From Marx to Mao – And After – VI
Why a Cultural Revolution?
Ray Nunes

Late in his life Mao said: “Our country at present practices a commodity system, the wage system is unequal too, as in the eight-grade wage scale, and so forth. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat such things can only be restricted. Therefore if people like Lin Piao come to power, it will be quite easy for them to rig up the capitalist system.”[30] People like Lin Piao did come to power and found it quite easy to restore capitalism. How long for, remains to be seen. More will be said on this question further on.
The Question of Class Forces
We come to the question of ‘what went wrong?’It could be said – and some do say – that the bourgeois-aligned class forces were simply too strong. And it is true to say that in general, this was the case in China. But first of all, Lenin had previously pointed out that for a long time after a socialist revolution the bourgeoisie are still stronger than the proletariat. From the further experience of the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and the restoration of capitalism mainly in the USSR, Mao expanded on this. He wrote in 1964 (before the Cultural Revolution): “Socialist society covers a very long historical period. Classes and class struggle continue to exist in this society, and the struggle still goes on between the road of socialism and the road of capitalism. The socialist revolution on the economic front (in the ownership of the means of production) is insufficient by itself and cannot be consolidated. There must also be a thorough socialist revolution on the political and ideological fronts. Here a very long period of time is needed to decide ‘who will win’ in the struggle between socialism and capitalism. Several decades won’t do it; success requires anywhere from one to several centuries. On the question of duration, it is better to prepare for a longer rather than a shorter period of time…During the historical period of socialism it is necessary to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat and carry the socialist revolution through to the end if the restoration of capitalism is to be prevented, socialist construction carried forward and the conditions created for the transition to communism.”[31]
This is a profound and correct assessment of the problem of preventing capitalist restoration. If one thinks it over, it means that a restoration of capitalism can take place at any time before the transition to communism. That in turn means that at any time throughout that entire period of from one to several centuries, the alignment of class forces may favour the bourgeoisie. But while the bourgeoisie may win power, it does not follow that they must or should. And in the same article, it is stated: “But the restoration of capitalism in the socialist countries and their degeneration into capitalist countries are certainly not unavoidable. We can prevent the restoration of capitalism so long as there is a correct leadership and a correct understanding of the problem, so long as we adhere to the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist line, take the appropriate measures and wage a prolonged, unremitting struggle.”[32] There follows then a set of 15 theories and policies advanced by Mao aimed at upholding the dictatorship of the proletariat and preventing a capitalist restoration.
The point here is that it is not enough to attribute the restoration to the adverse alignment of class forces, for such an adverse alignment may last for a very long time. The point is that with correct policies it should have been possible to prevent the bourgeois seizure of power. In a sense, then, those who attribute the loss of proletarian power simply to an adverse balance of class forces are begging the real question, which is this: if the loss of that power was not inevitable, why did it happen? The proletariat was strong enough to win power; it should have been, with correct policies, strong enough to hold it despite an adverse balance of class forces. If the set of policies advanced by Mao was correct, as we think, then something was wrong with their application.
Was the Cultural Revolution Itself Correct?
This raises, must raise, the related questions: (a) was the Cultural Revolution (CR) itself a correct policy or method of struggle? and (b) were mistakes made during the CR that led or could have led to the left’s inability to hold power?
We have already considered why Mao turned to the CR in order to get rid of capitalist roaders in the Party, particularly at top level.The Party organisation was in the grip of a revisionist bloc headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Xiaoping. This situation had grown up partly because Mao had handed over day-to-day direction of the Party and his position as head of state to others, placing himself “in the second line”, as he put it. Also, because in 1949 the Soviet Union being the only country with experience in building socialism, China had copied many of the CPSU’s policies, and thus acquired similar faults, which threatened China with a similar fate. The Socialist Education Movement was achieving little in the cities, thanks to the blocking tactics of the leading revisionists, and consequently the revisionist danger within the country threatened to make China change colour unless it could be defeated through revolutionary class and ideological struggle.
Led by Mao, China had just gone through a period of cutting itself free from Soviet tutelage and standing on its own feet. Among the many policies of Stalin which Mao had subjected to critical analysis was that of his increasing reliance on the use of State security forces against critics within and without the Party, instead of relying on the masses and the mass line. It was quite clear that these methods had not prevented a revisionist coup, and that they were against the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, which upheld the role of the masses as decisive in maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat. From his writings in the ideological dispute and after, it is quite clear that Mao held this view.
With Mao’s immense prestige – he was even then by far the most eminent and revered figure in China – and his role as Chairman of the Military Commission, it would have been relatively easy to have used the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to carry out a purge of the revisionist headquarters. But this would not have solved the problem. That kind of ’palace coup’ had also been carried out by Khrushchev to seize power for his clique and had led to the restoration of capitalism. Evidently what was needed was a great campaign to arouse the masses, one that would awaken the Party masses (there were about 17 million members at the time) to the dangers of revisionist degeneration, not only of the Party as an organisation but also of the individual cadres themselves. The ordinary means of rectification through criticism and self-criticism linked with ideological education were not overcoming the dangers. Besides the Party cadres, the state cadres and officials also had to be revolutionised in their outlook. And particularly, domination of the intellectual life of China, the education system and the output of people in literature, art and all culture by traditional feudal and capitalist ideas and their representatives, had to be replaced by proletarian ideas and their representatives. All this was needed in order to train millions of successors of Mao himself and the revolutionary generation he had led, and by these means to bar the door to a revisionist takeover.
Mao reached the conclusion that this required a cultural revolution. According to Han Suyin, who had access to documents which have not been officially published: In January 1965 Mao would place before the Politburo a draft programme for the cultural revolution to come and a draft programme for China’s economic advance. Part of the first, concerning the socialist education movement in the rural areas, is known as the Twenty-three articles. The economic programme would only become known 10 years later…The key point was to rectify those people in authority within the Party who took the capitalist road; there were such people at every level, even in the Central Committee. Some harboured among their own friends and in their own families people engaged in capitalist activities.[33]
Combating Tendencies towards Party Degeneration
In the beginning it was not called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but just the Socialist Cultural Revolution. But Mao expected it to widen into a political, anti-revisionist revolution. In the Twenty-three articles, as Han Suyin remarks, there were two new concepts introduced. “First: where mistakes had been very serious, where leadership had been taken over by counter-revolutionaries or degenerate elements, there must be a seizure of power, to be achieved with the masses and by arousing them. This new concept of ‘seizing authority’ from a degenerate Party leadership is the crux of the cultural revolution and the rebellion it taught. Second: where Party organs had become degenerate, and before a new leadership nucleus could be formed, the right was given to the poor and lower middle peasant associations to seize power temporarily, not to replace the Party but to wield authority on an interim basis until the Party could be reformed locally. This also was startling and new…It was now clear to Mao that he could no longer use the Party organisation because the Party was being used organisationally against him.”[34]
So far it certainly seems that Mao was justified in seeking to accomplish a cultural revolution, both from above and below. Prior to this he had called the Communist Party “the core of the Chinese revolution”, and so everyone had regarded it. Now he was calling for the masses to seize authority from the Party leadership where serious mistakes had been made. After the 1976 coup, the new bourgeois leadership called everything about the Cultural Revolution wrong, including Mao’s ideas, and denounced it publicly as fascism. Of course, as we have seen in practice, they were the real fascists.

Notes:

[30] Quoted in an article by Chang Chun-chiao: “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie”, reprinted in the British quarterly A World to Win, November 1989.
[31] “On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and its Historical Lessons for the World” (Included in: The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, Peking, 1965, pp.471-472). The article attributes the formulation to Mao. It was actually published in 1964, i.e. before the Cultural Revolution, and was directed against Soviet revisionists.
[32] “On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and its Historical Lessons for the World”, p. 470.
[33] Han Suyin: Wind in the Tower (Jonathan Cape, 1976, p. 225).
[34] Han Suyin, op. cit., pp. 226-227.
(To be continued)