From Marx to Mao – And After – VII
The Dialectics of History
Ray Nunes

Lenin’s Experiences in Fighting to Save the Revolution
Was there, then, a different route to the Cultural Revolution (CR) that could have been taken? It was certainly a great risk to place the Party and its leading role in danger of being defeated in a new struggle for power. It is also hard to find analogous situations and examples of other methods in Party history except for those we have mentioned in regard to Stalin (see Ray Nunes: Why a Cultural Revolution?, Pakistan Monthly Review, February 2026). Lenin had had to face critical situations in the Party at least twice during the revolution.
The first of these was the demand of a group of the Council of People’s Commissars, i.e., the Government, which included several members of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party, for abandonment of CC decisions and policy. This took place on November 17, 1917, just after the revolutionary insurrection. The Bolsheviks who resigned from the CC were Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Shlyapnikov, Milyutin and Nogin, who together issued a declaration that: “We renounce our title as members of the Central Committee in order to be able to say openly our opinion to the masses of workers and soldiers.”[35] In a strongly-worded proclamation to the people, Lenin denounced the group as deserters from the revolution. John Reed writes: “The response from the whole country was like a blast of hot storm. The insurgents never got a chance to ‘say openly their opinion to the masses of workers and soldiers.’[36] There was ‘fierce, popular condemnation of the ‘deserters’’.”[37] They were forced by revolutionary mass pressure to submit to the CC decisions.
Not strictly analogous, of course, because the revisionist headquarters in the Communist Party of China (CPC) did not resign. But Mao, even though not sure of a majority in the CC, outweighed all the others in prestige. Had he publicly revealed the existence in the Party of a ‘black gang’, as it was later known, before the appeal to the students launched them into a leading role, matters might have been different. Certainly there would have been immense revolutionary mass pressure targeted on the revisionists from the outset. The fact that the target in the CR was only generally defined in the early stages led to much chaotic behaviour and pressure on all cadres, and as well a great deal of anarchic behaviour, with a corresponding, often lasting resentment by many good cadres of ill-treatment during the CR. This undoubtedly aided the seizure of power by the right in 1976. Still, the problem of cadre degeneration at lower levels would probably have remained.
The other critical situation faced by Lenin was in early 1918 when a complex struggle broke out in the CC on the question of whether to accept peace terms laid down by Germany. Lenin had to wage a bitter fight against those who refused to accept the peace terms, including a group of ‘left communists’ headed by Bukharin, whom Lenin called pseudo-lefts, and who went as far as calling for the sacrifice of Soviet power to aid the ‘German revolution’, which was not yet a fact, and was still in the process of maturing. Almost up to the deadline for acceptance, Lenin was in a minority in demanding acceptance of the terms. He repeatedly denounced “the revolutionary phrase”, which meant disregarding the facts, which was being done by those who called for revolutionary war at once rather than acceptance of a humiliating peace, even though the army was deserting the front wholesale. Lenin warned on January 7 that if peace were not concluded then, it would be concluded later on worse terms. The struggle continued through to the signing of the Treaty (Brest-Litovsk). With an article “The Revolutionary Phrase”, published on February 21, Lenin began a public campaign for peace at once. On February 23 Lenin said at a CC meeting, the second on that day, that if the policy of revolutionary phrases was continued, he would resign both from the government and the CC. At the beginning of the meeting only three were with Lenin. Stalin took the position that the peace terms did not have to be signed, but Lenin said: “Stalin is wrong when he says we need not sign. If you don’t sign them, you will sign the Soviet power’s death warrant within three weeks.”[38] After Lenin’s ultimatum Stalin changed his position to support of Lenin, which gave acceptance a majority of 7-4, with four others abstaining.[39] The point of Lenin’s position is that he finally had to use his prestige as Party leader to win a majority on the CC by means of an ultimatum. The fate of the revolution was at stake. By these means he preserved the unity of the Party as the leader of the working class, even though his opponents went on later to opposition on other questions.
Again, it is true that Mao could have used similar methods to oust the revisionist headquarters. He had the prestige. But then the question remained of bringing up millions of successors. One cannot say whether Mao considered these options. He was certainly not unacquainted with the history of the CPSU. But still, had he won the majority on the CC for the removal of Liu, Deng and Co. from the CC, it would not have solved the problem of restricting the growth of the new bourgeoisie. This task required transforming the entire cadre force of the Party through the removal of revisionists from its ranks, strengthening the practice of the mass line, continued class struggle, strengthening the study of Marxism-Leninism, and through all of these, strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat. One cannot quarrel, then, with Mao’s decision to call for a cultural revolution that he could hope would achieve this aim. That it did not, then, points to the answer lying in the mistakes made during the CR.
Mistakes
The principal mistake lay in the working class not playing the leading role from the outset. To some extent this was a matter of chance, of how the class struggle unfolded from 1965 on. Already in December 1964, Chou En-lai in his Report on the work of the government to the 3rd National People’s Congress had pointed to the main tasks facing the Party and people. (The report, said Han Suyin, quotes Mao almost verbatim.)[40] “The way in which the socialist education movement was conducted, said Chou, was a question of world outlook, of basic class stand, and therefore of great ideological importance. Serious and acute class struggles exist in our urban and rural areas…such are necessarily reflected inside the Party…the crux of the movement is to purge the capitalist roaders within the Party…These stay behind the scenes in some cases…some of their supporters come from below and some from above. In a socialist society, new bourgeois elements were ceaselessly being generated in the Party, government organs, economic organisations, cultural and educational departments – they linked with the older bourgeoisie in trying to restore capitalism.”[41] Here the emphasis is general, not specifically concentrated on education and culture. A wide-ranging, intensive campaign of socialist education is nevertheless a basic theme.
The ‘Twenty-three Articles’ placed by Mao before the Politburo in January 1965 are, in their first part, concerned also with the people in the Party in authority taking the capitalist road at every level, but did not concentrate particularly on education and culture. What particularly focused attention on this side was the experience connected with Wu Han’s play ‘Hai Jui Dismissed from Office’ in the latter part of 1965. This play, a barbed political attack on Mao for dismissing Defence Minister Peng Teh-huai (who had, it must be recalled, launched an all-out attack on the Party’s political line in 1959), revealed that there was a bourgeois headquarters in the Party leadership, having control over culture and education. This came to assume great prominence in the initial stages of the CR, with the appointment by the Politburo of work teams to go to the universities and higher schools in order to support the class struggle against bourgeois ideology. It being a practice of Mao’s to assist opposing elements to expose themselves in practice, one of the principal figures in the bourgeois headquarters, Peng Chen, was placed in charge of the Committee controlling this work. It has already been noted that his group (not all, for it included Kang Sheng) did the opposite of what it was instructed to do. Thus, the role of revisionism in the sphere of education and culture came to the forefront as the result of the way events unfolded. This was the ‘chance’ aspect of the matter.
However, the fact that the struggle as it developed was called a cultural revolution was also due to another factor: that Mao saw it as, in a sense, a new ‘May 4th’ Movement. We must spend a moment explaining this.
May 4th Movement
At the end of World War I, the victorious Entente imperialist powers met at Paris in 1919 to allocate the spoils of victory. Both Japan and China were Entente allies. However, Japan had a secret treaty with Britain and France agreeing to allocate to it the former German possessions in Shantung, China. These they received. The news caused an explosion of protest in China. “The students of Peking responded not only with words but with a gigantic demonstration on May 4th.”[42] Mao, in Hunan, organised a student’s strike. The movement spread rapidly throughout China. Several of the founders of the CPC, including Mao, were prominent in it. It gave considerable impetus to the formation of the CPC in 1921.
The author of this study was told early in 1968 by Kang Sheng, then a member of the CPC Secretariat and for a long time close to Mao, that Mao saw the CR as a particular feature of the laws of development of the Chinese revolution, and that the May 4th movement was an initial example of this. In that movement, the student youth had played the leading, initiating role. This aspect was a specific characteristic of the Chinese revolution. This accounted for the leading role given to the students in the later CR.
The Dialectics of History
Was this a correct assessment by Mao? In the author’s opinion, it was not. Without disputing the importance of the May 4th movement in China’s modern history, the fact remains that a great transformation had taken place in China since then. China had moved from a semi-feudal, semi-colonial regime, to a New Democratic state, and from there to a dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat was now the leading class, and hence the leading force, in Chinese politics. In 1967 this was proved by the ‘January storm’ in Shanghai. The working class should have been roused from the beginning to have taken the leading role in the CR. That would have avoided the petty-bourgeois, often anarchist character which attached to the activities of the students in 1967-68 and in the latter half of 1966. It would have developed among the working class a much greater consciousness of its role. The whole character of the struggle would have been altered. The role of the PLA and the consequent ultra-left moves of Lin Piao would have been obviated, if not wholly, at least to a large extent. All perhaps very true, the critic may say, but still it is only hindsight. Yet it is only possible to sum up experience with hindsight. As we hope we have already shown, if one accepts the obvious fact that the CR failed to achieve its purpose, one must accept that mistakes were made in the course of it.
A further consequence of the student role to which we have already pointed was the deep residue of resentment on the part of a great many quite good cadres who were brought under suspicion by indefinite early statements on the CR and who suffered ill-treatment by Red Guards as a result. Not until October 1968 was Liu Shao-chi actually officially named as ‘China’s Khrushchev’. The backlash from this indefiniteness played its part in the lack of the reconstituted Party’s support for the radicals arrested in the rightist coup. A further consequence, in the author’s opinion, is that the Party never succeeded in re-establishing the great prestige among the masses which it had acquired during and since the days of the revolutionary wars against Chiang Kai-shek and Japanese and US imperialism – which had sided with Chiang. They no longer considered it to be altogether the great, glorious and correct party it had been hitherto.

Notes:

[35] Reed, J: Ten Days That Shook the World (International Publishers, New York. p.273).
[36] Ibid., p.274.
[37] Ibid., p. 274.
[38] Lenin, V I: Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 479.
[39] Lenin, V I: Collected Works, Vol. 36, see note 562, p. 693.
[40] Han Suyin:Wind in the Tower (Jonathan Cape, 1976, p. 225. See footnote).
[41] Ibid., pp.224-225.
[42] Ch’en, J: Mao and the Chinese Revolution (Oxford University Press, London, p. 61).
(To be continued)