THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE END OF MAOISM
Translation of “A Revolução Cultural e o Fim do Maoísmo” by Francisco Martins Rodrigues. Originally published in February of 1998.
In 1969, the 9th Congress of the Communist Party of China proclaimed the definitive triumph of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the wholesale defeat of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping’s “gang” and the “handful of followers of the capitalist road”. China, the Congress assured, would not change color, as had occurred to the Soviet Union.
However, in the years that followed, the Chinese domestic and foreign policies shifted increasingly to the right, amidst murky score-settling, until the liquidation of the “Gang of Four” and the subsequent return to power of Deng Xiaoping dissolved any further doubts as to which side had won the battle, and the bourgeoisie made its superior strength clear. The Cultural Revolution had been a massive failure, and its failure sealed the collapse of not only the Chinese revolution but the entire international Marxist-Leninist line of the 1960s.
The Cultural Revolution and the End of the M-L line.
Around the world, Maoists felt themselves to be the victims of a gigantic act of deception. What had become of the invincible consciousness of the workers and peasants, armed with Mao Zedong Thought? What purpose had the tempestuous mass movements of 1966/67, this “new stage of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat”, served, if in the end a revisionism even more virulent than the Soviet Union’s emerged from it?
With time, those who had most fervently believed in the infallible perspicuity of the “Great Helmsman” became the most bitter detractors of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The crowds waving the Little Red Book had been manipulated, pure and simple. The idyllic “solving of contradictions within the heart of the people” resulted in ferocious combat with many thousands left dead. The bourgeoisie had never been seriously assaulted. Maoism had been a monumental bluff.
Enver Hoxha expressed this disappointment when he scornfully declared in 1978 that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been “neither a revolution, nor cultural, nor proletarian”. Mao had never been anything but a peasant nationalist, a false Marxist nurtured by ancient Chinese philosophy. The CP of China was an amalgam of cliques warring in the shadow of the “struggle between two lines”; the Red Guards, the anarchic bands of fanatical students. The purported struggle between the proletarian and bourgeois lines had transformed into an obscure power dispute between rival factions of the bureaucracy and the military leadership.
Therefore the ex-Maoists buried the dream of the Cultural Revolution. Only this late “Marxist-Leninist” critique took up almost point by point accusations made years earlier by the Soviets. Had they not denounced the Cultural Revolution as the “arbitrary act of the mob, instigated by Mao’s nationalist cabal”, and the anti-Rightist campaign as a smokescreen in the service of the consolidation of a bureaucratic-military dictatorship? Had they not criticized Maoism as a distortion of Leninism, and predicted that Chinese extremism would fall into an understanding with imperialism?
That the M-Ls would come to conclusions similar to those of the Soviets served as food for thought. Because the USSR, behind all its rhetoric of principles, was in reality attacking Mao for calling into question the party apparatus and the "socialist" order. It seemed monstrous to them to call on the masses to "bombard the headquarters"; to call for the continuation of the class struggle (not only in ideology but in the streets) after the seizure of power; to tell the masses that the Communist Party could change colors.
This horror for subversion and "disorder," which was the true background of Soviet criticism, was adopted by the Albanian leaders and their disciples.
Thus, when it was necessary to ascertain what Maoism lacked to lead the revolution further, they condemned it for having dared to unleash turmoil; when it was necessary to overcome Maoism from the left, they repudiated it from the right.
It is not surprising, therefore, that, after having excommunicated the cultural revolution and cleansed itself of its Maoist sins, the M-L current, instead of gaining a renewed revolutionary vigor, as it had announced to the four winds, has instead plunged into a narrow reformist petty-bourgeois progressivism, increasingly difficult to distinguish from revisionism.
By refusing to take note of one of the vastest and most advanced revolutionary movements of our time, disparaging it as simply having been a chaotic riot, the M-L parties cut the already weak ties that bound them to Marxism. Instead of enriching themselves with what the cultural revolution was bringing them, they confused, in the same pedantic condemnation, the conflicting antagonistic social forces. They turned their backs on the revolutionary lessons offered to them by the tragedy of China and drew reactionary lessons from it instead, just as the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie did all over the world, both in the West and the East. And so they put an end to the timid rediscovery of Marxism that they had started years before.
Today it is clear why the Chinese cultural revolution marked the culmination and the beginning of the agony of the M-L current of the 1960s. By breaking with the bourgeois restoration in the USSR, the Chinese communists hoped to demonstrate that their more flexible path - founded on a greater democracy of the masses, confrontation between two lines in the party, voluntary adherence of the peasantry to the revolution, and gradual reabsorption of the bourgeoisie - would lead to the slower but more steadfast advance to socialism. Stalin's mistakes, about which they refused to speak – the rush to industrialization and the excesses of the terror in whose shadow a new bourgeoisie was formed – would be corrected by practice.
But the Chinese way turned out to be as vulnerable to bourgeois involvement as the Soviet way. And from then on, not one, but two major failures in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat remained unexplained. The whole burden of the USSR disaster, which it had been thought possible to overcome with the new Chinese way, fell, with its weight redoubled, on the shoulders of Marxists.
It might seem pessimistic to say that the M-L current of the 1960s ended in the experience of the Cultural Revolution. But that is what actually happened. At the beginning of the century, the communists had a program for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and with it they made the Russian Revolution. Twenty years ago, they thought that they were remaking that program in China after the disaster of the USSR. Today they don't have it, and they will continue to be deprived of it until they explain the social causes of the loss of the revolution in Russia and China.
To retreat from this painful task, to try to evade it with little stories about the mistakes of Stalin and Mao or the betrayals of Khrushchev and Liu Shaoqi, is in fact to leave the ground open to the only two real systems of the present age: private capitalism and its (temporary?) variant of state capitalism. And if the future belongs, with ever clearer necessity, to socialism, the history of the 20th century shows that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie nevertheless continues to function, to re-establish itself from the blows dealt to it and to reabsorb the attempts at proletarian power.
Under these circumstances, cursing the rampant proliferation of opportunism and reformism in the workers' movement is of little use if meanwhile communists don’t overcome the crisis of revolutionary thought in which they have allowed themselves to be imprisoned and formulate a new, enriched program of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, workers do not adhere to a project of revolution that one does not know what it is for.
Lenin once said that "no one in the world can prevent the victory of communism except the communists themselves."
It is high time that we stop giving reason to this harsh prophecy.
With this article, it is not intended, obviously, to write a history of the Chinese cultural revolution, but only to draw attention to a precise point: what led the Maoists to proclaim victory at the very moment when they were losing the battle they had unleashed against the right? Perhaps the clarification of this strange deception will help to better understand the Chinese revolution and to unravel the class thread of Maoism. That will be our self-criticism for the support we gave to it.
A Russian-style Socialism
Initially presented as an educational campaign for the perfecting of socialism, the Cultural Revolution was in reality the upper stage of a deaf political struggle that had been dividing the Chinese party into two wings since liberation. And if Mao unleashed hostilities through literary polemic it was not for the love of frills but because his position on the central committee had reached a critical point.
The truth is that, although above public contestation because of his historical role and the immense prestige he enjoyed among the people, Mao was losing ground as a leader of the party and the state. His conceptions of the uninterrupted heightening of the revolution appeared to a growing sector of communist cadres as a theoretical fantasy, inapplicable to the construction of socialism and fraught with dangers. There was a struggle between two lines, which centered on the question: to follow or not to follow the Soviet line?
Ten years earlier, with the general collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of the dominant sectors of industry and services, the People's China had announced its triumphant entry into the stage of socialist revolution.
By the end of 1956, the state and cooperative sectors encompassed two-thirds of industry, while the rest were made up of mixed enterprises and an insignificant percentage of private enterprises; almost all rural farms had been grouped into 740,000 cooperatives of a higher type, without recourse to the massive repression that had taken place in the Soviet Union; the first Five Year Plan marked the cadence of a period of rapid economic growth; the spectacular rise in the standard of living of the people, the extension of democratic rights, the emancipation of women and oppressed nationalities, and the new mass culture, made the New China a beacon for the national liberation movement.
However, these historic victories could only be mistaken for a socialist revolution because of the belief that the Communist Party's control of power, exercised in the name of the working class, guaranteed the advance to socialism. The truth is that the dictatorship of the proletariat was nothing more than a propaganda slogan. Since China had gone down the road of New Democracy, there were no workers' soviets, not even on paper. Behind the brilliant successes achieved, the social basis of the regime was still the people-democratic dictatorship, an unstable sharing of power between the poor peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the "patriotic" bourgeoisie.
And what is worse is that this "Bloc of Four Classes" increasingly tilted more and more to the side of the bourgeoisie. All the compromise solutions that Maoism had been forced to adopt because of the tremendous backwardness of the productive forces and class relations, and that had allowed for the spectacular victories of the preceding years, now weighed like a choking yoke on the revolution.
The massive incorporation into the new regime of the technicians, officials, administrators, army officers and intellectuals "recovered" from the Kuomintang and won for the revolution at the cost of high salaries; the integration of the former "national" capitalists into the management of the enterprises that had been expropriated from them, with thick compensation and profit sharing; the invasion of the party by the petty-bourgeoisie, anxious to have its share of power; the gulf that remained between the ruling elite and the manual workers; the consolidation of rigid hierarchies in the enterprises, the army and the state - all this made workers' power symbolic. The party had bought the adhesion of the “national” bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, but the latter was not content with the fabulous sums it pocketed - it wanted power.
Under the official "socialist euphoria", the effective direction of society was concentrated in the hands of the bureaucratic and technocratic layer, intertwined with the compact core of the "patriotic" bourgeois, ruling in the name of the working class. Having completed the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist tasks of the revolution, this red bourgeoisie was resolutely opposed to whatever would call its privileges into question. It agreed with "socialism" as long as it meant state capitalism; it agreed with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as long as its own guardianship over the workers and peasants was preserved; it agreed with the leading role of the Communist Party, as long as it served its interests. Thus the People's China was moving uncontrollably toward a re-enactment of the Soviet Union’s model.
With the 8th Party Congress in 1956, the bourgeois tendency, supported by the right turn of the USSR, crystallized into a strong current inside the party, headed by Liu Shaoqi, one of the most prestigious leaders of the party. His orthodox line - priority to heavy industry, technology in the command post, greater economic efficiency, naturally to "create a solid basis for socialist construction" - led straight to the strengthening and greater agency of the bourgeoisie: support for material incentives, greater authority for technocrats and economists, guarantee of capitalist privileges, free market in the countryside, and expropriation of any share of working-class power. It was the same mirage that had led the Soviet Union to sink into state capitalism "in order to arrive more quickly at socialism."
"In the course of the socialist transformation," Liu wrote in September 1956, "the alliance of the working class with the national bourgeoisie has played a positive role in educating and reshaping the bourgeois elements. In the future we can continue this work of uniting, educating and remodeling, so that they can put their knowledge at the service of socialist construction. As can be seen, it is incorrect to consider this alliance as a useless burden." (La revolución cultural proletaria y la derrota del poder obrero en China)
The wage scale, which during the liberation struggle had ensured a certain degree of egalitarianism, was elongated. According to a State Council resolution of August 31, 1955, "a new wage system was established to facilitate the building of socialism. According to the new official table, the range went from 23/24 yuan for an unskilled worker, to 263 yuan for factory directors, and 600 yuan for the Head of State. (Barnett 191)
Even among the workers, differences had to be accentuated to stimulate productivity. In June 1956 an 8-degree wage scale was adopted in industry, based on task-based pay and a bonus system.
"This revision will definitively eradicate the egalitarianism and confusion reigning in the present system and will be an important factor in the anticipated fulfillment of the 1st Five-Year Plan," wrote the trade union newspaper. (Laodong)
At the same time, a new salary scale was adopted in the army, and patents, stripes and insignia were reestablished. The argument was similar:
"All officers shall have the gallons and insignia, so as to make evident the distinction between officers and other ranks and between the various branches of the armed forces. This will not give rise to any conflict between officers and soldiers because their interests are the same." (Survey of China Mainland Press 3-5)
A friend from China recorded in 1962 that the pay of a lieutenant was ten times that of a soldier, and that of a general a hundred times. (Snow 289)
The "Marxist" logic behind these measures was the same one that the Soviets were propagating: once the new power was secured and property was nationalized, tolerance of privilege was not only harmless, but an indispensable engine for the building of socialism.
Mao, clearly, was wavering and compromising. With the "Hundred Flowers" campaign and the article "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People", he tried to limit the concessions to Liuqiaoism by emphasizing the need for the ideological re-education of both the bourgeoisie and the cadres. It was a weak weapon, just when a decisive proletariat-bourgeoisie antagonism was beginning to emerge.
The fear of a rupture with the Soviets, who were intensifying the pressure for a direct alignment with the new theses of their 20th Congress, undoubtedly weighed heavily on this move towards moderation. The article published at the time by Mao, on behalf of the Central Committee, "On the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat", trying to give a more balanced tone to Khrushchev’s brutal turnaround, followed it in essence (ambiguous criticism of Stalin, rehabilitation of the Yugoslav experience, the détente, etc.).
But the source of this vacillation was internal. After all, it was Mao himself who had created the policy of New Democracy, based on an understanding with the bourgeoisie. All the popular-democratic basis of Mao's past experience made it difficult for him to see the new character of the class struggle and pushed him to give in.
The left wing of the Chinese party, however, had strong reserves, accumulated in twenty-two years of revolutionary war of unparalleled scale, in the land reform struggles, etc. It had learned to recognize the right under the most varied "Marxist" masks. It had inherited the most radical aspects of Maoism and resisted its conciliatory face. It was aware, from the Soviet example, of the danger of a bourgeois restoration under the camouflage of socialism.
They eventually won Mao over, convincing him of the need for a counter-offensive when the Hundred Flowers campaign revealed the expansive momentum of bourgeois tendencies at all levels of society, which could no longer be contained by "educational" means alone, especially since Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary of the CC, had set out to gain systematic control of the party apparatus, the economic apparatus, the trade unions, education, youth organizations, women, intellectuals, etc.
During the following years (1958-1965), Mao would launch two successive battles against the Right. He failed to win either one.
Two Lost Battles
With the "Great Leap Forward," based mainly on the initiative of the people's communes in the countryside, the Maoists tried to attack head-on the idea that the economy could only advance at the expense of material incentives, big industries, and market freedom for the petit bourgeoisie.
In an article by Zhang Chunqiao, the future leader of the Cultural Revolution, published in the fall of 1958, "Breaking with the ideas of bourgeois right," an argument was made against notions established as indisputable by the Liushaoqiists:
"Naturally, we do not deny that the inequalities peculiar to bourgeois law cannot be eliminated immediately. But did Marx really defend that bourgeois law and bourgeois hierarchy, instead of being destroyed, should be systematized and deepened?
The result of the attacks on the old system of compensation was to create great differences in living standards among the party cadres (...) No doubt this is stimulating; but it is not enthusiasm for production that is thus stimulated; it is enthusiasm for obtaining fame and wealth, estrangement from the masses, and hence degeneration into bourgeois rightists." (Current Background 3-5)
By then, the commune movement, set in motion by Maoist agitators, had already taken on an irrepressible scope, similar to that of the agrarian reform years before.
The popular communes, formed by the federation of the former cooperatives and comprising thousands of families, put an end to the differences that had been opening up between rich and poor cooperatives, and forced the wealthy peasants to contribute to the rest. Private plots and the right to sell family production on the market were abolished. Everything was reverted to the commune. Free canteens, laundries and nurseries established a much more equal retribution for labor. Furthermore, the commune was not only an economic unit but a political cell.
It was destined to assert itself, in the Maoists' view, as a superior type of socialist organization, self-sufficient and capable of influencing factories and commerce with its example. This is how they hoped to submerge the technocrats. It was, in essence, the old tactic of "encircling the cities from the countryside."
In the industries, where the influence of the Liushaoqiists was more entrenched through party cadres and trade unions, the "Great Leap" had much more modest results, but still succeeded in reducing the scale of wages and forcing the managers, for the first time, to consider the voice of the workers' plenaries.
Despite being hailed by the central committee as an "irresistible tide of mass movement on a national scale" and enshrined in the official press as an innovation of historic scope, the Great Leap Forward was nonetheless doomed to failure. It was not difficult for the rightists to demonstrate the absurdity of claiming to lead the peasants to communism while the economy was not ready for it. The suppression of material incentives and the distribution of food according to need and not according to work done would cause a drop in production. The creation of improvised artisanal industries in the communes had no economic value whatsoever. It was nothing more than a kind of "primitive communism".
One didn't have to wait long. Soon, poor agricultural results confirmed the criticism and the movement went into crisis, although it could not be publicly challenged, because Mao had invested all of his authority in it.
Beginning in 1960, the Central Committee launched a "rectification movement" that had the effect of reducing the communes to a facade. Private plots, which in '58 had virtually disappeared, by 1964 occupied ten to even twenty percent of the communal land and funneled a percentage of the higher production. There was again a proliferation of inequality, street peddling, and usury in the countryside. In '62 Deng Xiaoping issued a directive that became known as "the three freedoms and one contract": extension of land plots for private use, free sale in the market, the right of enlargement of small businesses, and production quotas by family rather than by brigades.
In the factories, also in the name of raising productivity, both the discretionary power of the managers and rivalry among the workers through the race for prizes among the production teams were re-established.
The fact is that, from 1962 onwards, the recovery of industrial and agricultural production and the general improvement of the standard of living consolidated the position of the Liushaoqiists.
Mao's defeat was sealed at the Central Committee meeting in Lushan in the summer of 1959, where for the first time Marshal Peng Dehuai, Minister of Defense, openly contested his ideas. In order to obtain Peng’s resignation and his replacement by Lin Biao, Mao had to grant Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping virtually total control over the party and the economic apparatus.
The Maoists came out of the battle of the people's communes weakened because their line of deepening the revolution had proved to be utopian. It was under these circumstances, with a deeply deteriorated internal situation and the left of the party losing ground across the board, that Mao launched his second battle, in a kind of flanking maneuver - the campaign against Soviet revisionism - with which he hoped would delegitimize Liu Shaoqi’s mentors and ricochet back to Liu Shaoqi’s positions.
The Khrushchevist leadership of the CPSU, knowing the difficulties Mao was facing, intensified the pressure to force the CCP to align itself with its policy of global understanding with the United States; in 1960, against Chinese objections, they did not hesitate to go as far as breaking the cooperation agreements.
Despite this, the Liushaoqiists, claiming the need to "defend the unity of the communist movement," led the CPC to endorse the Statement of the 81 Parties, a pacifist concoction that had been enhanced by a few revolutionary amendments. The CP of China was in danger of becoming a prisoner of revisionism, only excepting the right to a symbolic demarcation.
It was the miscalculation of the Soviets, in redoubling their attacks on China in their 22nd Congress, that ended up favoring the Maoist counteroffensive and taking away space from Liu and Deng.
In 1963, Mao, supported by a team of "leftist" theoreticians under the leadership of Chen Boda, unleashed a bombardment against revisionism, Soviet and international: the Letter in 25 Points, with the proposal of a new general line of the communist movement, the documents on the Stalin question, on Yugoslav self-government, criticizing the parliamentary “cretinism” of the French and Italian parties, etc, despite the limitations that can be pointed about them today, had an explosive effect at the time because they challenged the hitherto uncontested hegemony of the Soviets and countered it with criticism from the left in the name of Marxist-Leninist principles.
The CP of China, backed by the Party of Labor of Albania, became the focus of a new international M-L current that called for a break with revisionism, denounced the bourgeois restoration in the USSR, and raised again the banner of revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It seemed that a new epoch was beginning in the communist movement, after decades of reformist decadence.
It did not take long, nevertheless, for the internal weakness of the Maoist campaign to become evident. This was because the denunciation of revisionism required an analysis of the origins of the bourgeois restoration in the Soviet Union. It was necessary to move from the defense of Stalin against the "usurpers" to a left critique of Stalinism, of the 7th Congress of the Communist International, of its dissolution. However, Maoism was incapable of entering this path, which would have forced it to question its own ideology of New Democracy. Soon the CP of China put an end to the critique and was left with nothing new to say.
In practice, the anti-revisionism campaign became a major diplomatic offensive to flirt with the nationalist bourgeoisies, with the aim of creating a Third Worldist camp. Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, the moderate and "pragmatic" Maoist, played a prominent role in this recovery, and his shift to the right was to be confirmed in the following years.
Instead of appearing on the international scene to support the revolutionary struggle of the working class and a new communist current, China dedicated itself to gaining allies with the nationalist regimes in Indonesia, Algeria, Guinea, Ghana, etc. A few years later, it would discredit itself in sinister endorsements of the reactionary forces in Biafra, Pakistan, Ceylon, etc., all in the name of the struggle against "social-imperialist hegemonism".
Hence the great ideological offensive of 1963, which initially seemed aimed at the elaboration of a new program of the revolutionary proletariat and the creation of a new Communist International, was shipwrecked in a bourgeois diplomatic offensive. The militant internationalism of the first proclamations descended into a nationalism as sordid as that of the USSR. The Marxist-Leninist parties that had begun to emerge sank into the confusion of Third Worldism, abandoned to their fate or degraded to the role of agencies of Chinese foreign policy.
Maoism lost the international anti-revisionist battle just as it had lost the battle of the popular communes. It lacked the stamina to become a consistent revolutionary alternative. That is what the Cultural Revolution movement proved definitively.
From the Two-line Fight to the Three-line Fight
Despite previous failures, Mao believed he could set in motion revolutionary forces capable of blocking the bourgeois ascension. By now, he would have no doubt about the lessons to be learned from the Soviet Union's turnaround. He'd declared in the CC:
"Socialist society extends over a quite long historical period, in the course of which classes, contradictions and class struggle continue to exist, as well as the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road and the danger of a capitalist restoration."
At a conference in late '64, Mao presented a 23-point document in which he mentioned for the first time "the party officials who have undertaken the capitalist road."
In the countryside, the Maoists waged from 1963-65 a delaying battle against the spread of capitalism through the "socialist education in the countryside" and the "four cleanups" movement, whose aim was to boost poor peasant associations. But these measures were clearly being sabotaged by Liu and Deng, who issued, on behalf of the CC, "enforcement" directives oriented to the opposite direction.
In 1965, Mao felt that no more could be expected for the extension to the cities of the socialist education movement. Revisionist influence at all levels was apparent. At the end of that year, a play calling into question, through historical allusions, the ousting of Peng Dehuai was staged to great official approval. It would not be long before Mao was publicly challenged.
Mao traveled to Shanghai, where he rallied his supporters and had an article violently criticizing the play published. At the same time, Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, encouraged debates among Beijing's students and intellectuals against "bourgeois culture." The Cultural Revolution movement was put in motion.
It is possible that the rightists did not initially take Mao's literary offensive, the debates over education, or the first Red Guard groups very seriously. As usual, they noisily adhered to Mao's exotic new idea of a "cultural revolution," criticized the author of the play, and rushed to put their men in the group charged with leading the "revolution”. The group, headed by Peng Zhen, produced in February an innocuous programmatic statement in which everything was reduced to the need to perfect the ideology. It then set about bringing to order the students who had distinguished themselves in challenging the academic authorities, which was not difficult because the atmosphere among the students was mostly favorable to the right. It then devoted itself to calling to order the students who had distinguished themselves in challenging the academic authorities, which did not prove difficult because the atmosphere among students was mostly favorable to the right.
After 17 years of "socialist" China, more than 40 percent of students still came from bourgeois families, although they constituted only 5 percent of the population (Snow 138). The entrance system kept the children of the workers away from the universities. In Beijing University, the percentage of students from working-class and peasant families had dropped from 67 percent to only 38 percent between 1958 and 1962 (Snow 137).
This social composition explains why universities became a privileged place for the extreme manifestation of both currents. The children of the poor and of the rich found themselves face to face with each other and could confront the abyss that separated them. This is an aspect that is forgotten when comparing the struggles of Chinese students to those of students in the capitalist world.
With the Maoist youth being persecuted in the name of Maoism, the Cultural Revolution descended into a farce. Mao had to deploy new reserves. He had the CC approve the May 16 Circular, relaunching the criticism of the right, and particularly of Peng Zhen. In a meeting of the Political Bureau two days later, Lin Biao denounced that
“representatives of the bourgeoisie infiltrated into the Party and its leading organs have formed an authoritarian faction which has gained control of the government machinery, the political power, the military power, and the headquarters of the ideological front. They have united to engage in subversive activities and cause great disturbances (Revó. Cul. dans la Chine pop. 35).”
Ultimately, Mao had to use all of his popularity to break through the web of resistance that was blocking the student movement. As Beijing resisted, he attacked in Wuhan. At a triumphal reception prepared by his loyal supporters in the city, after swimming across the Yangtze, he proclaimed that "the Red Guards are good." He then broadcast his own highly subversive dazibao, "Bombard the headquarters," and received, in a massive rally, the Red Guard armband. The commotion among the youth was enormous, and the right, unable to stage similar mass demonstrations, had to compromise. The Maoists seized the majority in the editorial offices of the People's Daily and the Red Flag, began to orchestrate a sharp press campaign against the "bourgeois elements" (who were not named), recomposed the Central Cultural Revolution Group, and decided to go to battle again in the Central Committee.
The new August resolution, which became the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, also known as the “Sixteen Points”, voted through by a narrow majority, still contained many elements of conciliation and aimed only at isolating the rightist ringleaders, which Mao judged enough to reverse the course of events:
"Rely firmly on the revolutionary left to isolate the most reactionary rightists, defeat the center and unite with the great majority" to "reach the unity of more than 95 percent of the leaders and the masses." "The aim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to revolutionize the ideology of the people and, as a result, to achieve bigger, faster, better and more economical results in all fields of work."
All this still had very little to do with a real revolution. Mao was bringing into play the battering ram of the initiative of the youth, but this attack suffered, like the previous ones, from the absence of workers' roots. The discipline and submission in the factories were much more difficult to break, because there, the dominance of the technocrats and union bosses was absolute. The role of the Red Guards was to "set the prairie on fire"; the rest, Mao hoped, would come later.
The Communist Youth, with some 30 million members, was dissolved; to free the Red Guards, schools were closed; rallies followed one after another, and the Red Guards went on "long marches" to rouse the masses. This was the folk period of the cultural revolution; students tore down statues, criticized backward customs, banned Western classical music, and displayed rhetorical and extravagant proclamations.
The masses that flocked to the rallies felt that the organs of power were being challenged and that something was brewing, but they didn't emerge from it any more enlightened. Denouncing the real working conditions, the daily injustices, continued to be taboo, because everyone was afraid of being mistaken for counter-revolutionaries.
All in all, it was a great festival of demagogy about the "sovereign will of the masses," but it was dissolving for lack of a target. Only in the army, where Lin Biao, on the offensive, was disseminating by the millions the Little Red Book of Mao's thoughts, did the atmosphere change. To give an example, ranks were again abolished and high salaries reduced, and a return to the principle of "serving the people" was preached. In any case, it should be noted that the extent of democracy in the army was always limited, because the purging of rightist officers was not the responsibility of the soldiers but of the Military Commission of the CC. Except for Luo Ruiqing, no important chief was purged, which would later have disastrous consequences.
By the end of '66, it was becoming clear that the revolution was leaving its "cultural" phase, sustained by the naïve euphoria of the students, and was entering a new stage. Everyone had become a Red Guard, and conflicts erupted between left and right-wing groups. In Beijing, the "Liandong (United Action)” committee, inspired by the rightists, promoted a demonstration of 30,000 students in December, in which the Maoist leaders of the Central Group - Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao - were criticized. It was the "black wind of December."
The struggle against the right was heating up. And in the dynamics of that struggle, the Maoist camp began to split into two branches, which quickly discovered that they were fighting for different goals. Should the struggle be conducted with restraint to "isolate the handful of ringleaders," or should the protests and demands of the working masses be unleashed without limits?
Shanghai gave the first hint, because of the vitality of the Maoist current there, which was implanted among the workers. In the course of the bloody fighting in which the Maoists dislodged the Municipal Committee of the Liushaoqiists, by surprise a vast strike movement emerged, which in a few days paralyzed the port, then the railways, and then finally the entire region. By January '67, the wave of strikes had spread to Wuhan, Beijing, Manchuria, etc. Manufacturing facilities and residences were occupied and in several factories the directors were expelled and the management was taken over by the workers' plenaries.
The workers raised demands that had hitherto been stifled by the "red bosses": effective enforcement of the 8-hour day and weekly rest period, wage increases, construction of housing, and labor contracts for the masses of casual workers.
Astonishing accusations surfaced in broad daylight, disseminated by the Red Guards to the entire country. There were factories with inhuman work rhythm, severe working hours, and prison-like surveillance. The protesters were being put into "collective re-education" disciplinary brigades where they were beaten and deprived of their ration tickets; the sick were being abandoned to their fate. All the power and privileges in many of these "socialist" factories had been appropriated by the brigade leaders, party and union cadres, who were the staunchest defenders of Liu Shaoqi's line. There were factories where the former bosses and their relatives and foremen had remained, after the liberation, in the leading positions, subjecting the workers to exploitation very similar to that of the old times (Daubier 183-197).
The Maoist leadership in Shanghai. headed by Zhang Chunqiao, reacted with panic to the strike and protest movement, which it classified as an "economicist" movement blown up by the right wing to disrupt the economy. He issued a "Message to all the people of Shanghai" (January 4) and, days later, an "Urgent Notice," condemning the strikes and occupation of public buildings and threatening sanctions if order was not restored.
But the undercurrent was unstoppable, and Zhang Chunqiao was dragged into proclaiming a commune government in the city, that is, an administration composed entirely of delegates elected by the mass organizations. The idea of the commune, in fact, had been born in the course of the movement as the logical solution to ensure workers' democracy. The experience of 1958 with the peasant communes was now bearing fruit in the working class and its political consequences were much more advanced. The generalization of the communes in the cities would inevitably bring about a revolutionary civil war and the overthrow of the entire system of established power.
Mao immediately condemned this initiative, with very unclear arguments. Zhang Chunqiao returned to Shanghai with instructions to dissolve the commune and institute "triple union committees" as a form of local government, with representatives of the army, cadres, and mass organizations. In the following months, this was to be the Maoists' point of support for not letting power "fall to the street," and the origin of the fierce fighting that spread to several regions in the summer. The revolution had finally matured by raising its key problem - the problem of power.
On January 18, delegates of "leftist" groups from various regions of the country, meeting at the headquarters of the "Total Struggle" committee, criticized Zhang as "conservative." The left was led, by the dialectic of class struggle, to combat not only the right, but also those it had designated as "centrists''.
What the “Leftists” Wanted
The orthodox Maoists were beginning to become aware of the "ultra-leftist" danger and the need to wage combat in two fronts. Here is how in July 1967, a Shanghai newspaper characterized the ultra-left:
"Recently, a self-styled 'new current of ideas' has begun to take hold in our society. Its content is to distort the main contradiction of socialist society by presenting it as a contradiction between what it calls 'privileged owners of property and power' and the masses of people. It calls for a constant 'redistribution' of social property and political power under the dictatorship of the proletariat. It considers the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a contest for power and wealth 'within the reactionary ruling class'. It confuses the revolutionary headquarters of Mao-Lin with the bourgeois headquarters of Liu-Deng-Dao. It singles out all the leading cadres as privileged and denounces them all as the target of the revolution." (China News Summary)
In reality, the leftist groups never questioned Maoism, which was the source of their legitimacy, and sought to direct it to a higher stage. In light of the experiences of the previous year, they argued that the revolution could not be limited to the toppling of a handful of leaders, but should target an entire class - the new bourgeoisie that had come to power during the 17 years of popular rule and was becoming "a vampire of the workers". They accused the army of serving as a stronghold for this bourgeoisie. They warned that the uprising of the masses was being directed into a mere recomposition of power, when it was necessary to subvert it.
In particular, the left demanded during the summer of '67:
1) The dismissal of Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi (the foreign minister) as the most prominent representatives of China's "red capitalists" after the fall of Liu and Deng;
2) The radical overhaul of the army officer corps, kept sheltered from criticism by Mao and Lin Biao in the name of the interests of defense and national unity;
3) The replacement of the triple union committees by committees composed exclusively of delegates elected by the mass organizations;
4) Stop paying dividends to the National Capitalists, abolish their high salaries, dismiss them from administrative positions, and transform the mixed enterprises into state enterprises;
5) The end of the foreign policy of alliance with secondary imperialisms (France, etc.) and with the national bourgeoisies and the effective support of the guerrilla struggles;
6) The abandonment of the country's nuclear program, in which they saw a blow to the principle of revolutionary popular war;
7) Finally, the institution of the commune in China, based on the principles of the Paris Commune: the abolition of the professional army, replaced by the people in arms; the retribution of officials and cadres according to the average wage of the workers; and elections for all public offices, subject to removal at any time by a simple vote of the electors.
Naturally, the possibility of implementing most of these demands was very remote, but they dispel the legend of the "ultra-leftists" as a bunch of irresponsible fools and show their clear-sightedness regarding the neuralgic points of the revolution that China was going through.
Even more remarkable is the series of programmatic documents edited by various extreme-left groups already in 1968, in the middle of the repression period, and which were collected by the "Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Great Alliance Committee" (Shengwulian). We have reproduced some passages:
"Despite the criticism and denunciation of the bourgeois reactionary line initiated last year, they were limited to exposing the crimes of certain individuals. The class roots that gave birth to the reactionary line and the bureaucratic structure that served it were only touched on."
"We consider that 90 percent of the senior cadres should be removed or at least subjected to re-education. They already constitute a decadent class, set apart, bent on defending their own interests. Their relations with the people have changed from relations between rulers and ruled to relations between exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed. Most of them aspire, consciously or not, to take the capitalist road, to protect and develop everything that concerns capitalism. Can we overthrow them by persuading them to give up their high wages and other benefits resulting from their legal bourgeois rights? The proletariat has already made efforts in this direction. The multiple and wide-ranging concessions made by Chairman Mao to the bourgeoisie are the concentrated expression of these efforts."
"The appearance of a privileged class indicates that certain relations of production have degenerated. Although the economic bases appear in general to be socialist, the immense superstructure can only be considered essentially capitalist (...). The socialist transformation of the economic base undertaken in China was carried out by peaceful means and the transformation was not complete. The superstructure was even less shaken. That is why the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is, in essence, the real beginning of the socialist revolution in China."
"In reality, this is a civil war that results directly from a major political revolution; it is a violent revolution necessary for the proletarian revolutionaries to seize and retain political power."
"In the revolutionary arena, there is no ultra-leftist current of thought. The struggle against so-called 'ultra-leftism' is a new form of repression on proletarian revolutionaries."
"The triple union that serves as the basis for the revolutionary committees is tantamount to putting back in charge the bureaucrats overthrown during the January [1967] revolution. It will thus inevitably become a form of political power usurped by the bourgeoisie, in which the armed forces and the bureaucrats will have the leading role (...) If the dictatorship of these committees constitutes the outcome of the first great cultural revolution, China will certainly follow the path of the Soviet Union and the people will again fall under the bloody fascist domination of capitalism." (Revó. Cul. dans la Chine pop. 395-426)
As is clearly understandable, these positions could not have been the product of "anarchic gangs"; they demonstrated a political maturity that only real vanguard forces could achieve.
When Western sympathizers of Maoism, such as Bettelheim, Snow, Daubier, J. Robinson, etc., spread the thesis of "anarchic gangs," they did so for their own petty-bourgeois reformist vision of the revolution in China, as became clear as new information filtered in about the events of 1967.
Among the far-left groups that had a more prominent role and greater mass influence were: the "May 16" group (cited in the Chinese press as the "5-16"), formed in Beijing from the first Marxist-Leninist nucleus that emerged at the university in 1966; after the arrest of some of its leaders in February 1967, a congress of delegates took place on July 1 at which the group was structured as a nationwide underground organization; was in the autumn banned as a "secret and counter-revolutionary group"; the "Great April 22 Rebel Army," the second mass organization in Guangxi province; the "Red Flag Army," formed by war veterans, based in Beijing and with branches in Chongqing, Nanjing, and Xi'an; in Shanghai, the "Total Struggle" committee; in Guangzhou, the "August 1st Combat Corps," formed by veterans in reserve, and the "Red Flag" group; in Hunan province, a coalition of twenty groups of Red Guards and rebel workers was formed as early as October 1967, claiming two to three million supporters, the aforementioned Shengwulian; similar organizations existed in Hubei, Sichuan provinces, and in all urban settlements.
Assessments by the Red Guards and Western sources reported 30 to 40 million followers of the far left in the summer of '67 - not only students, but also large contingents of workers and employees.
This vast influence alone explains why the far left at the time had five representatives in the CCRG, all of whom were editors of the Red Flag, the Party's theoretical magazine: Wang Li, Lin Jie, Mu Xin, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu. The first four were dismissed in the fall of '67 when the offensive against "ultra-leftism" was unleashed, and the last one a few months later.
"Ultra-leftism" was in reality the most advanced sector of the movement, which had to eventually emerge from the struggles of the Cultural Revolution, and which had been germinating much further back, during the war, the land reform, and the class struggles that followed the liberation. At first unconditional followers of Maoism, they discovered in the course of the struggle its limitations and tried to overcome them, to win Mao to their side without ever contesting him.
This was their great weakness - they had no real political autonomy because they could not criticize Mao's centrism. They were tied to him. That is why the need for the reorganization of the Communist Party was never publicly raised. This inability to break openly with the center condemned the revolution to defeat.
The Victory and Defeat of Mao Zedong
From the Shanghai Commune onwards, the left-wing tendency began to gain real mass support thanks to the boldness with which it took up the Maoist slogans to carry them through to the end: to liberate initiative and grassroots democracy and to eliminate the "headquarters" of the bourgeoisie once and for all. The right wing, for its part, resisted, entrenched also in Mao's conciliatory positions.
The struggle between the two wings was exacerbated when, during the May 1st parade, Zhou Enlai stood at the rostrum flanked by Zhu De, Chen Yun, Chen Yi, all of whom had already been widely criticized as outsiders to the revolution. It was a challenge by Mao's chief protégé to the Red Guards.
During the spring and summer, conflicts were escalating all over China. Leftist workers and students rose up against the Liushaoqiist authorities in the revolutionary committees, tried to dismiss them, and were fiercely repressed by groups of right-wing Red Guards, often protected by the army, acting supposedly as an arbiter. The struggle took on the dimensions of a full-blown civil war. Let's remember some of the most serious incidents:
In Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, in Henan, the "February 7 Commune," which was attended by one hundred thousand people, demands in a rally on May 26 the dismissal of the local authorities, linked to the rightists. The rally is attacked, resulting in dozens of deaths, a thousand wounded, three hundred arrested. Four days later, the right attacks the main bastion of the "leftists," the spinning mill No. 6, where they were entrenched. The building is set on fire and stormed, leaving many dead and wounded (Revó. Cul. dans la Chine pop. 343).
In June/July, in the large industrial center of Wuhan, daily battles take place between the workers "headquarters", supported by the Red Guards, and the very powerful rightist group "The Million Heroes". In response to the intervention of Zhou Enlai and central government envoys in an attempt to stop the massacre, the "Million Heroes" respond with an uprising, which is supported by the army. Wang Li, of the Central Group of the Cultural Revolution, is arrested and wounded. The steel complex and the university are stormed by the rightists, who kill hundreds if not thousands of people. Order is only restored when the city is taken over by aviation and navy forces, at Mao's behest. The "Million Heroes" are disarmed and Wang Li is welcomed to Beijing by a triumphant demonstration.
But in reality, the surrender of the rightists was based on a compromise accepted by Zhou Enlai that they would not be punished. The military commander of the city, the "butcher" Chen Zaidao, as the leftists called him, was a few months later rehabilitated by Mao, who declared that "he has studied well”.
It was justified then the assertion that
"from the Wuhan mutiny onwards the center of gravity of the cultural revolution shifts definitively toward the open repression of the Maoist extreme left and the rehabilitation of 95 percent of the cadres." (Weber 30)
In Guangzhou, where the leftist groups had gained practical control of power earlier in the year, the province is placed under military command. General Huang Yongsheng declared the leftist organizations outside the law, and an armed struggle was waged for several months, ending only in the spring of 1968 with the annihilation of the left. General Huang was later appointed, in recognition for his services, as Lin Biao's adjunct.
However, in Beijing, all summer long, the skirmishes that had more repercussions abroad were taking place. The Red Guards were violently contesting Marshal Chen Yi's continued foreign policy and demanding his resignation. After a brief occupation of the ministry on May 15, they organized fighting sessions and hunger strikes in August, keeping the ministry under permanent siege. Chen Yi was momentarily forced to give in to their demands, declaring support for the guerrillas in Cambodia and Burma (which contradicted Zhou Enlai's policy of alliance with Prince Sihanouk and the Burmese generals). The premises were occupied again when the Red Guards discovered that secret negotiations were going on for an American withdrawal agreement from Vietnam. Zhou Enlai himself was even besieged for two days and two nights by half a million Red Guards, who demanded self-criticism for his dubious policies and wanted to know the CC's secret documents. The British mission in Beijing was ransacked and set on fire in retaliation against the British repression in Hong Kong, etc.
By now, the criticisms that had been leveled since the beginning of the year at the great moderator Zhou Enlai (the same one whom Western Maoists admired for his "prodigious political sense, subtlety, and flexibility") were beginning to extend to those whom Mao had promoted as the leaders of the left and the main responsible for the Cultural Revolution: Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao. Their dubious interventions disillusioned the vanguard sectors, harried by the growing pressure from the rightists. Mao's wing thus risked being politically discredited if it did not take measures against the "leftists”.
And what was more serious for the Maoist power was that the leftists, having lost confidence in the rulers, were beginning to unify on a national scale and were coming to the conclusion that they could not be reliant on the army's protection. They needed to create their own armed defense. After a particularly subversive editorial published in August 1's Red Flag, "The proletariat must have arms in hand," various groups of Red Guards and revolutionary rebels began to assault armament convoys and stockpiles, and even began to disarm army units, so that they could stand up to the right. This last initiative convinced the Maoist leadership to go on the offensive against the left, before it was too late.
Mao, returning to Beijing in early September after a trip through the province, declares public support for Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi and harshly condemns the leftists. The "5-16" group is denounced as:
"a counterrevolutionary conspiratorial organization steered by class enemies from within and without." (Revó. Cul. dans la Chine pop. 313)
On September 2nd, a rally by revolutionary rebels in Nanjing against the commander of the military region is stopped by intervention of Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing. On September 5th a CC directive is issued for the immediate disarmament of the Red Guards. On September 12th a rally of 500 groups loyal to Mao is organized in Beijing, demanding the total destruction of the "5-16" and all "leftists". As a result, the leftist elements are purged from the leadership of the Cultural Revolution.
As became later apparent, this "adjustment" corresponded to the political liquidation of the core of the Cultural Revolution and a retreat to positions of compromise with the right. In the following months, under the slogan "dare to unite with the cadres," a crackdown on those guilty of "excesses" followed, and the mass rehabilitation of leaders and officials criticized and dismissed during the revolution.
Under the guise of revolutionary committees, the army takes over the maintenance of order in the provinces, replacing the completely disarticulated party. The organizations of the Red Guards and revolutionary rebels are subordinated to the army. The "leftists" who resisted were massacred, with bloodbaths in Guangzhou and Guangxi. In July 1968 there is no more resistance left, and the Maoists congratulate themselves on their simultaneous victory over the right and the "ultra-left in the service of the right”.
In this ruthless elimination, the politicians generally regarded abroad as the left wing of the Cultural Revolution - Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Lin Bia - and the leadership of Shanghai - Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan - collaborated more or less wholeheartedly.
By annihilating "ultra-leftism" through the army, Mao liquidated the living forces of the revolution, deprived himself of his only barrier against the right, and thus would come crashing down in the face of its slow return. The tragic outcome of the Cultural Revolution is summed up to this.
The invincible strength of Maoism had been its ability to sail the revolution's main current, feeding on its momentum and accelerating its march. Now, however, that capacity was exhausted because Maoism was unable to confront the higher level to which the class struggle had reached - it was no longer a question of "contradictions within the people" but of the struggle to liquidate the bourgeoisie. The popular-democratic dictatorship was no longer any use: one either advanced to the dictatorship of the proletariat or retreated to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
In 1969, this option was still invisible to most Maoists, because they believed that the removal of the right-wing leaders and the control of power by the army constituted an insurmountable barrier to any attempt at bourgeois restoration. From the days of the revolutionary war, Mao retained a deep-seated confidence in the potential of the people's army as a "school of the people”.
The 9th Party Congress enshrined the preponderance of the army in the CC. A large proportion of the delegates were army officers. Lin Biao was declared Mao's "successor. But the army could no longer play the role of the days of the liberation struggle, when it was an instrument of poor peasants and workers. It was now an armed body plunged into a society in upheaval where the bourgeoisie was continually ascending, projected upward by the very development of the productive forces.
The emphatic declarations of victory for the cultural revolution and repudiation for Liu and Deng by the congress had a precise meaning: the cadres and the bourgeoisie could rest assured that order would return and their privileges would be guaranteed, as long as they did not challenge the power of the army.
From that point onwards, the balance of power defined by the congress was steadily degraded. And as the Maoists belatedly tried to oppose the advance of the counter-revolution they had opened the doors to, they were in turn eliminated one by one. The liquidation of the left by the center swept in, in a new phase, the liquidation of the center by the right.
In 1970, Chen Boda, the most eminent theoretician of Maoism, was purged without explanation. The cause was the cover he had given to the "ultra-leftists" in the '67 demonstrations, which the right did not forgive him for. He was later tried.
In 1971, it was Lin Biao's turn to try to feverishly oppose the slow marginalization of the army from the command posts. He organized a conspiracy, about which little is known to this day, but which was allegedly precipitated by Mao's decision to welcome Nixon to China, and was killed in obscure circumstances.
Finally, with Mao's death, the "Gang of Four" was ousted from power and arrested, after a deceptive "second revolution" in which they tried, no longer with any chance, to revive mass mobilization against the unstoppable rise of Deng, the recognized head of the new Chinese bourgeoisie.
Mao Zedong died alone, among the rubble of the revolution of which he had been the undisputed "helmsman" for so many years. And in 1980, the Cultural Revolution was repudiated, its main leaders condemned, and Liu Shaoqi solemnly rehabilitated. From then on, the course that China is following today was set.
A Useless Revolution?
The first aspect that draws one's attention in the Chinese Cultural Revolution is the disproportion between its undertakings and the goals set for it. It was, as we can see today, a socialist revolution, the only solution capable of crowning and assuring the popular conquests achieved in the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist revolution of 1949. The working class, supported by the poor of the countryside and the cities, had to overthrow the "red" bourgeoisie that had come to power at the expense of the liberation struggle. It was necessary to destroy by force the "socialist" state apparatus in which the bourgeoisie was entrenched, replacing it with revolutionary organs of the Soviet type. There had to be a transition from degenerating popular democracy to the dictatorship of the proletariat. And this socialist revolution could only be brought to victory under the leadership of a renewed communist party capable of ensuring the hegemony of the proletariat.
None of these conditions were met. The social goals of the revolution were obscured by the "cultural" label, as if the danger of bourgeois restoration came from certain wrong ideas rather than from a class that produced those ideas. Under the radical calls for the "integral dictatorship of the proletariat," a great vagueness as to class alignment always prevailed in the official documents. The heated class struggle taking place in the country was hidden under the ideological proclamations.
On the other hand, although the revolution was baptized as "proletarian", the working class played a merely supporting role, not that of leading class. The leading force was made up of intellectuals and students, who called the poor peasants, workers, employees to their side. For this very reason, the working class did not impose its hegemony through a network of soviets of factory delegates; it participated, diluted among the other classes, in the revolutionary committees, where a confused radicalism of a petty-bourgeois character predominated. And also because of this, the leading body of the revolution was not the communist party, dismembered by the internal struggle and largely inclined toward the bourgeois camp, but the army, which functioned as a caricature of a party.
That a revolution sparked under these conditions would sink into chaos and eventually be won by the bourgeoisie is not surprising. Bourgeois revolutions can triumph even with a great deal of confusion and spontaneity, because their mission is to coronate an already existing bourgeois economic power. But proletarian revolution, if it does not rely on a high level of workers' consciousness and organization, is lost. That is what happened.
Second question: why did the Maoist bloc have sufficient clarity to denounce the danger of bourgeois restoration under the mask of socialism, had the audacity to call on the masses to disorganize the state apparatus and the party, and yet set such narrow and misleading goals for the revolution? Mao and the Maoists thought it possible to put a stop to bourgeois degeneration without calling into question the previous class alliances. A typical trait of Maoism has always been the belief that concessions to the bourgeoisie could be compensated with educational measures: re-education through manual labor, appeal to simplicity and modesty, "serving the people"... However, without the effective economic and political power of the working class, this pedagogy could only bear superficial and, in the long run, poisoned fruits. Cloaked in Maoist slogans, the bourgeoisie gradually took over all the power.
It is compelling to conclude that Mao and his followers carried over to the second, socialist stage of the Chinese revolution the popular-democratic concepts they had relied on in the first stage. Mao's Marxism was deformed by the course of the revolution itself: a protracted peasant revolutionary war in which the working class played a secondary role, in which the army appeared alongside the party as the leading organ, and in which alliance with part of the bourgeoisie was possible.
From this Mao drew the idea of the decisive role that could be played by the peasants in the passage to socialism, as well as the belief that China's own backwardness would be a favorable condition for the advance of the revolution.
Having set out for the new stage of the revolution with these backward notions, Mao viewed it from the narrow perspective of a reform of the state apparatus, imposed by the uprising of the masses. He wanted to move towards communism, but it was a peasant, people's-democratic, essentially petty-bourgeois "communism." He was therefore taken by surprise to find that the class struggle exceeded its assigned goals. He viewed as "excesses" fighting what was the advance of the revolution. Hence his inevitable swing from the left to the center as the revolution grew.
Third question: must we then conclude that the Soviets were correct when they classified Mao as a "pseudo-Marxist" and a long-time "revisionist"?
It seems to us that only those who give nothing for the revolution can believe that the CP of China would have been led from the defeat and deadlock of 1927 to the conquest of power, the commune movement, the critique of revisionism, and the struggles of the cultural revolution by a "pseudo-Marxist." This prodigious leap of a quarter of humanity, from the darkness of feudalism to the impetuous spread of demonstrations and dazibaos calling for an egalitarian society, would have been inconceivable without the action of leaders of exceptional stature, themselves the product of the great revolutionary tide that upheaved China for decades.
The new problem posed by the Cultural Revolution could not be solved by a clumsy and foolish repudiation of Mao - indisputably a genius of the peasant revolutionary war and a Marxist of merit. The problem was to understand the social causes of the exhaustion of the Chinese revolution and the ideological limits that led Maoism to collapse after decades of blazing victories. But this was the kind of criticism that could not be made by the Soviets.
Fourth question: why did the left wing of the Cultural Revolution, the only one that came close to the Marxist understanding of the tasks of the revolution, prove to be so weak, ideologically and materially, that it did not have the strength to break with the Maoist banner, initiate in the course of the struggle the reconstitution of the Communist Party and the workers', poor peasants' and soldiers' soviets, and did not produce leaders up to the task at hand?
Here we touch on the social limits of the Chinese revolution, similar in certain respects to those of the Russian revolution. The passage to socialist revolution imposed itself as the only chance to defend, consolidate and deepen the democratic revolutionary conquests of the first stage. But socialism was, in the social conditions of China, a premature birth, and therefore almost certainly destined to miscarry: the working class, although growing, was still an insignificant minority, it had no traditions of struggle for hegemony, it had not been able to take over the Communist Party, to transform it entirely into its party, it had not learned how to create organs of workers' power. Even if the upheavals had continued for a few more years, it would be very difficult for the working class to make the leap it needed to make to become the ruling class of the revolution.
This weakness explains the weakness of the left wing and the polarization of the struggle between the bourgeois revisionist current and the Maoist current. The decisive battle was fought between the right and the center. The left was shredded between the two. As in the Russian revolution in the 1920s; with the difference that there the left did not configure itself with the same clarity as in China.
Fifth question, derived from the previous one: if China was not yet socially mature enough for socialism, should the communists not have recognized that the aim of the revolution was to liberate the capitalist relations and let the country mature, in the long run, for the socialist revolution? Didn't the claim to advance towards socialism by force of will, without meeting the minimum economic and social conditions, reveal a voluntarist deformation of Marxism, which brought about monstrous human sacrifices, because they were useless from the historical point of view? In other words, is it not the case that Deng Xiaoping was and is right today when he proclaims socialism as a goal for "a hundred years from now," through the liberation of the mercantile economy?
This argument, which Kautsky already used against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, if we strip away the "Marxist" wrapping, is equivalent to demanding that the masses of workers and peasants take charge of the bourgeois revolution, since the bourgeoisie is incapable of it, and then meekly hand over power to it so that it can fulfill its historic mission of developing capitalism.
It is a thesis that regards the working class and the exploited masses as cannon fodder, in charge of pulling the cart of history and without aspirations to power. It cannot conceive that the workers, once they have taken the initiative in the revolution, no longer want to let it go and, even facing an almost certain defeat, are fighting for its uninterrupted deepening, against the return of wage slavery.
No one can say that the proletarian revolution in China (or the Soviet October Revolution) was doomed from the start to remain within the framework of state capitalism, which today is degenerating before our eyes into unrestricted capitalism. It was unpredictable what influence each of these revolutions could exert on the world revolutionary movement and what reflexes it would in turn receive from it. Communists are always right to seek to push the revolution as far as possible because:
“it is only through a series of attempts” - as Lenin said - “that integral socialism will be arrived at as the collaboration of the proletarians of all countries." (Lenin 734)
The Chinese "Cultural Revolution" was one such attempt. Stumbling, fragile, defeated - but a contribution of enormous historical value on which the workers of other countries will tomorrow lean for new victorious revolutions against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
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