From Marx to Mao – and After – VIII
Continued Revolution
Ray Nunes

We must mention, in our opinion, two further related mistakes. The first of these was in judging the length of time the Cultural Revolution (CR) would occupy. Originally estimated by Mao to last perhaps a few months or at most a year, it was officially brought to a close three years later at the reconstituted Party’s 9th Congress (we say reconstituted because as an organised controlling entity the Party virtually ceased to exist for most of the CR, the activists of which took their leadership from the Central Committee group around Mao). But though officially brought to an end, the struggles on all fronts continued, continually stirred into life by Lin Piao and the ultra-lefts. According to Han Suyin, “An editorial of June 30, 1974 in the Peking Kuangming Daily (which discussed mainly intellectual topics) called for all cadres to listen to the masses…Throughout that year there were sporadic rashes of posters denouncing the misdeeds of Party members in all of China’s cities. There was also some turbulence both in the factories and in the universities…In Wuhan the students of Wuhan University and the steel-workers once again united, as in 1967, and battled a local military commander of the garrison and another group of students from Hupeh University. In other cities there was hooliganism, and worker provosts and their militia patrolled the streets and the factories to prevent arson and other violence.”[43] There was delay in calling the 4th National Congress of People’s Deputies and Han was told: “We want to have even better unity before opening it.”[44] Altogether, it would not be too much to say that the CR, and with it, unsettled conditions of living and relative instability, lasted for the better part of 10 years.
All this certainly had its effect on preparing the ground for the coup d’etat. A large part of the population undoubtedly were dissatisfied with the constant turmoil, and – as the rightists were quite evidently aware – wanted relief from it, wanted settled conditions of life. How much Mao himself realised this in the latter part of his life it is hard to say. He still stood for continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But he was also a military commander of great experience, who knew the value for troops of a respite from constant fighting. It is worthwhile noting that while in the earlier period of the CR he had said that another would probably be needed in a few years, and indeed at the outset considered a new CR would be needed every ten years or so, he made no mention of this in his later years. This point seems to have escaped various Maoist parties and groups today. After all if a cultural revolution lasts ten years, and one is needed every ten years or so, the obvious inference is that society will exist in a state of continual turmoil in which it will be impossible to build socialism – if indeed a rightist coup is not the result fairly quickly. Mao, of course, did not settle this point before death intervened.
The Role of the Masses
The other main error to which we must draw attention was the degree of worship of Mao that developed during the CR. As Mao acknowledged in his previously quoted letter to Chiang Ching, this was not his own creation but Lin Piao’s. Mao also gives the reason for his going along with it, that is, to strengthen his hand in the struggle with Liu and his clique of revisionists. Undoubtedly it did that, and Mao himself did not allow his head to be turned by adulation, as Stalin did, imagining that the masses and what they thought were not important. On the contrary, he continually emphasised the necessity for Party and other cadres to submit themselves to criticism by the masses and to apply the mass line in all their work.
Nevertheless, the effects of this adulation also alienated many. Bookshops stocked only Mao’s works. Repetition of quotations from the Little Red Book became a substitute for studying basic works of Marxism. People were told to place Mao Tse-tung Thought in absolute command, though no individual’s thought can be treated as absolute.
Mao had himself criticised excessive adulation in regard to Stalin as contrary to the organising principle of the Party, democratic centralism, and to the principle of collective leadership. As an expedient it had its uses, no doubt, but carried to excess as it was, it undermined people’s confidence in their own ability to solve problems. It thereby created bureaucracy, the referring of decisions to others, and so in the long run harmed the objective it was designed to attain.
A Correct Theory
All this being said, does this mean that Mao’s theory of continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat as a development of fundamental importance in Marxism-Leninism is wrong? Not at all. That remains a great achievement, even though the CR did not itself achieve its objectives.
We have set out to trace the background to the CR, and to analyse some of its main features. We have also judged that at the time in China, the CR was justified, but have concluded that its failure lay in certain errors being made. Here we have to note that, while being correct for China, it would be undialectical to make the necessity of a CR as part of a continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dogma. Such a policy may be correct in other revolutions – but that can only be determined by the concrete circumstances in the country concerned. And it is necessary to recall that the CR did not finally succeed. The mistakes made led to this outcome.
To sum up our criticisms, we may say that the long period of disorder basically stemmed from the error of initially placing the student youth, and not the working class, in the role of leadership. The fact that China had been building socialism for 10 years meant that in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie only the proletariat could lead. In Marx’s words, “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.” It is therefore surprising that Mao did not use this as his starting point. Dialectical thinking was normally second nature to him. Certainly, his theoretical works on Marxist-Leninist philosophy are masterly. It is all the more surprising then, that he lost sight of world experience in regard to the overthrow of capitalism, and also of the changed time and circumstances in China itself, which led him to view the CR as, in a sense, a new May 4th movement in which student youth should play the leading role.
It is true that there were disturbances and even armed clashes in various cities after the arrest of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’, more particularly in Shanghai, their main base. But these actions in their support did not seriously threaten the power of the rightists established in their coup d’etat. There was no mighty upsurge in their (the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ – Ed.) support, as might have been expected had they achieved a truly mass following, and had the CR placed the proletariat firmly in power. This is in fact the strongest evidence that mistakes made during the CR had led to a relatively easy seizure of power by the right from which they could not be dislodged. The right judged the situation better than the left. They were much more experienced than the left, and recognised that masses of Chinese were no longer enthusiastic for the CR, that they wanted an end to disorder and a return to order.
Indeed, in August 1977, less than a year after Mao’s death, they were able to hold an 11th Congress of the CPC to confirm their coup d’etat as right and just, to affirm that counter-revolution was really revolution. The radicals had been purged, so the Congress was amenable. It is noteworthy that Hua Kuo-feng said: “The purge in 1976 of the Party’s radicals marks the triumphant conclusion of our first Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted 11 years.”[45] In summarising the chairman’s address, Hsinhua quoted him as saying, “Now…we are able to achieve stability and unity and attain great order across the land in compliance with Chairman Mao’s instructions.”[46] This, of course, was a barefaced lie, as the delegates must have known, for Mao had issued no such instructions. But its ready acceptance indicates that there was strong support across the land for a return to order, a support that proved decisive. And so the restoration of capitalism was able to proceed.
The ‘New China’ of Counter-Revolution
Without going too much into detail, it is worth quoting from an article by the US Maoist economist Raymond Lotta, giving a thumbnail sketch of China in August 1989: “Deng Xiaoping and Co have dragged China back into the clutches of the Western powers. When Mao was alive, China was a base area for world revolution. Today, China is a sweatshop for imperialism and an unofficial arms dealer for the CIA. China has received large amounts of foreign capital over the last ten years. Since 1979 China has negotiated $ 25 billion worth of foreign investment and signed $ 47 billion worth of loan agreements…China must continually export more to meet its rising import bill. Failing this it must borrow, and its foreign debt now stands at $ 40 billion…In 1988 more than one million workers in Southern China depended on manufacturing arrangements with capital from Hong Kong. It is not uncommon to find employees, even children, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for piece-rates amounting to 30 cents an hour…The counter-revolution in China has affected every sphere of social life. While higher education has been reorganised along elitist Western lines, more than 30 million children have dropped out of primary and middle school. With the return of family farming in the countryside, brutal feudal traditions and practices have made a comeback…along with private family plots, wife beating, the persecution of women giving birth to females, and the killing of female babies have re-emerged as major social problems.”[47]
This is a picture of a me-first grab-all society, a capitalism that lives up to Deng Xiaoping’s declaration: “To get rich is glorious.” As much as anything, the bribery and corruption that permeate Chinese capitalism were responsible for the vast demonstrations in Tien An Men preceding the June massacre. Hatred of this, not worship of US ‘democracy’, motivated many students and nearly all workers who demonstrated.
The Class Struggle Sharpens
There are, of course, plenty of officials and so-called ‘Party cadres’ under Deng who have made fortunes from the ‘new order’. But the backlash from June has sent the economy on a toboggan slide and frightened the bourgeoisie into pretending to be Maoists again. According to a Guardian article reprinted in the Auckland Star of April 11, 1990: “The familiar slogans are revived: Learn from the model soldier Lei Feng [a self-effacing PLA hero of Mao’s time]; Without the Communist Party there would be no China.” And further: Although many students have sunk into dejection, the urban workers whose radicalisation so alarmed the regime last year have become a more threatening force. Many factory workers were laid off last winter, then recalled to work for a basic wage without bonus. “The authorities wanted to keep an eye on them,” a Beijinger explains. “But now they sit around and discuss current affairs as well as play cards. The workshop has become a big political school.” And the economic slowdown, begun before last summer with austerity and under-employment only worsens the sullen urban political climate. In the countryside, per capita rural incomes have declined for the first time since 1978. Large numbers of seasonal construction workers have also been forced to return to their villages, and more than 50 million jobless are roaming the country. Back in 1979, the then Communist Party Senior Deputy Chairman Yeh Chien-ying – one of the principals in the 1976 coup d’etat – described the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s as “an appalling catastrophe suffered by all our people.”[48] The real catastrophe, as many must now realise, was the restoration of capitalism in China.
No ‘Peaceful’ Transition
Is it possible that somehow China can find a peaceful road back to socialism? No, that remains a pipe dream. The laws of social development still apply, as they do in the Soviet Union and its one-time satellite states. Capitalism cannot be changed by peaceful means. Only violent revolution can do the trick. A new workers’ revolutionary party must and will be developed – the class struggle will see to that. And it will very likely develop in China before it does in the Soviet Union. For despite all the bourgeois, revisionist and dogmatist propaganda denouncing Mao, there are still many who have not forgotten that it was Mao who led the Chinese people to stand up; it was under his leadership that imperialist domination was ended; and it was he who led the way in the struggle of the masses to eliminate oppression of every kind. That struggle goes on, nor will it end until not only is socialism re-established, but the long-term goal of communism is realised for all humankind.
Notes:
[43] Han Suyin: Wind in the Tower (Jonathan Cape, 1976, p. 381).
[44] Han Suyin, op. cit., p. 282
[45] Ed. Kwan Hayim: China Since Mao (Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1980. p. 61).
[46] Ibid., p. 61.
[47] Raymond Lotta: “The Crisis of Revisionism, or Why Mao Tse-tung Was Right” (A World to Win Quarterly, London, Nov.1989, pp.22-23).
[48] Kwan Hayim, op. cit., p.196.
(Concluded)