded and inaccurate definition of a union, intending to denigrate the ACFTU in every instance without recognizing the nature of the state and the terrain on which it operates. By Western measures of successful trade unionism, the ACFTU and its affiliates are far more successful, undermining the pervasive mantra propagated by antagonists that are a caricature and misrepresentation advanced by hostile Labor scholars. For example, a characterization gives the lie to the actuality of a responsible trade union:<blockquote>The term “trade union” is misleading in the context of the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese institutions described as such are unlike trade unions elsewhere in the world. … Let us start with what Chinese trade unions definitely are not. They do not fit Webbs’ classic definition of a trade union as “a continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives.” … That definition implies that the association is self-governing. Chinese trade unions are not; they are devoid of internal democratic procedures. … Nor do they fit the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 98, which specifies that trade unions must be financially independent of employers and other non-union organizations … Chinese trade unions are wholly dependent for finance on levies of employers and on state funding. … What makes their links with the state exceptional is that the only legal basis on which trade unions in China are permitted to operate is as part of a state agency, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). (Brown & Cao 2024, 169)</blockquote>The error and canard of the account is that the ACFTU is an official member of the ILO and is considered to engage in best practices of trade unionism. If the primary metric is decline and failure, then the Chinese model does not fit the Western model of trade unionism, where labor organization is in steep decline and new organization of workers is at a historic low.^4 But by any contemporary definition of a trade union and a labor federation, the ACFTU is far more effective than other national unions in defending the rights of workers who are unfairly treated and is successful in increasing wages and working conditions. By contrast, most trade unions in the West have floundered and have extensive membership decline, eroding their influence in local, state and national politics. Even in the Scandinavian region, where union density had been historically highest, trade union membership has declined significantly.^5 As we saw in Chapter 3, with the exception of China, the systemic decline in labor union membership is worldwide (Kjellberg 2023; SSAP 2024).

Practically all Western critics of the ACFTU deprecate China and the ACFTU as an abnormal and peculiar form denoted as a “party state”, a term which is intended to represent the labor federation as an appendage of the CPC and the Chinese government, lacking autonomy and effectiveness, and bending to the will of the CPC on all matters related to the working class. In fact, as Xi Jinping stated in 2023, the trade union federation must focus on the demands of the working class as they evolve over time, improving wages and working conditions, and mobilizing members into constituent unions and improving workers’ wages and living standards For them, the term “party-state” or “party-state capitalism” is code for all the undesirable elements which are attributed to the Chinese socialist market economy. Thousands of academic books and articles use the term time and again, to the extent that it has become insincere and meaningless. A recent seven page article in Current History, the oldest US journal of current events in continuous publication, uses the term “party-state capitalism” 31 times, as if it must be inscribed in perpetuity to inculcate a doctrine which will subjugate any other perspective (Pearson et al. 2021).

In labor relations, the term denotes: (1) the ACFTU’s lack of autonomy from the CPC and the state; (2) proscription of ACFTU officials deciding on decisive internal policies and external relations with SOEs and private sector firms; (3) exclusion of local level union leaders from bargaining with management; and (4) prohibition of workers to mobilize and participate in union decisions. This is a sweeping portrayal of an authoritarian and undemocratic system of representation, but even scholars who have articulated a more balanced perspective must, for fear of being ridiculed and excluded, adhere to the obligatory disparagement of labor–management relations in China. Consequently, the accounts by the “party-state” monolith of adherents undermine all efforts to engage in constructive criticism and dialogue which might improve conditions worldwide. The anti-China academic complex in the US and the West is a propaganda behemoth established to inhibit free thinking and independent perceptions. It is so vast that one cannot draw any other conclusion than that it is deliberately intended to target the credulity and naivety of Americans.

The “party-state” perspective is all encompassing and does not grant any institution, organization or decision making authority agency to adjudicate claims, or to determine or rule on any matter without the CPC’s approval. Its adherents consider all institutions, administrative policies, judicial rulings and trade union representation to be prohibited. All authority is a direct extension of policies and calculations flowing from the CPC Politburo, which are calculated to expand and consolidate power, accumulate capital and harness dissent from below. In the estimation of Ching Kwan Lee (2007), the Chinese government has omnipresent power which suppresses any challenge by workers to protest and improve conditions. This position does not even acknowledge that Chinese workers can improve their conditions through a range of contestations between labor and management.

Lin (2020) provides a more inventive analysis by arguing that Chinese workers are not building a social movement for political change. Like Lee, however, he neglects to explain why a disruptive social movement in a socialist country committed to the improvement of working class living conditions is necessary. Lin appropriates Mao’s concept of “cognition,” a term which was formulated to demonstrate how human knowledge and understanding are a direct result of material practice rather than abstraction and the necessity of a discerning mass leadership. Curiously, Lin anticipates cognition to be repressed to explain the absence of a national or even regional workers’ social movement. Undoubtedly, Chinese workers do not participate in collective efforts as much as many hope for, but Lin’s narrative discounts the ACFTU’s efforts to consolidate working class protections as well as the emergence of community unions in a growing number of Chinese cities, especially under Xi Jinping. It is possible that Lin did not anticipate that Xi would advance significant demands on the ACFTU to expand its scope of activity to the municipal and street level unions. The Chinese state’s commitment to building socialism through the working class is a foundational principle which is viewed as the responsibility of the party.
^4 Trade union membership in the US declined from 10.0 percent to 9.9 percent from 2023 to 2024. In the private sector, union membership was just 5.9 percent according to official statistics, where private sector union membership declined by 184,000 workers in 2024 (BLS 2025).

^5 In 2023, Anders Kjellberg documents a decline in trade union membership in each of the four Nordic states from 1990 to 2021: Sweden declined from 81 percent to 70 percent, Denmark declined from 76 percent to 63 percent, and Norway from 67 percent to 50 percent. In Finland, trade union density declined from 76 percent in 1990 to 59 percent in 2019 (Kjellberg 2023).
In 1949, 28 years after the founding of the CPC, Mao Zedong wrote that the Chinese proletariat shared a common perspective on the necessity of a vanguard party, (a view shared by Sun Yat-sen, the founder and president of the Republic of China), noting that, “We must arouse the masses of the people and unite in a common struggle with those nations of the world which treat us as equals.” Sun Yat-sen, he claimed, “reached a conclusion basically the same as ours on the question of how to struggle against imperialism,” continuing:<blockquote>Twenty-four years have passed since Sun Yat-sen’s death and the Chinese revolution, led by the Communist Party of China, has made tremendous advances both in theory and practice and has radically changed the face of China. Up to now the principal and fundamental experience the Chinese people have gained is twofold.

# Internally, arouse the masses of the people. That is, unite the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, form a domestic united front under the leadership of the working class, and advance from this to the establishment of a state which is a people’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
# Externally, unite in a common struggle with those nations in the world which treat us as equals and unite with the peoples of all countries … and form an international united front. (Mao Tse-tung/Mao Zedong 1949, 415)
</blockquote>The term “party-state” is ubiquitous in the labor literature and is in keeping with the path development from the revolution. It is the state and party’s responsibility to mobilize the masses. But, in the West, the term is almost always used to demonstrate that there is neither politics nor democracy in China, which is supposedly controlled by the CPC despite ample and pervasive evidence that popular participation in the state, and especially in local communities and unions, is extensive. In the past decade, more scholars have recognized the democratic nature of the Chinese state as well as its commitment to maintaining a communist system directed at advancing the interests of the Chinese working class.

The market reforms which were advanced from the 1980s to the 2000s have contributed to opposition among social democrats, expressed primarily through Western literature about the declining conditions of the working class in an economy subject to an internal and international market from its inception as a socialist state. Almost all Western socialists have condemned China in the post-Mao era in league with Western imperialists who have condemned the country from its foundation for replacing the private market with a state-dominated economy. Those who rebuke China as a party-state are now universal and run the spectrum from left to right, even though the Chinese state has consistently improved its people’s standard of living since the establishment of the PRC in 1949.

One line of attack is that the Chinese labor movement is ineffective and powerless as it cannot exert power beyond the local level (as if a national strike wave is a necessary feature of worker power), overlooking the institutional structure of the state administration, where political action (such as setting wages) takes place on a local and regional rather than national level. For example, in the US, the national minimum wage is largely meaningless as it is so low that it cannot lift even wage earners without a family out of the poverty level in any state. However, in China, wage laws are set by municipal authorities, not on a national or even provincial basis. Wages directly reflect the cost of living in each district, which varies across localities, provinces and the state. Thus, wage differentials between rural and urban areas reflect actual cost-of-living differences and had eradicated poverty in China by the second decade of the 21st century (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2023).

An example of this static and unqualified reasoning, and of an absence of nuance, can be found in an “argument” advanced by Labor scholars Kuruvilla, Lee and Gallagher. In ''From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization'' (2011), they wrongly infer that Chinese industrialization eroded and subverted a strong and egalitarian economy which provided economic sustenance to all its citizens. Based on previous research, the authors certainly do not regret the shift from an autarchic socialist economy to what they inaccurately refer to as a market economy in the 1970s and 1980s, as they elsewhere embrace a capitalist liberal-democratic economy analogous to those of Western Europe and North America. This is a position shared by most but not all China critics.<blockquote>Within a generation, urban China has moved from a highly protected “iron rice bowl” system that guaranteed workers in state owned enterprises (SOEs) and collectively owned enterprises permanent employment, cradle-to-grave benefits, and a relatively high degree of equality to a market-determined employment system characterized by considerable variation in wages, welfare provision, labor law enforcement, and job security. The growing field of China Labor Studies offers rich documentation of this change in working conditions, enterprise and managerial reforms, systems of remuneration, patterns of labor disputes and unrest, class and gender relations, unemployment, and labor law reforms (Kuruvilla et al. 2011, 3–4).</blockquote>The anti-China Labor scholars resort to scholarly misrepresentation which considers China in isolation, without comparing it to other countries. The evidence is based on selective and distorted information which gives a false idea of and manipulates Chinese government data sources through narrow interpretation of facts processed from international and even Chinese government sources, and misinterpretation of social phenomena through applying a static interpretative analysis rather than a historical and dynamic evaluation.

Even after the CPC enacted a comprehensive labor court adjudication system, Gallagher again arrives at a critique that does not take into consideration implementation of the policy. The point is that all efforts to improve the status of the working class fail or are deficient, and the motivation for the labor courts is to prevent labor unrest rather than to provide a comprehensive dispute resolution system. In Gallagher’s narrative, the expansion of judicial courts to protect workers only provides protections for workers with higher levels of education who are aware of the laws. By contrast, all other workers are uninterested in the legal mediation and arbitration system, preferring to engage in workplace activities, strikes and demonstrations. The book draws on evidence marshalled by the CLB, a US NGO cutout that closed after funding was cut in 2025. CLB data lacks credibility and is based on worker remote correspondence, which is a dubious source. Gallagher is impatient and immediately forms a negative opinion as the legal system for adjudicating legal disputes is put in place. However, the CLB shows that workers are going to labor courts to resolve disputes at a high rate and winning over 95 percent of their cases. But detractors view the expansion of legal protection for workers through labor courts as a means to placate a segment of more highly educated workers rather than arising from a shared interest in worker rights as stated by Xi Jinping at the CPC meetings. Gallagher views the legal system as “dysfunctional” and failing to serve the workers. However, interviews conducted among workers across the country in a wide range of industries during 2024 and 2025 found that workers are aware of the successful outcomes of the ACFTU in defending them through labor courts. They consider the enlargement of labor courts a positive development in safeguarding their wages, social insurance and ensuring safe working conditions. For Gallagher and others, though, any effort to improve wages, working conditions and compensation of workers are concessions to workers to maintain an authoritarian system. Like so many other Western Labor scholars, without evidence, Gallagher sees an ulterior motive behind everything which the Chinese state, CPC and the ACFTU advance to benefit the working class, without grasping the nature of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, which was in fact advanced by Mao Zedong at the origin of the PCP in 1949, when the people’s dictatorship required an alliance of the working class, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie to advance and develop. However, leading labor economists have documented the rapid expansion of labor courts as they have been established and grown in number. Even before the dramatic growth in labor dispute courts, the eminent labor economist Richard B. Freeman, of Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), noted in 2015 the dramatic rise in labor disputes, which have been documented by the Chinese government from 2000 to 2010:<blockquote>The number of labor disputes brought to the Labor Dispute Arbitration Committees (the legal entity set up to resolve disputes) sky-rocketed from 8,150 in 1992 to 135,206 in 2000 to 1,280,000 or so in 2010. Acting on their own with no help from the official unions, workers began striking in large numbers for better conditions in different parts of the country. In summer 2010 a strike by Honda workers in Guangdong made headlines around the world when it produced a collective agreement with improved pay and benefits. (Freeman 2015, 10)</blockquote>By contrast, uniformly disapproving Labor scholars in the West, who reflexively oppose the ACFTU and the Chinese state’s response to industrialization, advance a sarcastic assessment of the federation as a malevolent organization resolutely opposed to improving the conditions of workers when Chinese labor was in a state of tumultuous transformation from a rural to an urban workforce. In short, at no time and place in human history has a population migrated in such great numbers as did that of modern China. If the state instructions could not keep up with this relocation, driven by a foreign private sector, opponents view this as a major transgression. But the industrialization of Britain, Western Europe and North America transpired over a period of 50 years or more and yet there is little criticism of unions there for not keeping up. According to Mingwei Liu, by 2009, for practical purposes, after little over a decade, workers in 92 percent of all Fortune 500 companies operating in China had been represented by a union affiliated with the ACFTU (Liu 2011).

The malformed union which failed to protect Foxconn workers in 2010 represents a significant failure of the ACFTU and the state to keep pace with the industrial electronics juggernaut and not a state policy to exploit workers. The ACFTU quickly responded by forming a labor union which would move swiftly to negotiate higher wages, reduce hours and enact workplace safety measures and improved living conditions for the migrant workers who produced smartphones for Foxconn. Nonetheless, fault finding Labor critics dismiss any improvements by levelling new charges. For example, China Labor scholars Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai cite a New York Times article quoting an unnamed worker who stated in March 2015, without evidence, that: “Not many workers knew about the company union elections” at Foxconn (Chan et al. 2020, 192). Paradoxically, there is much evidence that most local union leaders in the US are not elected by a majority of rank-and-file members in the private and public sectors. Indeed, many workers do not even know they are represented by a union in the US despite the fact that they pay union dues.

Though it is true that the expansion of China as the workshop of the world and the driver of the massive rise in foreign consumption had given rise to higher levels of worker discord and direct action through strikes and dissent in the first two decades of the opening up, the antagonism and demands for improved conditions were primarily directed at foreign private firms and subcontractors which had violated workers’ rights (Ness 2014). There was also a call by workers for the ACFTU to vigorously represent their interests by engaging in direct action. Opponents of the ACFTU contend that the union was motivated by a desire to quell all forms of dissent, but if this cynical position was true, why then did worker demands expand in the aftermath of the strike wave? And how does one explain the rise in November 2012 of Xi Jinping to General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the 18th National Congress on a platform which emphasized the party fulfilling its responsibility and curbing all forms of corruption?

China Labor critics charge the party-state with engaging in a range of mechanisms to dodge the traditional labor–management contract, including the rise of third party contractors and the lack of direct contracts with employers, the use of interns and students as workers, and the rise of the digital economy, ridding business corporations of the obligation to provide the traditional labor–management contracts. Each critique can be addressed through the passage of time, a necessity in any study. In each instance, the Chinese government, CPC and the ACFTU have responded effectively through pressing employers to directly hire workers who form a potential bargaining unit, reducing the use of interns at workplaces; a practice which is far more pervasive in the West, where students must pay for the privilege of working without pay. In fact, a recent study of student interns found that job training was a necessary prerequisite, which often leads to offers of employment (Yang, F. 2025). Finally, the primary private platform delivery technology firms have offered direct labor contracts to workers in the digital economy who principally are employed in logistics and especially as delivery operatives. In China, the major digital platforms (Metiuan, Ele.me and JD.com) have recognized digital workers in the platform economy as workers and have directly hired them with guaranteed wages, social insurance, improved working conditions and other benefits, including maternity insurance (see Chapter 6 for an examination of Chinese digital labor).

=== 8. Challenging China’s Labor Critics ===
While opponents of the Chinese labor movement use scant facts which are often drawn from secondary sources to debase the labor movement, social science research among scholars based in the West and in China provides evidence of an emergent labor movement which is responding to extreme geopolitical transformations advanced through neoliberal capitalism and to the demands of mobilizing a newly proletarianized workforce in urban areas. The critique of the Chinese labor movement presented by the vast majority of Western Labor scholars is nearly unanimous; but emerging scholarship since 2013 by leading Western and Chinese political economists attributes the rapid transformations in China to the internal rural–urban migration there from the 1990s to the present. Abundant evidence is available of local and provincial success in contesting workplace power against public and private sector employers in China’s urban hubs at a time when the country’s working class has been dominated by first and second generation migrant workers, a factor which ordinarily inhibits the capacity of labor to wield influence and prevail in collective bargaining.

If the ACFTU and its affiliated unions are as ineffectual and impotent as Western critics would have us believe, why have Chinese workers authentically won concessions from SOEs and private sector businesses, especially in the last 15 years from 2010 to the present?

The evidence of workers organizing victories among trade unions representing workers at a single enterprise or company on the municipal level is clear, based on archival and ethnographic evidence. Lin (2022) analyses the 2020 strike wave and finds that workplace elections influenced successful collective bargaining. He demonstrates that employers’ perception of workers’ power resources contributes to an unambiguous capacity for workers to prevail over them in wage disputes. Lin found that authentic, workplace collective bargaining occurred when unions had a powerful array of collective resources (including mobilization capacity, negotiation skills and collective consultation) which posed a threat to managers. A key variable was collective bargaining skills, which must be learned and practiced with the support of provincial and municipal governments.

Booth et al. (2022) convincingly show that the presence of ACFTU trade unions within the workplace has significantly improved conditions (wages, workplace contracts, social insurance, working conditions, dignity and fringe benefits) for workers migrating to Chinese urban areas, and that this contributes to the willingness of workers to articulate grievances through official challenges rather than independently mobilizing to protest. Rather than basing assessments on Western sources antagonistic to the PRC, these researchers use a panel survey and quantitatively control for individual “fixed effects.” They conclude:<blockquote>Relative to workers from workplaces without union presence or with inactive unions, both union-covered non-members and union members in workplaces with active unions earn higher monthly income, are more likely to have a written contract, be covered by social insurances, receive fringe benefits, express work-related grievances through official channels, feel more satisfied with their lives, and are less likely to have mental health problems. (Booth et al. 2022, 975)</blockquote>Rather than taking independent or collective risks to form unions, the ACFTU has established worker organizations which are in most instances addressing the material and social requirements of workers. The authors go on to explain the remarkable improvements which the ACFTU is achieving for workers, extending from SOEs to the private sector:<blockquote>It is interesting to understand how the institutional features of the Chinese union affect workers’ welfare in a largely privately owned economy. This shift to a market-oriented system has been accompanied by dramatic industrialization fueled by a strong supply of cheap labor from rural areas. (2022, 975)</blockquote>As the ACFTU negotiates improved conditions for workers which have expanded to social insurance, Chinese courts are mandating social insurance and severance pay if employers failed to pay into worker accounts; decreeing that all employment contracts which omitted social insurance were rendered invalid. On August 1, 2025, the Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest court, mandated social insurance payments for all workers with employment contracts without exception. It also ruled that every worker who was denied social insurance throughout China would be encouraged to appeal to government authorities and lower courts to order back payments and resign with the right to severance pay. The ruling addresses non-public employers in the private sector who seek to take advantage of workers financially through dodging their responsibility to cover social insurance. According to the Supreme People’s Court Ruling:<blockquote>The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) issued a judicial interpretation on Aug 1, clarifying that any contractual agreement that excludes social insurance contributions is invalid. … The SPC emphasizes that paying social insurance is a legal obligation for both employers and employees, noting that the clarification is a result of some employers evading payments and some employees opting out of the system in practice. “For example, we’ve found a few companies not contributing to social insurance in order to reduce labor costs, with some workers requesting employers to provide the social insurance contributions directly to them as subsidies in order to receive higher wages,” said Zhang Yan, a judge in the top court’s First Civil Division. She reiterated that Chinese courts should support claims by employees who request for termination of their work contract or seek compensation due to the employer’s failure to contribute to social insurance. Wu Jingli, deputy chief judge of the division, also stressed the importance of paying social insurance, as legally enjoying social insurance benefits is a fundamental right for each worker, adding that the interpretation will be effective from Sept 1 (The Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China 2025).</blockquote>Workers did not have the right to waive their right to social insurance and could terminate their contracts if their employers did not pay and claim severance pay from the employer. The ruling, which almost immediately took effect on September 1, 2025, significantly contributes to the decline and eradication of precarious labor and non-standard employment agreements, an unprecedented achievement in the global South and rare in rich countries of the North (Qingyang & Chendi 2025; Xinyi 2025).^6 The convergence of evidence rooted in actual fact demonstrates that the conditions of the Chinese working class are improving as a collective social force which is formalized through employment relationships and the support of the ACFTU. It is worth mentioning that the ACFTU had applauded the Supreme People’s Court decision, noting that the interpretation unmistakably concludes that non-payment of social insurance is prohibited even if the worker negotiated with the employer an independent agreement which excluded the benefit.
^6 According to the Chinese newspaper Economic Observer, “Taking urban employee pension insurance as an example, data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security shows that by 2024, the number of employees participating in urban employee pension insurance will be 387 million, an increase of 7.88 million from the previous year. In contrast, the ‘Ninth National Workers’ Team Status Survey Report’ released by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions in February 2023 shows that the total number of employees nationwide is approximately 402 million” (Economic Observer 2025).

=== 9. Conclusion ===
The preliminary findings of this chapter are that the Chinese state is genuinely responding to working class interests, often identifying workplace exploitation in advance and implementing strategies to reach out to the new Chinese urban working class which has emerged in the last generation. These initiatives are only growing in scale and capacity under the leadership of Xi Jinping, who in the autumn of 2014, a year after his election as general secretary of the CPC, reprimanded the ACFTU for not responding effectively to the growing demands of the internal migrants who formed the largest segment of China’s working class. The evidence also shows that the Chinese state, whether or not called a “party-state,” is seeking to stimulate economic growth in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis by developing new technology and infrastructure, and that this is contributing to higher standards of living.

This chapter also asserts that even if the ACFTU is an arm of the CPC, effective trade unions seek state influence, regardless of whether the state being capitalist or socialist. The chapter builds on a position that the ACFTU would potentially be far more powerful if it more effectively established ties with its over 300 million members. Even if tens of millions are active union members, many more are also intent on gaining the benefits of workers in the union. However, the ACFTU faces a major challenge: that is, to expand its representation to those workers in the service sector, logistics and the platform economy, which are transforming rapidly. In the same way as the Federation had to respond to the expansion of financial capital and industrialization, it must now consider the changing nature of the economy and reach out to workers who are falling into the cracks between existing organizational structures. This notwithstanding, the ACFTU has been found by the ILO to represent far more workers in these contract sectors than trade unions elsewhere in the world and is seeking to broaden the safety net for all workers. Labor scholars who dominate the discourse in opposition to China are patently misleading when they assert that the CPC and the ACFTU encourage contract labor and interns as replacements for full time workers. There is no evidence to substantiate that the CPC and ACFTU seek to impoverish their own working class.

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= Epilogue and Acknowledgements =
Most Western observers of trade unions stereotypically disparage or ignore the achievements of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and all its elected leaders, organizers and members as captured by a party system. This book is intended to generate debate and discussion about the condition of the Chinese working class from a socialist perspective. The book avoids ideals and superlatives. It takes seriously the work of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and Xi through applying their analysis to Chinese workers in the context of revolutionary transformation and consolidation. A motivating force of this book is the necessity to respond monolithic and uncompromising interpretations and studies among scholars of China.

From the left to the right, almost all Labor scholars maintain an inflexible unyielding perspective and are unlikely to examine the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party of China and ACFTU and its members without blinders. This book is intended to assess the CPC and ACFTU for how their claims are proven or unproven through a dialectical and grounded analysis. How did the founders of the PRC envision the dictatorship of the working class under the ACFTU trade union at the formation of the socialist state and how do theory and practice today conform or deviate from them? I have found that there are no unalloyed truths but only positions which emerge out of material and confessional vantage points—notably a common opposition to the People’s Republic of China. In contrast, I adopt Mao Zedong’s concept of the principal contradiction which a fledgling socialist state must confront as it fends off imperialists and counterrevolutionaries and perceptions and constructs typically advanced by one and the same.

First and foremost, I acknowledge the generous support of diverse people for making this project possible and to whom I owe a large debt of gratitude. I garnered information and interpretation from synthesizing the multifaceted views of people who were open to sharing their opinions about the trade union movement in China. Make no mistake, this account recognizes the party–trade union alliance which prevails in China and recognizes the necessity that opposing worker organizations are proscribed. Yet, this admonition is endorsed by socialists, from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Mao. This lineage of revolutionary theorists, practitioners and workers recognized that the bourgeoisie would remain a threat to the emergent socialist transitional state after socialist revolutions. To prevent this, Marx and his successors unambiguously recognized that just as capitalism requires a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the transition from capitalism to socialism also required an equivalent dictatorship of the proletariat to prevent the restoration of capitalism. All unambiguously grasped the embryonic transitional state as exposed to bourgeois intrusion through infiltrating state institutions and trade unions.

By keeping their identities anonymous, I have taken special caution to protect all those who lent their time to discuss their viewpoints from the maelstrom of criticism and scorn that inevitably could flow from this study. However, trade unionists and workers have openly discussed how the ACFTU is responsible for rapidly improving their standard of living and has given them a critical voice to openly express their opposition to rapacious employers who have violated labor law. The PRC has established labor courts to mediate or arbitrate disputes quickly, unlike anywhere else in the world.

My acknowledgements are spare. Foremost, I thank anonymous scholars, trade unionists, workers and small-business owners who have shared their time and ideas through engaging this project and offered critical opinions that shaped the manuscript. A contentious book is intended to elicit positive and negative feedback. I thank all those who seriously engaged with this project. I do not expect agreement, but critical and serious comments.

Special thanks go to Torkil Lauesen, who has been instrumental in commenting on the framing of the concept of the transitional state. Ali Kadri introduced me to students and faculty in China who served as interlocutors that got this project off the ground.

I received sage insight and critiques from Michael Pelias, a Marxist philosopher who has provided thoughtful comments on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Many others have read and commented and corrected the manuscript, including Zhun Xu, a prodigious political economist whose vision I share.

I express gratitude to Pan Yan, Adrian Ortega Camara and Alex Witherspoon for their extraordinary critical comradely support. Thanks go to Leah Chen for assisting in many ways. Notably, Leah recruited six journalists who conducted ethnographic interviews with workers in diverse jobs across China. Thanks go to Sreyashi Choudhury for advice and encouragement and to Alesandro D’Angelo for elucidating the rise of an authentic trade union center in Hong Kong. I extend special thanks to Michael Crook for helping me to situate the Chinese and international working class.

I am grateful to Yan Hairong of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences for hosting a seminar for a paper on Western Marxism and for sharing her astute knowledge of migration in China and sharing her ethnographic research on how the Uyghur people prosper in rural Xinjiang Province.

Among many in South Africa, I thank Pragna Ragunanan, Malehoko Tshoaedi, Luke Sinwell and Eddie Cottle who have shaped my understanding of migration, trade unions, labor and imperialism.

Over the past 15 years, I benefited from discussions with Renate Bridenthal, Matteo Capasso, Mateo Crossa, Essam Elkorghli, Jeannette Graulau, Jennifer Holdaway, Timothy Kerswell, Max Lane, Lefeng, Nemanja Lukić, Corinna Mullin, Viren Murthy, Alejandro Pedregal, Richard Freeman and many others who contributed to my understanding Kay yew Koh provided sage advice and encouragement. In November 2023, on a visit to Shanghai, Roger Harris asked vital but difficult questions about the nature of China’s working class.

I appreciate Wilma Dunaway and Honghui Park for perceptive advice that sustained this research project and manuscript.

I owe a large debt of gratitude to Alan McIntosh for poring over the text, editing and proofing the manuscript. I am grateful to Christine Hededam and Simona Casadio, my editors at De Gruyter Brill. Many thanks go to illustrator Jovana Joković, in Belgrade, for a vivid imagination. I also thank project manager Madhan Kumar D.

Research support was generously provided from the South Africa Department of Higher Education and Training, City University of New York Research Foundation, and a PSC/CUNY grant.

Finally, I alone bear all responsibility for the substance, claims and opinions of this book. In the final instance, correspondence and friendship do not translate into shared positions, and vice versa. There are no absolutes and we must learn to differ without rancor.
[[Category:Labour and trade unionism (Library)]]
[[Category:Socialism with chinese characteristics (Library)]]