From Marx to Mao – and After

Ray Nunes

The Restoration of Capitalism in China

The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union was the outcome of the growth of a new capitalist class within the country, commonly referred to as ‘the new bourgeoisie’. The ideology of this class was capitalist, not socialist, although the restoration of capitalism was carried out under the phoney signboard of ‘socialism’. This ended with the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991. The ideological instrument by which the new bourgeoisie was able to capture power was revisionism, bourgeois ideology in socialist guise. From Khrushchev on it became the dominant ideology, resulting in the continual degeneration of Soviet socialism. The dictatorship of the proletariat was discarded, creating huge problems – economic, political and ideological – for the working people of the Soviet Union as its degeneration proceeded. The dictatorship of the proletariat was replaced by a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The problem was, in essence, not only why the working class had lost political power, but also whether it was possible for them to regain it. To achieve this a new socialist revolution would be needed.

It should be remembered that the Chinese revolution differed from the directly socialist revolution in Russia in that it proceeded in two stages – the first, a New Democratic revolution, the second, a socialist revolution.At the time of the revisionist usurpation of power in the Soviet Union in 1956, China had completed the first stage of its revolution with unexpected speed, and was beginning the second stage of creating a socialist society. The revisionist path being taken by the Communist Party leadership in the Soviet Union led to a great ideological dispute between that party and the Communist Party of China (CPC) and other Marxist-Leninists, a dispute that would determine whether capitalism or socialism would win out, not only in China but in the world communist movement.

During the ideological dispute with the Soviet revisionists it became clear to Mao that the same tendencies that had enabled the new bourgeoisie to seize power in the Soviet Union were also operative in China. He found in practice that the line of moving from the stage of the democratic revolution into the stage of carrying out the socialist revolution was in fact being blocked by a group of leading Party figures who had actually built up a majority within the Central Committee (CC) and the Political Bureau. They were only a step away from seizing control of the Party as Khrushchev had done and installing a revisionist, back-to-capitalism programme.The group was centred on the Peking Party Committee and included the chief of the Party organisation and head-of-state Liu Shao-chi, later to be named ‘China’s Khrushchev’, Peng Chen, head of the Peking Party Committee and Mayor of Peking, and Deng Xiaoping, the Secretary-General of the Party.

Some years earlier Mao had relinquished his position as head of state and also the day-to-day direction of the Party organisation in order to concentrate on developing the ideological-political line and policies of the Party. This stood the Marxist-Leninists of the world in good stead when the battle against Soviet revisionism intensified, for Mao came to that battle fully armed, and gave better than he got. But it enabled the elements who wanted to stay at the new-democratic stage and reconcile with Soviet revisionism the opportunity to gain a solid grip on the leadership of the Party organisation and the direction of the state apparatus. A nationwide Socialist Education Movement launched by Mao in the early 1960s to lift the ideological level of the workers and peasants in order to further the struggle for socialist construction was making little headway in the cities, where it should have been advancing most rapidly. A student revolt was brewing (but being repressed) against the dominance of bourgeois and feudal ideas and methods in culture and education, and in particular an underhanded movement of criticism aimed at Mao’s leadership was coming forward in the press under the protection of the Peking Party Committee, which controlled the media.

The Bourgeoisie’s Attack

Matters came to a head when an article appeared in the Peking press entitled ‘Hai Jui Dismissed from Office’. This was plainly an allegorical attack on Mao for the dismissal of the former Defence Minister Peng Teh-huai, who had collaborated with the Soviet revisionists and attacked the CPC line on all fronts, ideological, military, economic and political. All efforts by Mao to get a refutation published in the Peking press proved fruitless. Finally an article by Yao Wen-yuan, a Shanghai ideological worker, was published in Shanghai. It refuted the original article and sharply criticised the author, Wu Han, for grave ideological errors, beginning the exposure of his protectors. “This article exposed the fact that this was not just an ordinary play but an attack, in literary form, on the policies of the CPC, such as the Great Leap Forward and the people’s communes.”[1]

The struggle over this matter showed clearly to Mao that there was an entrenched group at Party headquarters, often acting in his name but without his knowledge. The group was bent on following the capitalist road and not the socialist road. Although the line for building socialism meant that the class struggle between the workers and the bourgeoisie was the main internal contradiction in China, the class struggle was being suppressed and stifled by top Party persons in authority.

It is both necessary and useful at this point to cite some of Mao’s speeches of the early 1960s to show that the situation from which the Cultural Revolution (CR) developed was maturing fairly rapidly. Already it was clear from Soviet experience what would be the consequences if revisionism should gain the upper hand. In a speech in January 1962 to an Enlarged Work Conference, Mao emphasised the necessity of deepening and widening mass democracy. He said: “Unless we fully promote people’s democracy and inner-Party democracy in our country, and unless we fully implement the system of proletarian democracy it will be impossible to achieve a true proletarian centralism, it is impossible to establish a socialist economy. If our country does not establish a socialist economy, what kind of a situation will we be in? We shall become a country like Yugoslavia, which has actually become a bourgeois country; the dictatorship of the proletariat will be transformed into a bourgeois dictatorship, into a reactionary fascist type of dictatorship. This is a question which demands the utmost vigilance.”[2] In the same speech Mao said: “In acquiring an understanding of the objective world, in making a flying leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, man must pass through a process.”[3]

Mao here is expressing a well-known Marxist idea taken from the philosopher Hegel, that ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’, which simply means that without knowledge of the laws of development of nature and society, man has to act blindly, from necessity; with an understanding of these laws, however, he can turn them to his advantage and achieve aims consciously that are otherwise unachievable. He makes a leap from necessity to freedom.

Mao goes on to say: “Speaking generally, it is we Chinese who have achieved understanding of the objective world of China, not the comrades concerned with Chinese questions in the Communist International. These comrades in the Communist International simply did not understand, or we could say they utterly failed to understand Chinese society, the Chinese nation, or the Chinese revolution. For a long time even we did not have a clear understanding of the objective world of China, let alone the foreign comrades!”[4]

Classes and Class Struggle Under Socialism

In 1962, in a speech to a plenum of the CC, Mao generalised on the question of class struggle under socialism. “Now then,” he said, “do classes exist in socialist countries? Does class struggle exist? We can now affirm that classes do exist in socialist countries and that class struggle undoubtedly exists.”[5] Thus, the question of class struggle under socialism was vital. He went on to point out that there was a struggle of class against class in China and it had to be admitted there was a possibility of the restoration of reactionary classes. Vigilance must be raised and all levels of cadres educated. Otherwise a country like ours can still move towards its opposite. Even to move towards its opposite would not matter too much because there would still be the negation of the negation, and afterwards we might move towards our opposite yet again. If our children’s generation go in for revisionism and move towards their opposite, so that although they still nominally have socialism it is in fact capitalism, then our grandsons will certainly rise up in revolt and overthrow their fathers, because the masses will not be satisfied.[6]

Thus, the question of possible capitalist restoration existed for China as indeed for all socialist countries. The Tien An Men square demonstrations of 1989 could not be said to be a second negation such as Mao spoke of, because they were under the leadership of pro-imperialist bourgeois elements. These were in essence no different from Deng Xiaoping in aim – but wanted a far more rapid transition to capitalism. (There were, nevertheless, many pro-Mao elements who did not get reported in the media). For the same reason Khrushchev and even Gorbachev couldn’t move too fast to this objective – the reason being fear of the workers’ reaction and possible restoration of socialism – so Deng had to choose between crushing the student revolt or risking overthrow by the working class, an alternative he dared not contemplate. The second negation – i.e., a negation of restored capitalism and a restoration of socialism, is still to be achieved.

Further on in the same speech Mao pointed out that between 1958 and 1962 the Party had difficulty in giving essential time to the correction of internal policy shortcomings because of the growing problem with Khrushchev’s revisionism. He writes: “Our attention was diverted to opposing Khrushchev. From the second half of 1958 he wanted to blockade the Chinese coastline. He wanted to set up a joint fleet so as to have control over our coastline and blockade us. It was because of this question that Khrushchev came to our country. After this, in September 1959 during the Sino-Indian border dispute, Khrushchev supported Nehru in attacking us…Then Khrushchev came to China and at our Tenth Anniversary Celebration banquet, he attacked us on our own rostrum. At the Bucharest Conference in 1960 they tried to encircle and annihilate us. Then came the conference of the Two Communist Parties, the Twenty-six-Country Drafting Committee, the 81-country Moscow Conference, and there was also a Warsaw Conference, all of which were concerned with the dispute between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism. We spent the whole of 1960 fighting Khrushchev. So you see that among socialist countries and within Marxism-Leninism a question like this could emerge. But in fact its roots lie very deep in the past, in things which happened very long ago. They did not permit China to make revolution: that was in 1945. Stalin wanted to prevent China from making revolution, saying that we should not have a civil war and should cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek, otherwise the Chinese nation would perish. But we did not do what he said. The revolution was victorious. After the victory of the revolution, he next suspected China of being a Yugoslavia, and that I would become a second Tito. Later when I went to Moscow to sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance, we had to go through another struggle. He was not willing to sign a treaty. After two months of negotiations he at last signed. When did Stalin at last begin to have confidence in us? It was at the time of the Resist America, Aid Korea campaign, from the winter of 1950. He then came to believe that we were not Tito, not Yugoslavia.”[7]

New Democracy is Not Socialism

In August 1964 Mao was already re-emphasising the danger of remaining at the new-democratic stage. He wrote: “To consolidate New Democracy, and to go on consolidating it forever, is to engage in capitalism. New Democracy is a bourgeois-democratic revolution under the leadership of the proletariat. It touches only the landlords and the comprador bourgeoisie, it does not touch the national bourgeoisie at all…To divide up the land is nothing remarkable – MacArthur did it in Japan. Napoleon divided up the land too. Land reform cannot abolish capitalism, nor can it lead to socialism.”[8]

Partial measures did not serve to improve the situation in the ideological and political superstructure in relation to pressing on with the socialist revolution. Because of the reactionary trends shown to be current in the sphere of education and culture, Mao called for a cultural revolution to be carried out with the aim of removal of the top Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road. The Party CC set up in October 1965 a group of five, under Peng Chen, to begin carrying out suppression of criticism of leading academics and writers such as Wu Han who were on the capitalist road. It was dissolved and a new Committee appointed, which applied Mao’s line calling for mass participation in uncovering capitalist roaders in positions of authority in the ideological superstructure.

In his criticisms of Stalin, Mao made it clear that Stalin was not able to distinguish properly between contradictions among the people, which could be resolved without the use of force, and contradictions between the people and the enemy, which were antagonistic in character. As a consequence, Stalin often used wrong methods to solve differences within the Party and state, equating differences of opinion with counter-revolution instead of relying on the masses. At the same time, Mao considered that Stalin had not given proper thought to the question of his succession as Party and state leader, so that Khrushchev was able to usurp power. By the time of the Cultural Revolution (CR) Mao had reached the conclusion that the only way to be sure of barring the door to a revisionist seizure of power was not just to rely on individuals but to raise a whole generation of successors, millions of them. This required that youth, the next generation, should learn by first-hand experience the meaning of class struggle to uphold socialism and defeat the bourgeoisie and their revisionist agents and supporters – all capitalist roaders – within the Party, particularly in the top echelon of leaders. This explains why youth were given such support by Mao throughout the CR.

Notes

[1] Chen, J: Inside the Cultural Revolution (Sheldon Press, London, 1976, p.194).

[2] Schram, S: Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed (Penguin Books, England, p.167).

[3] Ibid., p.170.

[4] Ibid., p.172.

[5] Ibid., p.189.

[6] Ibid., pp.189-190.

[7] Ibid., pp.190-191.

[8] Ibid., p.216.

(To be continued)