[ Part 2 : Chapters 5-9 ]
Kostas Mavrakis
Translated by John McGreal
[Manuscript typed by Jennifer R. Poole]
© Librairie François Maspero 1973
Translation © Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 1976
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5 |
REVISIONIST DEGENERATION OR CULTURAL REVOLUTION STALIN AND TROTSKY ON THE CHINESE REVOLUTION THE DEFEAT OF THE GREEK COMMUNISTS CONCLUSION: THE FUNDAMENTAL TRAITS OF TROTSKYISM CRITICAL NOTES ON SOME TROTSKYIST ORGANISATIONS
[Notes - Part 2] |
98 126 157 178 184 |
page 98
REVISIONIST DEGENERATION OR
Trotsky's disciples wish to remain faithful to him on the question of the nature of the USSR and the other revisionist countries as if nothing had changed since more than thirty years ago. Now, Trotsky's position on this question was always extremely perplexed, confused and contradictory. In 1929 he still thought that the social basis of Thermidor, defined as a 'counter-revolution' and as a 'transfer of power into the hands of another class', was the kulak. 'The problem of Thermidor and of Bonapartism is in essence the problem of the kulak.' According to Trotsky, 'The enriched muzhik or the muzhik who only seeks to get rich . . . is the natural agent of Bonapartist tendencies' (cf. Chapter 4, above). When Stalin, whom Trotsky thought was going to lay the basis for the restoration of capitalism ('a Kerensky in reverse'), had expropriated the kulaks against all the predictions of our 'prophet', Trotsky abandoned the Marxist method of analysing a policy by its class content. In fact, in the sense Trotsky understood the term, classes no longer existed in the USSR. To his great perplexity, Bonapartist tendencies continued to assert themselves despite the disappearance of their 'natural agent', the kulak.
Can this really be the terror of the dictatorship of the proletariat? No, because it is directed against the party, against the interests of the proletariat. Does this mean to say then that this is the pressure and terror of other classes? Obviously it is, for there is no supra-class pressure.
Apparently, for Trotsky after 1929, the rural bourgeoisie (the kulaks), which was terrorising the proletariat by means of the party apparatus, lost power (how, we do not know) and the power was exercised by the bureaucracy as the 'historic arm of the working class' (!) Returning to this problem at the end of his life in 'The Soviet Union and The Fourth International', Trotsky acknowledged that 'the bureaucracy is indissolubly bound up with the role of the
ruling economic class'.(1) It should be added that the bureaucracy always serves the interests of this class. But in that case, what do our present-day Trotskyists have to say about it? Are the Russian workers today 'the ruling economic class'? The question is how, in a country where the means of production are under state control, can the proletariat be 'the ruling economic class' if it is not 'the ruling political class'?
(what he later accepted) that a Thermidor had taken place in the USSR:(6)
Thermidor does not signify a period of reaction in general . . . it
indicates a transfer of power into the hands of another class . . .
Thermidor was a civil war in which the sans-culottes were
defeated - can anyone believe . . . that power can pass from the
hands of the Russian proletariat into those of the bourgeoisie by
peaceful means . . . ? Such a conception of Thermidor is only
reformism turned inside out.
A few years later, Trotsky was to prove exactly the opposite, namely, that Thermidor does mean a period of reaction in general . . . and so on.
If the workers were masters of the enterprises they would not strike against themselves. If they were masters of the state they would not emigrate and sell themselves as wage slaves in hundreds of thousands on the French and German markets. Only a comprador bourgeoisie could put up its country's wealth for auction by throwing wide the door to imperialist investments which are guaranteed the transfer of their profits and the repatriation of their capital.
The struggle between the capitalist road and the socialist road goes on throughout the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism. At every moment and on every problem the leadership of the party and the state, the subordinate echelons and finally individuals themselves are confronted with the choice between the two roads. The victory of socialism is not assured once and for all; it is the product of an unceasing struggle, a continuous creation. Every relaxation in the vigilance of proletarian revolutionaries leaves the field open to revisionist tendencies and leads to a regression.
the disappearance of capitalism . . . does not coincide with the
disappearance of private ownership of the means of production but
with the disappearance of the wage-earning class.
Meanwhile 'every assertion about classes must also be an assertion about the class struggle'.(11) In other words, the principal criterion for membership of a class is neither class being nor class origin but class position. After the expropriation of the old exploiters, there are surviving 'social elements characterised by their class position' (12) who work for the restoration of capitalism, and new ones are created. These social forces are:
(a) The former exploiters of whom Lenin said, 'they shall
retain, long after the revolution, a whole series of real
advantages . . . money . . . habits of organisation and
management, the knowledge of all the "secrets" of
administration.'
cut off from the masses, feel themselves superior and become
authoritarian. They can degenerate by becoming preoccupied
with their own advancement, their personal prestige and the
material advantages afforded them by their 'role in the
social organisation of labour'. The demands and rationality
peculiar to their department confronted with particular
types of problems and on occasion working for non-
proletarian social categories, may make them lose the
viewpoint of the whole - the viewpoint which subordinates
everything to the march towards socialism, to the
revolution.
These authorities repress the creative initiative of the masses in production under the pretext of efficiency and productivity, invoking the necessities of the technical division of labour. They strive to perpetuate the division between brains which think without lifting a finger and brawn which drudges without thinking.
under the pretext of 'dictatorship', the masses were practically forbidden to involve themselves in politics and to criticise or overthrow bad leaders.
- the market as the regulator of the whole economy;
In particular, the appearance of unemployment (the suppression of the right to labour) is the undeniable proof that the means of production are separated from the producers, that the proletarian, or rather his labour-power, has reverted to the state of a commodity, a plaything of market fluctuations enriching those who control it ('alienation'). Meanwhile, the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to 'the state of the whole people', the transparent mask of a new class oppression. The bourgeoisie has always presented its reign as that of universal reason and the general interest. The new bourgeoisie in the revisionist countries is no exception.
its structure has the form of a double separation, the separation
of the labourers from their means of production (the counterpart
of which is the possession of these means by the enterprises,
that is to say, by their directors) and the separation of the
enterprises from one another.
This is an obstacle to their effective socialisation. The directors of the enterprises buy the labour-power 'necessary for the conversion into value' of the means of production. They can dismiss the workers whose relations with the enterprise remain on a wage basis. The reproduction of the separation of the labourers from their means of production is accomplished, moreover
through specific ideological relations: management 'authority',
the internal hierarchical organisation of the enterprise, the
social division of labour which connects the labour of management
and 'intellectual' labour on the one hand and the practical and
manual labour on the other hand.
The ideological institutions (the school, etc.) which prepare the workers for life in the 'enterprises' also reproduce these ideological relations and 'Subordinate the technical division of labour to the social division of labour'. Finally:(15)
the reproduction of the separation of the labourers from their
means of production is also ensured by the political relations
within the enterprises: legal authority of the management which
can call on the means of repression, supervision exerted 'from
top to bottom', and the application of sanctions in the same way.
The presence of such capitalist social relations and therefore of the supports of these relations characterises the whole transition from capitalism to socialism. It provides the social basis for the restoration of capitalism:(16)
The real importance of state ownership depends on the relations
existing between the mass of labourers and the state apparatus.
If the latter is truly and concretely dominated by the labourers
(instead of being set above them and dominating them), state
property is the legal form of the labourers' social property; on
the other hand, if . . . the state apparatus . . . is dominated by a
body of officials and administrators . . . this body becomes the
effective owner (in the sense of a relation of production) of the
means of production. This body then forms a social class (a
state bourgeoisie) on account of the relation existing between
itself and the means of production on the one hand and the
labourers on the other.
The transition to socialism(18)
demands a constant struggle against the tendency to the
separation between functions of control, management and
execution. This tendency is itself inscribed in the ideological
relations which are reproduced by the (economic, ideological and
even political) institutions inherited from societies dominated
by non-labourers because these institutions are not and cannot
generally be immediately 'revolutionised' and managed by the
workers.
In no. 45 of the 'Quatrieme Internationale', E. Mandel has tried to found the old Trotskyist theories about the nature of the Soviet state on new bases, so that they take into account the intervening changes in the USSR on the one hand and the analysis made by the Chinese and Charles Bettelheim on the other.
Like them, Mandel implies that this new 'mode of production' is the one which predominates in a 'society in transition from capitalism to socialism'. Vis-à-vis the USSR he talks about 'socialist planning' without explaining how this planning is socialist, and about 'collective ownership' while being careful not to specify that it is collective ownership of the state bourgeoisie.
the real contradiction (the contradiction which the expression
'plan/market contradiction' designates in the ideological modes
the one whose existence it signals while masking it), is that of
the domination or non-domination by the producers over the
conditions and results of their activity.
It follows that 'the fundamental question is not whether the "market" or the "plan" (therefore also the "state") dominates the economy but the nature of the class which holds power'. (23)
first step, necessary but by no means sufficient to install the socialist relations of production. The old relations of production therefore continue to reproduce themselves at the level of the enterprises as long as these are not revolutionised. The 'installation' having been realised at the level of the juridico-political superstructure, 'restoration' has been possible by the 'road' of a 'usurpation' of the political power conquered in 1917 by the vanguard of the proletariat.
Legal exploitation and speculation
For many years, speculation in the commercial domain has assumed vast proportions and this has sometimes been echoed in the Soviet press when there have been particularly scandalous cases which have aroused public indignation. The managers of the state enterprises often buy machines with their own money, make workers labour for them and sell the product for their own profit. They are individual capitalists in the classical sense of the term. 'Private' economy is also developing in the Russian countryside. In 1963, the family plots of the Kolkhozniks and Sovkhozniks of Kazakhstan produced 874,000 metric tons of potatoes while the 'public economy' of the kolkhozy and sovkhozy produced only 254,000 metric tons. The same year, the yield in vegetables from private plots was nearly three times as much as that from 'collective farms'. It is not surprising, therefore, if the peasants devote only 180 days per year to the collective land in the Ukraine and only 135 in Georgia in order to work the rest of the time on their individual allotments. (24) The Soviet press has revealed that hundreds of kolkhozniks devote themselves daily to trade on the free markets. Among them, certain speculators 'with long experience' are capable of clearing enormous profits. They rent whole trains to carry fruit, for example, from the Caucasus or Central Asia, to resell for their weight in gold in Moscow.
As was disclosed in the book entitled 'Lawful Remuneration on the
Collective Farm' by Shabakov, among the 27 collective farms which
had been investigated in Kazkhstan, chairmen of 11 collective
farms drew wages 15, and even 19 times that of an ordinary
member. In 1965, the chairman of the Baku Worker Collective Farm
in the Azerbaijan Republic received an average monthly pay of
1,076 roubles; the chief accountant, 756 roubles. By contrast,
an average farm member received less than 38 roubles . . . The
leading staff and 'experts' of the state farms receive full pay
no matter whether the crops are good or bad and their annual
bonuses are as much as 5 or 6 times their monthly pay.
A leader at the Paris Commune Members' Collective Farm in the
Ivanovo Region of the Russian SFSR embezzled at one time enough
money to 'fully pay the monthly wages of all farm members'.(28)
Since 1962 the economists Lieberman and Trapeznikov have made recommendations for an economic reform conferring greater autonomy on the enterprises at the expense of planning, largely restoring the free functioning of the market, making profit the criterion of the success of the enterprise and lastly, involving management and staff. The reform was adopted in September 1965, put into effect from 1 January 1966 and became general during 1969.
Here is what we read in 'L'Express' of 28 August 1967:
The Soviet authorities have decided to arouse enthusiasm for
economic reform the other week by authorising the publication of
a book which praises 'American efficiency'. Such is its title.
The author, Nicolas N. Smeliakov, an engineer and Deputy Minister
of Foreign Trade, lived in the USA as head of a permanent trade
mission.
It is easy to understand that Soviet citizens do not abound with enthusiasm for economic reform when one considers its consequences:
Egalitarianism would cut the ground from under the relationship
between the workers' material incentives and the product of their
labour and would sap their urge for vocational and cultural
improvement. The socialist system of society offers people moral
and material incentives for increasing the productivity of labour
and developing their capacities and endowments.(30)
According to 'Izvestia' on 4 March 1966, wage differentiation alone guarantees increases in productivity and therefore becomes a fundamental element in the construction of communism'(31)
Finally, the reform will lead to rising prices and an increasing dependency on the capitalist world. Here is what one Western observer has said:(32)
The price of the reform's success remains to be paid: the
acceptance of a certain amount of inflation and a noticeable
deterioration in the terms of trade with the outside world.
Perhaps the Soviet leaders will judge that this price is not too
high when it involves stabilising economic relations with the
West in a period when the threat from the East is growing.
It will be remembered that at the time when these lines were written, the correspondent of the Soviet Agency Novostni stated in 'Le Monde' that the USSR was defending Western civilisation on the Amur and the Ussuri.
The general orientation of the reforms, contain measures which go
along with them and especially the climate in which they are
carried out allow us to think that they constitute only a first
step on the road to more profound changes . . . In the present
stage of development of industrial societies, the system of a
market and a plan constitutes the only formula in the East as
well as in the West.
We can trust the specialised dispensary of anti-communism which publishes 'Est-Ouest' to discern what is as good for the capitalist East as well as for the capitalist West.
'Man is made in such a way that in general he does not permit himself to be exploited at will; this is why he must be coerced and oppressed.'(34)
Political opponents are usually imprisoned in labour camps with common rights but it is very common to intern them in mental hospitals, where they are forcibly administered stupefying drugs. Not to regard the Soviet system as the best possible is proof that one is not 'adjusted' and therefore not sane.
The analysis of Soviet society contained in the notes sketched at the end of his life by the well-known economist Eugene Varga does not go beyond a surface description of phenomena and bring out their causes. In fact, his attempts at explanation based on the interruption of Russian capitalist development at its beginnings or the necessity for the USSR to set aside an enormous budget for defence do not seem convincing. Nevertheless, there are many observations in these notes which coincide with other accounts such as those which four Japanese students published in the Belgian Marxist-Leninist journal 'Clarté' (no. 110) and which confirm our own picture of revisionist degeneration. Here is what Varga writes:
Moreover, material relations in Soviet society are often
conducive to immoral survivals and actions. On the one hand, the
lavish conditions enjoyed by the leading groups of the Party
bureaucracy . . . lead to complacency and arrogance, often also to
perversion. They are driven to seek even greater personal
prosperity, appropriating and squandering the property of the
state, to demoralisation and sometimes to outright crime.
Varga deplores in 'the middle sections'(36)
The absence of a truly democratic content and of the civic sense
to which it should give rise. The lack of these makes the
members of Soviet society concentrate on satisfying personal
family matters and leading a petty bourgeois existence. Apart
from matters connected with his employment, the ordinary Soviet
citizen thinks mainly about acquiring personal property, a good
flat, a dacha with a garden, a television set, clothes, etc; he
saves up for this, boasts about it to his relations and neighbours . . . On the whole the citizens of the USSR have not had the
slightest idea of what a true Soviet democracy would be like, or
the social relations that would result from it . . . This society
is . . . based on the cult of officialdom . . . Today, as before, the
power of the state is concentrated in the hands of the top
leaders of the party bureaucracy. Political conditions are still
being concealed from the working people.
We could multiply the examples showing that bourgeois common sense passes for good sense as such in the pro-Soviet bloc. The author once happened to argue with a young Hungarian architect working in France, where she stayed for two years. She was a party member and regarded herself as a faithful communist. Speaking of her experience of French building-sites, she said that she was shocked by the workers' unwillingness. To our suggestion that perhaps this was a form of resistance to capitalist exploitation and therefore laudable from a proletarian point of view, she replied that it was just laziness, the mother and father of all vices - no matter whether in France or in the socialist countries.
Those who have travelled in the USSR have been able to observe many things, all of which lead to the same conclusion: the dominant ideology there is that of the ruling class, the state bourgeoisie. K. S. Karol has summarised certain features of this ideology fairly well:(37)
The values of the leading Soviet class are hardly distinguishable
from those which predominate among the Western bourgeoisie. The
power elite in the USSR believes firmly in the necessity for a
social division of labour, in hierarchical methods in the
economic and political sector and in all dogmas of 'promotion by
merit'.
Of course, the Soviet leaders make a great show of their supposedly intransigent fidelity to Marxism-Leninism, but it becomes more and more difficult for them to reconcile their real, deeply conservative practice and ideology with the exaltation of Lenin and the revolutionary origins of their state. They are shown up in a truly laughable way when they attribute to Lenin Otto Bauer's 'theory' of five 'social factors of force', described by Lenin as a petty-bourgeois degradation of Marxism. This 'mistake' made in point 14 of the 'Theses for the hundredth anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin', published on 23 December 1969 by the Central Committee of the CPSU, should rather be called 'an exceptionally candid disclosure'.
A German variety of philistinism is required, and you get the
'theory' that the 'social factors of force' are: number; the
degree of organisation; the place held in the process of
production and distribution; activity and education. If a rural
agricultural labourer or an urban working man practises
revolutionary violence against a landowner or a capitalist, that
is no dictatorship of the proletariat . . . That is 'violence
against the social factors of force'.
A little earlier, Lenin had commented:(38)
Bauer's book will be a useful if peculiar supplement to the
textbooks on communism. Take any paragraph, any argument in Otto
Bauer's book and indicate the Menshevism in it, where the roots
lie of views that lead up to the actions of the traitors to
socialism . . . this is a question that could be very usefully and
successfully set in 'examinations' designed to test whether
communism has been properly assimilated. If you cannot answer
this question, you are not yet a communist, and should not join
the Communist Party.
Thus we see that the Soviet leaders' 'mistakes' cannot be put down to a gap in their learning. Lenin had already explained that it was a question of whether or not one is a communist. By confusing the elucubrations of an Otto Bauer with the thought of Lenin, they themselves have proved that they are incapable of distinguishing between the idea of a 'social traitor' and a Leninist idea. This is indicative of the limits of their duplicity. They have vainly endeavoured to camouflage their real ideology beneath the pomp of a
bookish Marxism-Leninism. Their ideology has played a mean trick on them which is more revealing than a Freudian slip and precisely in a text meant to present them as the worthy heirs of Lenin.
The revisionist degeneration which long ago affected the Soviet 'elites' in cultural and political areas came officially into the open after the 20th Congress (February 1956); first on the ideological front, with the abandonment of essential Marxist-Leninist principles (parliamentary and peaceful transition to socialism, condemnation of war in general, humanism above classes, the proclamation in 1961 of the Soviet state as no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat but as a 'state of the whole people', etc); then in the domain of international policy ('the Camp David spirit' in 1959, the withdrawal of Soviet experts from China in the summer of 1960, etc); lastly on the economic plane with the economic reform in 1965. In 1963, many years of effort exerted by the Soviet clique to convince the Americans that they were no longer a revolutionary power were finally crowned with success. By breaking with China they made the right pledge to win the confidence of their imperialist interlocutors, hence the Moscow Treaty.(39) These were the alarm signals which aroused the Chinese very early on. A dispute ensued which ended in the public split over differences in December 1962.(40) The class significance of the political turn taken by the USSR during this period was unmistakable, but it was more difficult to elucidate its causes and to grasp quickly all its political importance.
Socialist society covers a considerably long historical period.
In the historical period of socialism, there are still classes,
class contradictions and class struggle, there is the struggle
between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and there is
the danger of capitalist restoration.
How can a catastrophe such as the one which has already occurred in the USSR be prevented? In his Report to the 9th Congress, Lin Piao quotes Mao's proposals in an interview in February 1967:(41)
In the past we waged struggles in rural areas, in factories, in
the cultural field, and we carried out the socialist education
movement. But all this failed to solve the problem because we
did not find a form, a method, to arouse the broad masses to
expose our dark aspect openly, in an all-round way and from
below.
And Lin Piao adds, 'now we have found this form - it is the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution'.
dictatorship of the proletariat, preventing capitalist restoration and building socialism'.(42)
which they had usurped, to criticise them and to destroy their prestige and moral authority.
- the mobilisation and revolt of the masses;
In fact Mao unleashed the cultural revolution because he had realised that the contradiction between the proletarian line and the bourgeois line could not and should not be resolved in the confines of the party and by struggles in the apparatus but only by encouraging the intervention of the broad masses.
In certain schools, units and work teams of the Cultural
Revolution, some of the persons in charge have organised counter-
attacks against the masses who put up big-character posters
criticising them. These people have even advanced such slogans
as: Opposition to the leaders of a unit or work team means
opposition to the Central Committee of the party, means
opposition to the Party and socialism, means counter-revolution
. . . This is an error in matters of orientation, an error of line,
and is absolutely impermissible.
The 'Decision in 16 Points' clearly implies that the leaders of the party and state organisations draw their authority solely from their link with the masses, a link which in this case shows itself by the fact that they 'stand in the van of movement and dare arouse the masses boldly', and encourage them 'to expose every kind of ghost and monster and also to criticise the shortcomings and errors in the work of the persons in charge'.(47) Like a marvellous litmus paper, the mass movement has revealed the true class position of cadres by forcing them to take sides.
Shao-chi and Po Yi-po, the director of the economy, had suppressed in the preceding period. These ideas were already clearly inscribed in the famous Constitution of the Anshan Iron and Steel Company drawn up by Mao in 1960:(48)
1. Keep politics firmly in command.
Po Yi-po opposed this programme point by point. Not putting proletarian politics in command, he inevitably allowed bourgeois politics to prevail in the end. For him, profit had to be the criterion of success and workers' effort had to be governed by material incentives. He declared that power of decision reverted to one leader (to the manager) and advocated the management of enterprises by experts. The latter often used their 'knowledge' to impose on the workers and did not liberate the latter's initiative by appealing to their practical experience and ingenuity to promote the technical revolution. They themselves tended to copy foreign methods. The supporters of this policy justified it by invoking the imperatives of 'production before everything'. The Shanghai tool-machine factory provides an example of revolutionarisation in conformity with the principles stated by Chairman Mao.
With the cultural revolution
the proletarian revolutionaries have truly taken into their hands
the leadership in the factory, including power over technical
matters. The bourgeois technical 'authorities' . . . have been
overthrown'. They have broken 'with the model of individual
advancement (to rise in the hierarchy, to join the body of
'experts', to struggle to become an engineer) to the profit of
collective research and advancement.
The relations between workers and technicians have been transformed. They used to be based on the model of the division of labour between conception and performance. This meant that
'the engineer gives the word and the worker does the job' or 'the
engineer has the idea and the worker carries it out'. This was
still the old nonsense of 'those who do mental work rule, while
those who work with their hands are ruled' . . . The rank and file
workers now take part in designing and the technicians go to
operate machines in the first line of production.
Among the young technicians, 350 were college graduates and around 250 were promoted from among the workers:(49)
The facts show that the latter are better than the former . . . The
chief designers of six of the ten new precision grinding machines
successfully trial-produced in the first half of this year are
technical personnel of worker origin . . . Many technicians of
worker origin, free from the spiritual fetters of working for
personal fame or gain and rich in practical experience, dare to
do away with fetishes and superstitions and break through all
unnecessary restrictions and are the least conservative in their
thinking.
Journalists and other Western Sinologists feel obliged to choose between two interpretations of the cultural revolution: it is either supposed to be quite spontaneous or else completely manipulated. Mao Tse-tung is either a 'sorcerer's apprentice' or else the Machiavellian 'secret conductor of the orchestra'. The two terms of the alternative are false. The cultural revolution was unleashed and led by Mao in accordance with his 'Great Strategic Plan'. At the same time, it was a movement from the base responding to the profound aspirations of the masses and obeying a dynamic of its own. Mao Tse-tung made it possible:
1. to give the greatest publicity to the exemplary initiatives of
the base, such as the 'first national Marxist-Leninist big
character poster' displayed on 25 May 1966 criticising the Vice-Chancellor of Peking University;
Most often the central authorities refrained from intervening in the local conflicts which had to be settled by the masses (except in specific cases like that of Wuhan). This was the reason why nearly three years were necessary for revolutionary committees to take power in all provinces, with all that this implied in the way of troubles and disorders. Nevertheless, throughout the cultural revolution and its preliminary stages, Mao Tse-tung knew how to manoeuvre with the ability and consumate clearsightedness of the great strategist and great tactician which he has always been.
Sing, Chou En-lai, the Prime Minister, and even Lin Piao and Mao Tse-tung himself.
It is normal for the masses to hold different views. Contention
between different views is unavoidable, necessary and beneficial
. . . Any method of forcing a minority holding different views to
submit is impermissible. The minority should be protected,
because sometimes the truth is with the minority. Even if the
minority is wrong, they should still be allowed to argue their
case and reserve their views.
With regard to the resolution of contradictions among the people, Lin Piao recalled in his report what 'Chairman Mao has taught us many times': 'Help more people by educating them and narrow the target of the attack', and 'Carry out Marx's teaching that only by emancipating all mankind can the proletariat achieve its own final emancipation'. In the struggle against the enemy, said Lin Piao, quoting Mao, 'Stress should be laid on the weight of evidence and on investigation and study, and it is strictly forbidden to obtain confessions by compulsion and to give them credence.' And Lin Piao added, 'To handle this part of the contradictions between ourselves and the enemy in the manner of handling contradictions among the people is beneficial to the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and to the disintegration of the enemy ranks'.(50)
the most democratic', cannot 'be considered a model of proletarian democracy for society as a whole'.(54) This gibberish does not mean anything:
1. The Chinese have never said that the structure of their army was
a model of democracy for society as a whole.
An army 'stricto sensu' is an instrument which guarantees the subjection of the vast majority to a small minority. It is a parasitic organisation apart from the people in which a blind and as it were mechanical discipline prevails. Drill is the extreme form of the methods by which recruits are transformed into robots. Although adults, the soldiers, and even the pupils of certain training schools dependent on the War Ministry do not have the same political rights as other citizens.
1. Political democracy: the right and the duty of the soldiers to
criticise the officers, for political discussion, criticism and
self-criticism must unfold without regard for hierarchy.
The officers share the life of the soldiers and do not benefit from any privilege. Since 1964 when visible signs of rank were suppressed, it can and does frequently happen that senior officers are taken for private soldiers. They are not supposed to enlighten 'the culprit' under any circumstances unless this is necessary for performing duties.
left. This is what it did at Harbin, especially at the time of the seizure of power by the proletarian revolutionaries. But its intervention in the cultural revolution consisted primarily of sending small groups of unarmed soldiers to places where revolutionary rebels were divided into rival organisations in order to help the militants to study the thought of Mao Tse-tung while keeping in mind the problems to be resolved. In spite of their political prestige the soldiers did not play much of an arbitrating role. They contributed above all to a raising of consciousness by organising discussion and study on a principled basis so as to overcome the closed-circle mentality. The end thus aimed at was to effect the 'Great Alliance' between all the revolutionary organisations, the indispensable condition for working out a 'revolutionary committee' based on the 'Triple Combination', that is, bringing together authorities springing from: (a) rebel organisations; (b) revolutionary cadres; and (c) the army (or people's militia). The first two categories of authorities as well as the militia men were elected in secret ballots by the masses and were subject to recall at any time.
this cult thrived. Edgar Snow told his host that he was the greatest Chinese statesman and in addition, a great strategist, poet and philosopher. Mao's reply is characteristic of the man. He did not stoop to the false modesty of rejecting his interviewer's flattering formulae. He explained to him only that he would no doubt have become a simple schoolmaster had it not been for the exploitation and oppression of the Chinese people, in the face of which he was unable to remain passive. In other words, the revolution made Mao as much as Mao made the revolution.
Throughout this book we have used the term 'Maoism' as a synonym for 'the thought of Mao Tse-tung', an expression only naturalised in China. Why is this and what are our reasons for considering the first term just as correct?
because he and his comrades prefer to leave the adoption of the term to posterity; (c) because certain allies in the international communist movement who are disposed to respect the thought of Mao Tse-tung and occasionally make it their inspiration may be reluctant for the moment to proclaim their adherence to Maoism; that is, to recognise it as the Marxism-Leninism of our era. General reference to Marxism-Leninism without further detail provides a wider common ground and makes it easier to isolate the revisionists on a world scale and within each Communist Party.
the acquisitions of the theory as a result of their refusal to apply it to make the revolution. Their policy is the effect of the pressure of bourgeois ideology which exists deep down in every one of us. For the Trotskyists, dogmatism - the tendency to deduce from a few general truths the response to all problems - happily co-exists with the crudest empiricism and a straight-forward surrender to all the fetishes of bourgeois ideology: individualism, liberalism, the cult of knowledge and technique, etc.
Communists must always go into the whys and wherefores of
anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or
not (what they are told) corresponds to reality and is really
well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and
encourage slavishness.
In contrast, in the capitalist countries civil responsibility is synonymous with passivity and slavishness. Governments appeal to 'the silent majority' and . . . speak for it. They do all that they can so that it will remain silent through a sense of impotence and resignation. They use police terror when necessary to prevent it from having its say and occupying the forestage of history. Just think, that would be the revolution! Before inventing participation, De Gaulle compared the head of state to the captain of a ship. The citizens were the passengers, expected to stay in their cabins, the understanding being that they had nothing to say on the subject of running the ship. Even in daily life, the ordinary man has to obey his superiors, officials, police, everyone who is invested with any authority whatsoever, without dispute, without 'going into the whys and wherefores of anything'. A recurrent phrase in popular speech is 'Don't even try to understand'.
has proclaimed, and this holds true not only for the capitalist countries, but also for China, whose leaders or cadres may degenerate and cease to serve the people. For the latter, to seize Marxist-Leninist science (the thought of Mao Tse-tung) is to reject all other authority, to win the right to criticise all authority from a proletarian viewpoint, to master politics, the conduct of the class struggle, the laws of uninterrupted revolution. It is to make history consciously instead of submitting to it. It thus appears that far from being 'repressive' as certain distressed spirits among 'anti-authoritarian' intellectuals claim, the thought of Mao Tse-tung is, in fact, liberating by the same right as all forms of rationality.
(a) It states in a rigorous way an ensemble of general truths
(laws).
(d) They make it possible to work out predictions and therefore
to put hypotheses about new facts to the test of practice.
It follows from the last characteristic that politics (the conduct of the class struggle, history in the present) is a true experimental science.
STALIN AND TROTSKY ON THE
In using two examples, China and Greece, to criticise the Trotskyist version of history, we have no intention of justifying Stalin's international policy. Stalin made many mistakes, some of them serious, on this level. But in their political vehemence the Trotskyists go further. Their argument proceeds from postulates (presented as conclusions) which constitute a total falsification of history and which, furthermore, are anti-Marxist from the point of view of method. Put briefly, these are:
(a) All the Communist Parties in the world were manipulated by
Stalin as mere puppets, deprived of any will of their own.
This last explanation is really absurd. The security of the USSR was best guaranteed by the strengthening of the revolutionary movements undermining the imperialist rear. It is hard to see how a victory of the revolution in China, Germany, Spain or Greece could have endangered the USSR. In Stalin's time the USSR inspired fear and hatred in reactionaries precisely because they had good reason to see it as the Red base of the world revolution. At present this is no longer the case and the anti-communists who used to write on the walls 'Send the commies to Moscow' today write 'Send the commies to Mao'. The mythical, secret puppet-master has changed his lair.
1. that an exchange of messages between the Kiangsi bases and Moscow
required six to eight months;
positions of Mao Tse-tung and not those of the CCP leadership
which he is supposed to have put in the saddle.
We have anticipated a little to show that our aim is to recall the little-known or misunderstood facts which will help us to arrive at a more accurate and nuanced idea of history than the one provided by writings oriented by a pre-occupation with anti-Stalinist polemic.
1. that Trotsky's positions on China were wrong;
we shall demonstrate with supporting documents, their
interpretation of history proceeds from the fundamental
theoretical mistakes which were brought to light in the preceding
chapters.
On 1 July 1926 the Northern Expedition was launched. The Canton armies advanced rapidly, taking Changsha on 12 July, completing the conquest of the triple city of Wuhan on 7 October and seizing Nanchang on 8 November.
the communists were multiplied in the regions controlled by Wuhan. The final break between the 'left' Kuomintang and the communists occurred on 16 July. Borodin left on 27 July and the hunted communists went underground.(6)
defeat, once more new struggle, and so on till victory - such is the people's logic.'
We read in Isaac Deutscher's 'The Prophet Unarmed' (p. 317):
Only in 1921 did the Chinese Communist Party, based on small
propagandist circles, hold its first congress. But no sooner had
it done so and set out to formulate its programme and shape its
organisation than Moscow began to urge it to seek a rapprochement
with the Kuomintang.
And on p. 319 of the same work, that in 1922 Maring
told Ch'en Tu-hsiu and his comrades that the Communist
International firmly instructed them to join the Kuomintang,
regardless of terms. Ch'en Tu-hsiu was reluctant to act on this
instruction, but when Maring invoked the principle of
international communist discipline, he and his comrades
submitted.
Astonishing as this may appear, the sources (even the Trotskyist ones!) totally contradict this version of the facts. Maring (alias Sneevliet), the Comintern representative, who became a Trotskyist in the 1930s, told the Trotskyist historian Harold Isaacs that the majority of the Central Committee, including Ch'en Tu-hsiu, agreed with his views and that those who opposed him, in particular the then 'ultra-leftist' and later turncoat Chang Kuo-tao, had not done so for reasons of principle, but because they did not believe at the time that the Kuomintang could become a mass movement in which it would be useful to militate. He insisted on the fact that he did not have precise instructions at that time.(10) His account is confirmed by Pavel Mif, a member of the Far-Eastern Bureau of the Comintern, according to whom the first instructions regarding 'the co-ordination of the activities of the Kuomintang and the young Chinese Communist Party' were issued by the Executive Committee of the Comintern in a special communication dated 12 January 1923. (11)
it was not a party of the bourgeoisie but a party common to
various classes . . . the five members of the Central Committee of
the CCP unanimously opposed this suggestion because entry into
the Kuomintang would have introduced confusion into the class
organisation and fettered our independent policy. Finally, the
Third International delegate asked categorically whether the
Chinese Communist Party would conform to the decision of the
International.
It is now clear where Deutscher got his information. He passed over the sources (even the Trotskyist ones) which did not have sufficient grist for his mill and chose an interested party whose 'pro domo' plea was intended to shift the blame for his own faults on to Stalin. Throughout an exposition covering several pages Deutscher takes Ch'en's account for Gospel truth, all the more so as he considers him to be a greater theoretician than Mao Tse-tung.(13)
peasantry - half of whom according to him were small proprietors - could accept communism and be anything more than a vacillating ally tending to compromise with reaction. As Stuart Schram says, 'this disdain for the peasantry was not characteristic of the Comintern line in the same period'.(18) In fact the thirteen-point directive presented to the 3rd Congress of the CCP in May 1923 and drawn up under Bukharin's guidance, argued that the peasant problem should occupy a central position in the policy of the party.
Deutscher himself disputed the truth of 'one of the legends of vulgar Trotskyism which maintains that the Opposition had from the beginning unremittingly resisted Stalin's and Bukharin's "betrayal of the Chinese Revolution"'.(20) He showed that up until 31 March 1927 Trotsky had only criticised (incidentally and in passing, so to speak) the Comintern's China policy on a single point: the CCP joining the Kuomintang. Furthermore, he did it only within the secrecy of the Political Bureau.
between militarists restricted the domestic market. The imperialist ascendancy helped to bar any possibility of expansion to it. This is why the Chinese industrialists and merchants of Canton and Shanghai came to finance the Hong Kong strike committees! Thus the Kuomintang-CP united front was at one and the same time possible, necessary and enormously profitable to the revolutionary movement and to the Communist Party. This does not mean that it had to be prolonged for as long as it was, at the expense of consistent revolutionary action in the countryside; we shall talk about this question later in this chapter. For the moment, we can conclude that Trotsky was wrong to condemn the alliance with the Kuomintang as early as the beginning of 1924. In doing so, moreover, he came into contradiction with the positions sustained by Lenin at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International:(22)
There is not the slightest doubt that every nationalist movement
can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement . . . the Communist
International must enter into temporary arrangements, even
alliances, with the bourgeois democrats in the colonies and
backward countries, but should not merge with them, and should
maintain at all costs the independence of the proletarian
movement even in its most embryonic form.
Trotsky's argument condemning the entry of the communists into the Kuomintang was that in doing so they were sacrificing their political independence. For him, the criterion of this independence was the fact of possessing a daily newspaper. The CCP did not have a daily, but it did have several periodicals. The independence of these was such that in September 1926 the party journal 'Hsiang-tao' stated that the Northern Expedition was not propelled by the masses and that the Kuomintang government did not represent the people but was merely 'the special organ', of a cabal of generals to serve their 'personal ends'.(23)
Trotsky's commission reckoned with China's continued division;
and its recommendations were as if calculated to prolong it . . .
(It) did not seek to promote revolution but to secure every
possible advantage for the Soviet government. Thus the
commission suggested that Soviet diplomatic agencies should seek
a 'modus vivendi' and a division of spheres between Chiang
Kai-shek's government in the south and Chang Tso-lin's in the
north . . . The commission urged Soviet envoys to prepare public
opinion 'carefully and tactfully' for this arrangement, which
was likely to hurt patriotic feelings in China.
We shall refrain from any comment on this report. Everyone knows what the Trotskyists would say about it if it was not signed by Trotsky but only by Stalin. Let us simply point out that it was easy for the former to criticise others once he himself no longer had any responsibility. There being no risk that his proposals would be put to the test of adversity he could always exclaim, 'Ah, if only you had listened to me'' What can be discussed, on the other hand, is his analysis of the class contradictions in China and his appraisal of the motor forces of revolution in that country.
We have shown that the alliance with the Kuomintang corresponded to a correct policy up to and including the Northern Expedition. Before the success of this campaign, neither the communists nor the reactionary element of the Kuomintang were ready for the trial of strength which they jointly foresaw but deferred in order no
Chapter 5
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
THE TROTSKYIST POSITION
In 'The Third International After Lenin', written in 1929, Trotsky still occasionally argued like a Marxist. In it he declared that 'the state apparatus terrorised the proletarian core of the party' and wondered (op. cit. p. 304):
page 99
In an interview given just before his death, Trotsky asserted: 'We accuse the leading clique of having transformed itself into a new aristocracy oppressing and robbing the masses . . . The immense bureaucracy devours a lion's share of the modest national income.'(2)
The Chinese speak of a 'new bourgeoisie'; why is the expression 'new aristocracy' (feudal?), supposed to be more adequate? How is an industrialised country in which a new bourgeoisie exploits (or 'robs') the masses to be described if not as capitalist? The reply of Trotsky and the Trotskyists is that the bureaucracy does not, properly speaking, exploit the workers but robs them as a parasitic stratum, like the Church, for example. But the latter has always been an integral part of the propertied classes. We know that the Vatican today is a big capitalist power in the same way as in former times it owned more land than the king and the nobles. Even when it owns neither land nor capital the Church exploits the workers by participating in the redistribution of surplus value. We thus come back to the question posed above: who collectively owns the means of production in the USSR? Is it the workers, or else what we call the new bourgeoisie and what the Trotskyists call the bureaucracy? A comparison not being proof, Trotsky cannot be regarded as having solved the problem by comparing the bureaucracy to the Church, a tumour or the 'lumpenproletariat'!
In the same interview, Trotsky argued that 'the liquidation of the private ownership of the means of production is the central historical task of our epoch and will guarantee the birth of a new, more harmonious society'.(3) The least one can say is that he was deceiving himself and that this 'guarantee' was not so certain. Otherwise, how can one explain the Polish workers being forced to rise up against the intensification of their exploitation and the necessity for them to be mown down from tanks and helicopters to make them submit?
Trotsky's wife, Natalia Sedova, finally adopted a clearer and more coherent position than her late husband's dogmatic supporters: she regarded the Soviet Union as 'state capitalism'.(4)
The Trotskyists deny the capitalist character of the countries in eastern Europe and its links with the usurpation of power by a state bourgeoisie which exploits and oppresses the workers. Let us examine their argument as it is developed in the Theses adopted by the 9th Congress of the Fourth International. Taking the example of Yugoslavia, 'since there has clearly never been a social counter-revolution . . . since the party in power . . . is still the same', the partisans of the thesis according to which capitalism has been restored 'apply . . . reformist conceptions in reverse'.(5)
This is the repetition of an old argument of Trotsky's, denying
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However that may be, it is really strange to argue that the party in power remained the same after repeated, massive and ferocious purges, particularly at the time of the break with the Cominform. Moreover, history offers the example of many parties whose class nature has changed without purges. As for the necessity of a (violent) social counter-revolution, it would undoubtedly have to occur for the old propertied classes to return to power, but not for the formation of new ones.
The Theses of the 9th Congress continue in these terms: 'For Marxists there can be no capitalism without a bourgeois class in power in the economic sense of the term. There can be no bourgeois class without private appropriation of the means of production and the social surplus product.'
First of all, it is wrong to argue that 'there can be no capitalism without a bourgeois class in power'. Capitalism existed under NEP even though the bourgeoisie was not in power. On the other hand, when the Trotskyists say 'in the economic sense of the term' this must be understood as 'in the legal sense' for it is only in this sense that the new Yugoslav bourgeoisie has not appropriated the means of production in a private capacity.
But above all, the Trotskyists are not unaware that besides the state bourgeoisie, there exist in Yugoslavia industrialists who possess enterprises employing up to 500 workers, that capitalism is developing in the countryside, that there is brisk commercial and land speculation (particularly in the tourist areas), that the state monopoly of external trade has been abandoned for the maximum profits of the tycoons; in short, that Yugoslavia is, as one American journalist put it, 'the paradise of free enterprise'.
To embark on an analysis of Yugoslavia's foreign policy would take us too far out of our way. One thing is certain: the US Government knew what it was doing when it gave Yugoslavia aid amounting to several thousand millions of dollars.
An article in 'Le Monde' talks about 'the strange alliance of foreign capital and co-management in Yugoslav enterprises'.(7) Strange indeed, if one takes 'co-management' at face-value. Could capitalist management and worker management make good bedfellows? We are not sufficiently reformist to believe it. In fact, 'co-management' hardly means more than 'participation'. It leaves the workers defenceless before those who hold effective power at the levels of the enterprise and the state, hence the wave of strikes (ultimate weapon) that broke out in 1966 and 1967, as the Theses which we are criticising recognise.
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We call attention to this magnificent sentence in Paul Yankovitch's article: 'Official circles consider that there is not even any reason to guarantee foreign investors against so-called political risks, since Yugoslav enterprises are already social enterprises and consequently cannot be nationalised.' In other words, now that we have made the revolution, our country offers absolute security to capitalist exploitation. The Yugoslav leaders assert and deny the existence of socialism in their country in the same breath. This same argument which, addressed to foreign investors, constitutes a guileless confession, also serves to deceive the workers. At the least demand our 'officials' apostrophise the workers by asking them what more they want: 'the state belongs to you, the enterprises belong to you'! Trotskyists can be counted on to applaud this mystification. However they should know broadly what they are committing themselves to in the Yugoslav road to socialism, this original, non-Stalinist 'model', etc. It can be characterised as an economy entirely given over to the laws of the market; that is, to capitalist anarchy with its cyclical crises and their accompanying train of bankruptcies and redundancies. There are 300,000 unemployed out of 4 million non-agricultural wage-earners. Speculators are given free reign. The state exports labour and imports capital in order that the people may be doubly exploited by imperialist capital, inside as well as outside the country. Enterprises issue bonds to augment their capital. Banks convert deposits of private individuals into loans to enterprises and pay 7 per cent interest. However, Trotskyists refuse to draw the conclusions obvious facts impose. They repeat, 'the working class has not yet been defeated'. If it has not been defeated then it is in power; how can this be reconciled with what we know about Yugoslav society and Belgrade's policy?
After accusing the Maoists of reformism, the Trotskyists modify their argument a little and accuse them of 'defeatism'. They cry, 'to say that capitalism has already been restored, without massive resistance from the workers, would be to proclaim defeat before the battle; it would demonstrate a defeatism that the recent events have shown to be totally unjustified.'(8)
No doubt it is sad to acknowledge that defeat has come without a battle but, as Renan said, 'The truth may be depressing'. Meanwhile, it is the Trotskyists who propagate a spirit of surrender. They lead the Yugoslav workers away from the struggle for power by assuring them that they have never lost it.
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THE SOCIAL BASIS OF THE RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM
The principal contradiction of this whole period is that between the revolutionary masses and leaders who take the capitalist road. It is a class contradiction.
Some cannot conceive of the existence of classes without individual private ownership of the means of production: this is not a Marxist point of view. Marx never identified the relations of production and property relations. The former continue to reproduce themselves after the means of production have been brought under state control. That is why 'Lenin had to remind Bukharin that state control of the means of production was not socialisation'.(9) Division into classes retains its basis in the relations of production for a long period after the seizure of power by the proletariat, for, as was pointed out by 'the founders of scientific socialism,['] (10)
(b) The new bourgeois elements engendered by the petty bourgeois
environment. Lenin spoke of the 'sea of small production'
which threatened to devour the socialist economy before the
completion of collectivisation. Even after this, the
peasantry long remained attached to individual forms of
production. Moreover, the persistence of market relations
combined with an inadequate organisation of distribution
cause the appearance of new bourgeois elements in the
interstices of the socialist system given over to a variety
of negotiation and speculation.
(c) The degenerate leading cadres taking the capitalist road.
Most of the cadres in the Communist Party occupy responsible
posts in the state apparatus. These officials can become
page 103
The social forces which we have outlined have allies in the people's minds: traditions, customs, habits, ideas bequeathed by capitalist society. The concentrated expression, the essence of these ideological survivals, is individualism, selfishness, the search for personal gain.
In saying this we are not calling for the 'moral' supplement for which Marx did not hide his contempt. The slogan of the cultural revolution, 'fight self, criticise revisionism', is a slogan of ideological struggle the political significance of which is unquestionable. Selfishness tends to reproduce institutional structures which perpetuate the privileges and the domination of a minority. Before the cultural revolution, many Chinese students imagined that because they were 'literati' they would be appointed to leading posts as a matter of course. They considered their career as the due reward for their university labours and despised those who had not acquired the same bookish knowledge. Thus selfishness and personal ambition breathe new life into ideas inherited from the past which become revisionism when they are decked out as 'Marxist'. The new bourgeoisie being formed relies on this ideology to reorganise society in terms of its interests. We can conclude from this that it is impossible to construct an economy and social relations which are genuinely socialist without the creation of a new man who puts collective interests above everything. The opposite result is obtained if one hopes to stimulate enthusiasm for work by relying on the profit motive and by widening wage differentials excessively as was done in the USSR and which leads to division rather than unity among the workers. As a consequence, bourgeois ideology finds a new social basis. Its underhand progress disaggregates the nascent socialist relations of production.
One cannot struggle against bourgeois ideology solely by resort to administrative and police measures. These make it possible to suppress only its overt expression but in fact leave it to progress beneath the surface in people's minds. The only effective weapon is Marxist-Leninist refutation supported by facts and the participation of the broad masses in ideological struggles. In the USSR, the transformation of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was facilitated by the fact that,
page 104
The people, raised in the ideology of servile submission to the authorities, overwhelmed by the sense of their helplessness, diverted from public affairs and from politics into the pursuit of private interests, nevertheless feel their oppression and passively resist it, but in the absence of an organised vanguard they cannot mobilise to fight it in a consistent way. They are a people divided and atomised like a heap of sand. As revisionist leaders have also discredited communism in the eyes of the masses, the latter are defenceless before the reactionary propaganda spread by encircling capitalism and its internal allies, disguised or not.
The leaders taking the capitalist road who have usurped the leadership of the party, purge it of militants loyal to the dictatorship of the proletariat. They turn a blind eye to the misappropriation of public funds for speculative ends, while intensifying the exploitation of the mass of workers for the benefit of a narrow privileged stratum. They encourage the accumulation of savings by offering high interest rates (therefore unearned incomes)(13) and launch economic reforms which restore the free functioning of the market, the authority and autonomy of the managers of enterprises, etc.
In the forms which the restoration of capitalism took in Yugoslavia, only the principal means of production remain state-owned but the laws of the functioning of the economy are now simply the laws of the capitalist mode of production as they were extracted by Marx, Engels and Lenin:
- the prices of production law of a free circulation of capitals (free buying and selling of the means of production by enterprises);
- the law of profit as the motor of production;
- the existence of an industrial reserve army (unemployment);
- economic crises, spontaneous movements of investments.
Charles Bettelheim promises a book on the restoration of the power of the bourgeoisie in the USSR, but we are already indebted to him for precise and illuminating indications on this subject which we think it would be useful to present in an abridged form.
The conquest of political power by the proletariat only opens the way to the elimination of capitalist relations of production, which continue to reproduce themselves even in the enterprises under state control. In fact, the 'enterprise' necessarily has a capitalist character owing to the fact that(14)
page 105
During the transition to socialism, the dominance of socialist
relations of production and the transformation thanks to this
dominance of the relations of real appropriation (essentially
those which are reproduced within economic units) depends on the
intervention of the other (ideological and political) instances
of the social formation in the economic instance.(17)
page 106
However, reproduction of the old bourgeois (social) relations
(at the level of the enterprises) and of the different political
and ideological apparatuses signifies that the agents of the
reproduction of these relationships, which constitute bourgeois
social forces, are still present under the dictatorship of the
proletariat and in spite of the nationalisation of the means of
production. It is this which makes the dictatorship of the
proletariat necessary, for the class struggle goes on. One of
the possible results of this struggle is the return to power,
under forms which are not readily detectable, of bourgeois social
forces. This happens when the representatives of these forces
take over the leadership of the state and the ruling party; from
that time, the class character of the state, of nationalised
property, and of planning is no longer proletarian but bourgeois.
In this situation, domination by the producers over their
conditions of existence, which, at the moment of the
proletariat's seizure of power is first assured by the state
apparatus - pending being so in other forms which are not
immediately realisable because they demand a profound transformation of the economic, political and ideological relations -
ceases altogether and is replaced by that of an exploiting class.
On the basis of the existing economic, political and ideological
relations, this class can be nothing but a bourgeoisie. The
latter appears as a state bourgeoisie.(19)
ERNEST MANDEL'S NEW THESES
According to Ernest Mandel, it is the orientation of investments which distinguishes nationalised property from private property.
In the first case, they are decided at the national level; in the second, at the level of the firm. And he adds, 'everything else follows from this'. After establishing this difference, he submits that 'planning . . . is . . . an ensemble of human relations of production'. Is this a truism? No, for these are 'human' relations in order not to be 'class' relations. Everything else follows rather from this. Humanism is never innocent. Having grasped this link Mandel pulls the whole chain to him. He forges two new 'Marxist' (?) concepts with these 'human relations of production': (a) 'relations of planning'; (b) 'the socialist and planned mode of production'.
Mandel also describes this mode of production invented 'ad hoc' as 'non-capitalist'. We know that for the 'newly independent countries' (in reality those dominated by imperialism and social-imperialism) the Soviet publicists advocate a 'non-capitalist road', the most developed examples of which are supposed to be Egypt and Burma since in them the state possesses most of the means of production.(20)
page 107
Mandel acknowledges, of course, that the 'bureaucracy' appropriates a part of the social surplus product but refuses to call this 'bourgeois exploitation'. Presumably if driven into a corner he would concede the existence of exploitation in the USSR and reject only the epithet 'bourgeois'.(21) In his article he invokes the (real) differences between the way in which, for example, the American economy and the Soviet economy function and develop. But he does not even try to demonstrate that, in order to determine the nature of the Soviet state, these differences are essential from a class point of view, a point of view which he renounces when he talks about the mode of production. It is not enough that the orientation of investments be decided at the level of the state; this orientation must also conform to the interests of the working class and the economic policy as a whole must conform to the immediate and long-term interests of the proletariat - this is 'putting politics in command'. Failing which, one cannot speak of the transition to socialism.
Mandel's whole argument is based on the opposition between a supposedly planned mode of production and a supposedly commodity mode of production co-existing in the USSR. According to him, the struggle between the dynamic of one and the dynamic of the other will necessarily end either in the Trotskyist 'political revolution' or in a counter-revolution which will have to overcome 'the fierce resistance of the Soviet proletariat'. We thus find, hardly rejuvenated, the traditional Trotskyist theses which we have already criticised. Mandel's attempt to bring them up to date collapses in its turn once one refuses to accept the 'modes of production' which he has invented for the purpose. The introduction of a plan is not enough either to eliminate social classes or to found different class relations. But the relations of production are class relations.(22) This is enough to rule out talk of a planned mode of production.
In his second letter to Sweezy, Bettelheim had already pointed out that 'bourgeois "plans" and "planning" are possible' and that
Mandel thinks that he is posing a very awkward question by asking 'what changes in the relations of production or the mode of production manifest this restoration of capitalism, this counter-revolution (in the USSR)?' Bettelheim's analyses which we have just summarised suggest a perfectly clear answer. The nationalisation of the principal means of production by the proletariat in power is a
page 108
SOME FACTS TO ILLUSTRATE THE RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM IN THE USSR
The principal agents of the restoration of capitalism are not, however, the speculators, a marginal (and secondary) phenomenon in a country in which the means of production are mainly state-owned, but 'the collective owners of the state', the ensemble of those who have leading posts in the apparatus, the 'bureaucratic bourgeoisie',(25) the 'state bourgeoisie',(26) who profit from their power to enrich themselves at the workers' expense.(27)
page 109
Economic reform
- reform gives the managers of enterprises the right to alter wage scales, to fix the proportion of profits allotted to bonuses and the distribution of the latter, and therefore to favour some people - starting with themselves - at the expense of others;
- in order to get the maximum profit, the managers of enterprises increase productivity, particularly by speed-up;
- they gain the right to lay off workers from their factories, who thus become superfluous;
- to palliate the resulting 'structural' unemployment, the state creates an employment agency called the 'Administrative Bureau for the Utilisation of Manpower'.
For the labourers, the reform signifies misery and unemployment (or at the very least uncertain employment). Only a privileged minority will be made rich. In this way the income differential which was already excessively wide will grow even wider. Such, in fact, is the policy consciously pursued since 1964.(29) The Soviet leaders do not hide it and even go so far as to find 'theoretical justification' for their anti-working class policy. The Central Committee proclaimed in its Theses on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution:
In other words, the greater the inequalities and the more people act in terms of their individual interest, the closer we get to communism.
page 110
Today the restoration of capitalism in the USSR is visible to the naked eye. Even the ideologists of the bourgeoisie are aware of it in their own way and congratulate themselves on it.(33)
The repression of the people
In order to maintain their power and supervision over the means of production, the new bourgeois exploiters led by the Brezhnev-Kosygin clique are forced to resort to repression whenever deception proves inadequate. That is why they set up a 'USSR Ministry of Public Order' in July 1966. In December of the same year, they adopted a 'resolution for the strengthening of labour discipline' which affirms the necessity for a full use of the 'administrative measures foreseen by the law' and extends the role 'of the Public Prosecutor and the Supreme Court of the USSR'. In other words, labourers who revolt against 'labour discipline' - that is, against the exploitation they suffer - are beaten down legally or even administratively.
At the beginning of 1967 new amendments were added to Soviet laws which stipulated that 'anyone who infringes Soviet political and social order' and 'spreads anti-Soviet slanders' is liable to three years' imprisonment. In January 1967 a group of Soviet youth demonstrated against the introduction of these new clauses. Two of them were sentenced to three years' imprisonment on a charge of 'Violation of public order'.(35) It is well-known that those citizens who protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 received heavy prison sentences.
page 111
Ideological degeneration
page 112
The Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer published a pamphlet in 1920 in which he accused the 'tyrannical socialism' of the Bolsheviks of doing 'violence against the social factors of force'. Speaking of this absurd theory, Lenin declared before the Second Congress of the International:
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The Bolshevik leader described the Social-Democratic Parties as bourgeois workers' parties - workers' through their recruitment and electoral influence, bourgeois through their leadership and policy. Mao Tse-tung is therefore directly in the line of Leninism when he says 'Revisionism in power is the bourgeoisie in power'.
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
However, as early as 1962, Chairman Mao had penetratingly characterised the fundamental problems of the transition to communism:
Mao defined the latter as necessary for 'consolidating the
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The targets are 'those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road' and also certain 'academic "authorities"' who propagate bourgeois ideology. (43)
The methods are:
- mobilisation of the masses, it being understood that 'the only method is for the masses to liberate themselves, and any method of doing things in their stead must not be used';(44)
- criticism by argument, supported by facts, in conditions of 'broad democracy', thanks to the real possibility given to everyone to express themselves individually or collectively by posters, journals, pamphlets and verbally in meetings and debates.
The struggle is mainly ideological. The masses participate in it by using the weapons of criticism and not the criticism of weapons. This is possible through the fact that the revolution unfolds under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Its immediate stakes are the institutions, organisms and different apparatuses usurped by leaders who have embarked on the capitalist road. It is a revolution in the superstructure, that is, its terrain is constituted by the legal-political instance and the instance of ideology. In fact, in order to carry through a lasting victory over bourgeois ideology, it is necessary to wrest the schools, the press and the other state ideological apparatuses (forms in which ideology is realised) from the domination of bourgeois intellectuals.(45)
By transforming the superstructure, the cultural revolution puts it at the service of the construction of a socialist economic base. It creates the conditions for revolutionising enterprises. As a result, relations of production of a capitalist type give way to socialist relations of production. The productive forces proper to socialism, based on the initiative, creativity and ingenuity of the masses are liberated and set in motion. Such is the meaning of the slogan 'Grasp revolution, promote production'.
The cultural revolution effects a profound upheaval of the social totality in all its determinations, levels and instances. In particular, it demolishes the mechanisms which reproduce the old social relations at the level of the ideological state apparatuses - educational, familial, cultural and informational - replacing them by other mechanisms reproducing socialist relations. It thus transforms the moral physiognomy of the country and, finally, thanks to the reciprocal action of the superstructure, it transforms the modes of production itself which does not become socialist by nationalisation alone, for 'capitalist relations of production continue to reproduce themselves in the enterprises' (Bettelheim).
The most prominent leaders taking the capitalist road, like Liu Shao-chi, relied on the agents of the reproduction of bourgeois social relations at the level of the enterprises and the political and ideological apparatuses. Seizing on a favourable conjuncture, they would have taken hold of central power, and this would have amounted to the restoration of capitalism in a new form. To guard against this danger, to sweep aside the obstacles which these bourgeois elements placed on the socialist road, it was necessary for the masses to revolt against them, to tear from them the power
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In the course of this struggle, the masses have educated themselves, they have raised the level of their political consciousness, and learned to outmanoeuvre the enemies concealed amongst them. In doing so, they have assimilated the thought of Mao Tse-tung and mastered its living application. Thus the conditions have been created for translating into reality Mao's slogan 'The working class must exercise its leadership in everything'.
Three stages can be distinguished in the cultural revolution, so long as they are not seen as strictly chronologically separate and the more or less contingent vicissitudes of its real historical development are ignored:
- seizure of power, the 'Great Alliance', the 'Triple Combination';
- 'struggle-criticism-transformation' during which take place the transformation of the system of management of the enterprises, the entry of the working class into the apparatuses and institutions of the superstructure, and the consolidation-construction of the party by the expulsion of what has been corrupted and an influx of new blood carried out 'in the open': under the supervision of the masses.
Thus the latter were called on to settle a political debate inside the party; this was contrary to tradition and clashed with the habits of thought of cadres bogged down in these traditions. The masses could only liberate themselves if it was clear that the organisms of the party and their hierarchy were not untouchable. This is why the 'Decision in 16 Points' proclaims:(46)
At the level of the economic base, the cultural revolution has allowed the real and concrete application of Mao's ideas, which Liu
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2. Strengthen Party leadership.
3. Launch vigorous mass movements.
4. Institute the system of cadre participation in productive
labour and worker participation in management, of reform of
irrational and outdated rules and regulations, and of close
co-operation among workers, cadres and technicians.
5. Go full steam ahead with the technical innovations and
technical revolution.
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- by guaranteeing his control of the army from 1960 by revolutionising it, the pillar of the dictatorship of the proletariat and by purging it of doubtful elements such as Lo Jui-ching (at the beginning of 1966);
- by encouraging Yao Wen-yuan to criticise Wu Han's 'historical play', in other words to attack the 'black gang' which controlled the municipality and press of Peking (10 November 1965);
- by publishing the circular of 16 May 1966 which, through Peng Chen, the Mayor of Peking, was aimed at all the 'other individuals of the Khrushchev type'.
As a result, the masses were the driving force of the movement and the role of the 'proletarian headquarters' was:
2. to systematise the lessons of the experience of the mass movement
in the form of general political directives.
In short, the cultural revolution was a directed movement but directed in accordance with the principles of the 'mass line'.
The 'broad democracy' which characterised it was real, and such as no people in the world has ever known. The organisations and groups of Red guards and revolutionary rebels who proliferated from the start had the free use of premises and the necessary equipment for the diffusion of their ideas: paper, ink, photo-copying machines, loud-hailers and even walkie-talkies, useful for co-ordinating the development of demonstrations.
In the first stage of the revolution, the groups even abused their freedom since they did not always respect the order to abstain from any resort to violence. The police refrained from intervening even when certain leading organs called for their help.
All the leaders were criticised: not only Liu Shao-chi, the President of the Republic, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the General Secretary of the Central Committee, and Tao Chu, the head of propaganda, but also the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ch'en Yi, Mao's wife, Kiang
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The Trotskyists have claimed that the 9th Congress was prefabricated. How then explain that the discussion on the choice of candidates to the Central Committee alone took all of nine days if Mao was able to dictate to the delegates the list which suited him?
The Chinese Communist Party has never been monolithic. A party without contradictions is a dead party.
The broad democracy we have discussed was based on a set of political principles formulated long ago by Mao Tse-tung and still valid. They have been explicitly incorporated into the new statutes of the party.
The 'Decision in 16 Points' states:
According to the Trotskyists, 'the Liu grouping took control of the party apparatus and pushed Mao to one side'.(51) The latter had mobilised the students 'as the instrument to re-establish his control over the country'.(52) This interpretation, borrowed from the bourgeois press, has been refuted by Jean Daubier who, among other things, asks: how, deprived of power, was Mao able to have Liu Shao-chi's line condemned as a right deviation in September 1962, and again in 1964 the one which he had applied 'to Tao Yuan, and to publish the twenty-three articles which concretised this condemnation'?(53) It is only true that Mao, with a small majority on the Central Committee, saw the application of his policy thwarted by the representatives of the reactionary line and the conservative elements.
The Trotskyists have not gone as far as the revisionists in the deceitful exploitation of the army's intervention in the cultural revolution. Livio Maitan's report, which we have already quoted, only notes with regard to the role played by the military in the 'revolutionary committees' that 'the structure of any army - even
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2. Democracy is not a matter of 'structure' but of function. It
concerns the way in which the decisions are taken and relations
between the leaders and the masses. Democracy exists when the
leaders consult and listen to the masses and when their decisions
correspond to the needs and wishes of the masses.
3. It is meaningless to talk of 'any army - even the most
democratic'. The difference between the People's Liberation Army
and the bourgeois armies is one not of degree but of kind. The
People's Liberation Army is not an army in the usual sense of the
word precisely because it is a people's army. The word 'army'
must be understood in a figurative sense. It is a metaphor.
Such is the case because if need be it must be possible for such an army to be used to massacre the people (cf. the Paris Commune, the 1927 massacres in China, those in 1965 in Indonesia).
The Chinese Army is quite different. It is closely bound to the people. Far from being parasitic, it produces everything which it needs, sets up pilot farms and leads vanguard industrial enterprises. It is an elite body not only on the military, but also on the political level. To be accepted in it is an honour sought by everyone and granted to the best. Discipline is all the stronger in this army, for it is based on the 'three democracies', namely:(55)
2. Economic democracy; in which 'the representatives elected by the
soldiers must be ensured the right to assist (but not to bypass)
the company leadership in managing the company's supplies and
mess' and in which the officers share the same living conditions
as the soldiers.
3. Military democracy: in which 'in periods of training there must
be mutual instruction as between officers and soldiers . . . and in
periods of fighting' there should be discussions by the soldiers
in big and small meetings on 'how to attack and capture enemy
positions'.
In January 1967 Mao issued a call for the army to support the
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The Trotskyists - too - try to exorcise Maoism by representing it as an avatar of Stalinism. This is not easy; thus, they have to concede that 'those who view Mao's present position as nothing but a replica of Stalin's tyrannical personal dictatorship . . . (are) in error'. Having thus proved their 'objectivity', they feel all the happier to denounce 'the outrageous cult of Mao' by playing, just like the revisionists, on the equivocation: cult of personality = Stalinism.(56)
Yet they themselves are far from underestimating the role of leaders in history, as is attested in the texts of Trotsky's in which he demonstrates that without Lenin there would have been no 1917 revolution. The Chinese people who know the history of their revolution, know that Mao has led them from victory to victory for fifty years. It is natural that they should feel a deep affection and veneration for him. Indeed, the expressions of these sentiments sometimes assumes forms which are a little excessive and folkloric, but this is characteristic of popular infatuations. Moreover, China has behind it several thousand years of the cult of the 'Son of Heaven'. Traces of it remain. Mao complained about this to Edgar Snow in December 1970. During the cultural revolution he had intervened several times to proscribe excessive or incorrect formulae on the theoretical level. He is no longer described as 'the great leader, great commander, great educator and great helmsman'. His thought is no longer hailed as 'the summit of Marxism-Leninism', an image possibly implying the idea of a future decline. Lastly, people are no longer urged to place themselves 'under the absolute authority' of his thought, for as Mao had observed, 'there is no absolute authority but only relative authorities'.
These excesses were generally the ultra-left's doing. The attacks on this current in 1971 were followed by a reduction in the number of portraits of Mao in Chinese towns.
It is interesting to find in the article in which Edgar Snow relates his conversation with Mao in 1965, alongside Mao's critical remarks on the 'cult of personality', the sort of statement on which
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MAOISM, THE SCIENCE OF THE REVOLUTION AND THE THIRD STAGE OF MARXISM
We base our view on the fact that the relation between the thought of Mao Tse-tung and Marxism-Leninism is exactly the same in nature as that between the thought of Lenin and that of Marx. By summing up the revolutionary practice of his age, an age in which he was one of the principal actors, Lenin developed Marxism while remaining faithful to its universal truth. Mao has done the same in our era. Like all sciences, Marxism progresses and enriches itself without the new knowledges destroying what has been acquired in the preceding period which they integrate into a wider synthesis.(57) This history is at one and the same time continuous and discontinuous.
In a series of articles celebrating the 90th Anniversary of the Paris Commune in 1961, the Chinese communists put forward a thesis which they support more than ever today: that of the three stages of Marxism. The first, placed under the sign of Marx and Engels, had been marked by the Commune; the second, that of Leninism, had culminated in the October revolution; the third was that of the thought of Mao Tse-tung and of the Chinese revolution.
Just as Leninism is the Marxism of the epoch of wars and revolutions which opened in 1914, the thought of Mao Tse-tung is the Marxism-Leninism of our era, in which imperialism will meet its final end and in which socialism marches towards victory throughout the world. Mao Tse-tung has led the Chinese revolution; he has summed up the international revolutionary experience for half a century; he has drawn the lessons from revisionist degeneration, particularly in the USSR; he has unleashed and led the cultural revolution so that China would avoid a similar fate. In doing so, he has solved a whole series of problems, concerning particularly the theory of (dialectical) contradiction, the theory of the united front, that of the people's war, that of class struggle in the transition to socialism and of contradictions among the people. Mao has thus carried Marxism to a higher level.
If the Chinese do not use the term Maoism, in our opinion it is for three reasons: (a) out of a concern not to emphasise the novelty of the thought of Mao Tse-tung in relation to Marxism-Leninism so as not to provide ammunition for revisionist propaganda; (b) because Mao is alive and modesty forbids him to talk of Maoism himself and
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The latter are purely tactical reasons. In no respect do they invalidate the theoretical arguments which we have just presented. It so happens that not only do we not have the same tactical motives for adopting the Chinese usage but, on the contrary, the conjuncture of the struggle between the two roads among the movements which lay claim to the thought of Mao Tse-tung requires that one should differentiate oneself from the ossified Marxist-Leninists who have understood nothing of Mao Tse-tung's original contribution and who only verbally recognise its universal validity, and hence its applicability in Europe, and who reject the term Maoism because of this. This is why in France the latter was adopted by the 'Gauche prolétarienne' at its birth.(58)
We do not claim by any means that there are ready-made recipes for revolution in any country whatever in the works of Mao. Maoism should be regarded in exactly the same way as Mao regarded Marxism-Leninism, as a foreign doctrine which he was able to acclimatise to China. One must 'assimilate it and know how to apply it and assimilate it with the single aim of applying it'. This is impossible if one is content to repeat stereotyped formulae instead of using one's brains. Like all sciences, the thought of Mao is the systematisation of acquired knowledge (in this case that of the revolutionary experience of the peoples). The assimilation of this acquisition and its living applications are the precondition for a correct solution to the new problems posed and hence the pre-condition for a further development of the theory.
How can one define the unity of the organic development and the invariance of Marxism? Marxist theory aims to know the world in order to transform it; it succeeds in knowing it through and by means of its transformation. By penetrating the masses, by becoming a material force, it transforms the world and transforms itself in the process. Theory can only be assimilated by putting it into practice. That is why the Marxologists understand nothing about Marxism. Like the party, theory is only a means to free the people. To make it an end in itself is to harden it into a dogma, into scholastic speculation. Theory can only be developed by really applying it, i.e., successfully applying it. It is true, of course, that we can learn many lessons from the analysis of a defeat; communists constantly sum up their experience including their defeats - but only victorious exemplary applications permit the verification of the validity of a theoretical innovation, that is, a new solution to the ever-new problems raised by practice. To go beyond the Marxism of a certain stage, to make it progress, it must have previously been assimilated through its application in the revolution. This is what Lenin and Mao did. On the contrary, Bernstein, Kautsky, Khrushchev, Togliatti and other Dubceks revise
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Every chapter of this book contains elements of a reply to the question - What is Maoism? In what follows we shall emphasise only its democratic, undogmatic and non-repressive character.
The thought of Mao Tse-tung brings to the masses the conceptual instruments which enable them to intervene actively in politics and to take their destiny into their own hands. The very vigorous ideological struggles between different currents and organisations during the cultural revolution in China and the fact that the 9th Congress required all of three weeks of discussions, show that a general reference to Mao's thought by no means signifies some kind of standardisation of the Chinese, who are sometimes presented by the Pekinologists as a society of ants and not of human 'subjects'.(59) If one is to believe them, only one man has the right 'to think' in China. As if Mao were not the theoretician of the contradictions among the people, that is, of the legitimacy of differences of opinion among men pursuing the same ultimate ends. In fact, far from exempting its adherents from having to think for themselves, Maoism, on the contrary, enables them to do it in a rigorous way. It does not provide them with a set of recipes valid for all situations but demands of them that they 'set the machine (the brain) to work', that they 'dissect one of several sparrows' (that they analyse problems concretely after investigation); in short, that they dare to think, to talk, to act. Mao says: (60)
Well, Mao invites the people not only to search for understanding but also to reject what is unreasonable. 'It is right to rebel' he
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Undoubtedly it is permissible to deny the scientific status of Marxism in general as well as Maoism in particular. In this case refutations are necessary on a theoretical and practical level. Lenin refuted Menshevism in a series of writings. Furthermore, like Socrates who demonstrated movement by walking, Lenin demonstrated the legitimacy of socialist revolution in Russia by making it.
Raymond Aron asserts that 'the theory according to which social contradictions by themselves lead to a classless society and a mathematical or physical proposition have nothing in common'.(61) He takes good care not to explain that for a Marxist the concept of 'social contradictions' refers to social reality in its totality, whose motor force they are. Once this is known it becomes clear that if social contradictions do lead to a classless society they must lead there 'by themselves', unless we admit to the intervention of a God. Left in ignorance of this explanation the reader is led by this procedure, as infallible as it is surreptitious, to believe that, according to Marxists, the revolution will be made all by itself and that society will go over to communism without our having any hand in it. How could Marxism claim to be scientific if it were a fatalism and therefore the most elementary of superstitions?
While suggesting this conclusion with his usual dexterity, Aron avoids compromising himself by making it explicit; he is content to state that 'a mathematical or physical proposition' has 'nothing in common' with a Marxist proposition, that Marxism 'does not represent a science in the sense of a natural science such as mathematics or physics'. Maybe yes, maybe no. What are we to understand by 'in common', 'in the sense of'? What Aron is putting forward is obvious (with the obviousness of a truism) or false, according to whether the formulations are taken 'sensu stricto' or 'lato'. Thanks to this semantic fog he can pass off as self-evident an assertion which is at the very least questionable.
All the sciences differ among themselves by their object, their concepts and their methods, but they all possess certain common features. We shall enumerate those which historical materialism shares with the other sciences:
(b) The known facts do not contradict these laws.
(c) The latter make it possible to explain the facts by their
causes.
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In the domain of the natural sciences all men are interested in knowing the objective truth whatever their class membership. This is not true in the case of the 'social sciences'. Here the same consensus cannot be attained because interests are opposed. In order to survive, the bourgeoisie has to achieve a real 'repression' of the truths which condemn it. It cannot admit, for example, that its reign is not eternal, that the bosses need the workers but the workers do not need the bosses. As for the proletariat, it has no particular interests to defend. In liberating itself it liberates the whole of humanity. In this sense it is the 'universal class'. Only intellectuals who side with the proletariat could discover the universal laws of historical development which reveal to the proletariat the way to its victory. In short, the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals who have joined its fight have an interest in knowing and publishing the truth while the bourgeoisie have an interest in masking it by masking it from themselves.
Two points in conclusion.
As in the other sciences, the assimilation of the acquisitions of historical materialism is necessary in order to go further, but does not carry a guarantee of success. The truth is always concrete.
On the other hand, the failure of a political line does not bring into question the validity of historical materialism, but only that line. It is still necessary to analyse, setting out from the lessons of this failure, in what respects the line was wrong, for certain setbacks are inevitable by virtue of the balance of forces.
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Chapter 6
CHINESE REVOLUTION
INTRODUCTION
(b) Stalin deliberately and systematically imposed on them a
line which led to their defeat and even to their
destruction. He was the 'organiser of defeats'.
(c) Stalin acted in this way to safeguard the existence of the
USSR and because the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy
were the only ones that mattered to him.
As for the first two points, they are needed to lay the blame for all the defeats on to Stalin, but the Trotskyists have never provided the least proof of this. Moreover, research which is in any way serious reveals a multitude of facts that invalidate the Trotskyist theses. For example, how can Stalin be held responsible for the mistakes made by the CCP in the period 1928-35 when we know:
2. that, whenever he had knowledge of them, Stalin upheld the
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3. that the latter carried out the Comintern's instructions only
when it suited it to do so.
It is only after sweeping away the hotch-potch accumulated by forty years of falsification that one can begin to tackle the really interesting questions such as the historically real content of the concept of Stalinism; the contribution of the International, based in Moscow, to the education and ideological unification of the international communist movement; the historical roots of the opportunist degeneration of this movement, etc.
In his book 'Fascisme et dictature', Poulantzas argues that the relation between the Comintern policy and the USSR was channelled through a line characterised by 'economism, the absence of a mass line and the abandonment of proletarian internationalism'.(1) He specifies, moreover, that the last trait 'appears principally . . . in the theses and concrete policy regarding "the national question" and "the colonial question"'.(2)
Let us note in passing that it is precisely the Chinese, Yugoslavian, Albanian and Vietnamese Communist Parties concerned by these theses and this policy which seem to have been the least troubled by them since they were victorious. We shall see in what follows that an investigation of the relations between the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party by no means corroborates Poulantzas's thesis. Of course it may be presumed, for example, that the line of unprincipled unity in the anti-Japanese front favoured by Wang Ming had been encouraged by Stalin; there is also the fact that the Moscow press condemned Chiang Kai-shek's arrest in Siam as a Japanese-inspired plot;(3) but all this is not enough to lead one to deduce an 'abandonment of proletarian internationalism'. It is not what the Chinese think, and they are in a better position than anyone to know. We still do not have means to determine the periodisation of the class struggle in the USSR on the basis of its internal factors, but we do know its effects at the level of its international policy. It emerges from this that 'the process of the reconstitution of the Soviet bourgeoisie' already in action in Stalin's time could only end in the usurpation of state power after his death.
The chapter which follows has extremely restricted aims. It should not be looked to for a systematic study of the history of the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the First and Second Revolutionary Civil Wars. By taking the example of the defeats suffered by the Chinese revolution from 1927 to 1935, we propose to establish the following points:
2. that the Trotskyists falsify the history of this period in the
framework of their propaganda with a view to canonising Trotsky
and presenting Stalin as the source of all the evils which have
befallen the communist movement;
3. that, independently of the specific cases of falsification which
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CHRONOLOGY: LANDMARKS (1926-7)
The victorious advance of the Nationalist armies was made easier by the revolutionary agitation organised by the communists in the enemy's rear. Everywhere the peasant leagues and unions arose and seized power. In Hunan alone, where Mao Tse-tung was active, the peasant leagues had 1 million members in November 1926, 2 million in January 1927, and 5 million in April of that year.(4)
The victory of the revolution in the Yangtze Valley led to clashes with the imperialists. On 7 September, British gunboats bombarded the unarmed population of Wansien and their troops fired on demonstrators in Hankow. As a result of these incidents the workers in Hankow occupied the British concession (January 1927). American and British warships bombarded Nanking on 24 March, some foreigners having been killed when the town was seized.
Shanghai was liberated at this time (23 March) following a workers' rising led by the communists, notably Chou En-lai.
On 10 March, Chiang Kai-shek had made a speech violently attacking the Kuomintang Government that had been set up at Wuhan and containing veiled threats against the communists. Wuhan replied by withdrawing from Chiang nearly all his special powers. The communists received a seat in the Presidium of the Political Council and two Ministries.
Terrified by the setting up of a municipality dominated by the representatives of the toiling masses and depending on the support of 2,700 armed workers, the bankers and compradors of Shanghai called Chiang Kai-shek to their assistance. The latter needed money: they handed over 45 million yuan. With the agreement of the authorities of the French and Anglo-American concessions 5,000 rifles and trucks were supplied to the members of the green and red gangs who, moreover, were authorised to traverse the concessions to massacre the workers and revolutionary intellectuals. Chiang's troops organised similar massacres in Canton and Nanking (12 April).(5)
The Wuhan government immediately dismissed Chiang Kai-shek from all his posts and expelled him from the Kuomintang (17 April). But on the following day he set up his own government at Nanking.
On 17 May, General Hsia Tiu-yin rebelled against the Wuhan government and declared himself for that of Nanking. He tried to seize Wuhan and was defeated by the mobilisation of the people in the capital of Hupeh and by the arrival of the troops of the pro-communist General Yeh-T'ing. On 21 May, a general of the Wuhan Government launched a bloody repression of communists and militant workers and peasants in Changsha. Later, arrests and massacres of
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At Nanchang on 1 August, there was a rising of the left Kuomintang garrison, commanded by communists (Chu Teh, Ho Lung, Yeh T'ing). These troops (30,000 men) headed south but were dispersed following heavy fighting in the Swatow region (27-30 September). Only a few thousand soldiers under Chu Teh escaped. In April 1928, they joined the forces which Mao Tse-tung had led into the Ching Kang mountains after the defeat of the Autumn Harvest Movement.(7)
Other risings led to the creation of more or less durable 'soviet' Red bases in the provinces of Kwantung, Hupeh, Shensi, etc.
On 11 December, the Canton insurrection was unleashed under the leadership of Yeh T'ing. The insurrection had the advantage of the complicity of Yeh Chien-ying (future Field-marshal of the People's Liberation Army) who commanded the training regiment and also from a situation which was momentarily very favourable since conflicts between two nationalist generals had led one of them to deploy his troops outside the town, leaving the latter ungarrisoned. The forces which took part in the action were 2,000 Red guards, 200 men from the training regiment and some 8,000 workers and peasants armed with rifles captured in the military depots, of whom 2,000 were communist workers freed from prisons. They were crushed two days later by the 50,000 Kuomintang who intervened immediately; 1,000 insurgents escaped and reached the sovietised zones of Haifeng and Lufeng while others were the germ of the guerillas of the Yu Kiang River.(8)
According to the Trotskyists, the 'Canton Commune' was a 'suicidal insurrection decided in Moscow' by Stalin, who desired a victorious announcement for the 15th Congress. No proof is ever forthcoming to support these allegations. It is clear, anyway, that for reasons of distance, Moscow could not decide particular operations and had to be content with transmitting general guidelines. So far as the substance of the problem is concerned, it must be seen that even risings destined to be defeated may be worth more than surrender without a fight. The Autumn Harvest insurrection was also a defeat but it was the beginning of the long march of the Chinese Communist Party to victory. Nevertheless, it does seem that the price paid in Canton was too high. In any case, risings in the towns stemmed from an erroneous strategy, striking the enemy at his strong point when his weak point was in the countryside. The Trotskyists cannot make this criticism - the only correct one - for they also thought that China had to be liberated in the towns first of all.
It was by rejecting this mistake on the basis of its experience, without listening to the Trotskyists, that the Chinese Communist Party regained the lost terrain in the following period. The communists were 'neither cowed nor conquered nor exterminated. They picked themselves up, wiped off the blood, buried their fallen comrades and went into battle again'.(9) Far from stopping the course of history, the reverse in 1927 planted the seeds of future victories.
As Mao Tse-tung has said, 'Struggle, defeat, new struggle, new
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HOW ISAAC DEUTSCHER WRITES HISTORY
Let us note that the strategy of penetrating a non-proletarian but progressive mass-movement had been tried with great success by Sneevliet himself in the Dutch East Indies, where the communists had set up cells in the peasant organisation Sarekat Islam. It was this experience which inspired the tactic of the united front with the revolutionary nationalist movements of the colonial and semi-colonial countries adopted by the 2nd Congress of the Communist International. It was Lenin who first sent Sneevliet to China (1920). Moreover, the latter attached great importance to the CCP's maintenance of political and organisational independence.
Now, in a text dating from the period when he was striving to justify himself against the criticism directed at him by the CCP leadership, Ch'en Tu-hsiu tells us that Maring had urged the Chinese communists to enter the Kuomintang because(12)
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He also said of Ch'en: 'At every stage he frankly stated his objections to Moscow's policy; but he did not stick to them. When overruled, he submitted to the Comintern's authority, and against his better knowledge carried out Moscow's policy.' Poor Ch'en' He could say with the Latin poet 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor' ('I know the right, approve it, and yet the wrong pursue.')
Historical reality is infinitely more complex than this apologetic thesis which the Trotskyists hand down from one generation to another, simplifying and deforming it as they go. This degradation from history to mythology can be traced by comparing Harold Isaacs to Deutscher and the latter to Broué. Fernando Claudin, too, slavishly takes up this legend, referring to Ch'en Tu-hsiu's 'Letter to Comrades' which he says 'has great interest, both human and historical'!(14)
Dov Bing, a more serious and less naïve investigator (though even more anti-Stalinist), has unearthed more than one falsehood in this account, which should be treated with great caution given its interested character.
There is no documentary evidence (before 1929) that Ch'en Tu-hsiu had only reluctantly agreed to join the Kuomintang. Even if this was so, it cannot be seen as the sign of a left-wing position. In their 'Shanghai Letter', the three members of the Comintern mission showed that opportunism made Voitinsky and the right of the CCP want the Communists not to enter the Canton government; more precisely, so that they would not have to struggle against the right-wing of the Kuomintang.(15) Likewise, it was a 'defeatist mentality' that made the Comintern executive representative (in agreement with Borodin) propose after the coup on 20 March 1926 that the communists should leave the Kuomintang as Chiang Kai-shek wanted.(16) The most right-wing leader in the party, T'an P'ing-shan, had criticised the policy of integration into the Kuomintang at the Comintern Plenum of November 1926. As Minister of Agriculture in the Wuhan Government he was, however, most zealous in holding back the peasant movement against certain instructions of the Comintern.
The policy of working within the Kuomintang was, after all, perfectly correct in the framework of the struggle against imperialism and the militarists. It gave a colossal impetus to the mass movement in the towns and the countryside. Li Ta-chao and Mao Tse-tung had carried out this policy enthusiastically for reasons quite independent of Comintern instructions. Mao seems even to have been subjected to sharp criticisms from some of his comrades such as Li Li-san, who attacked him for putting too much emphasis on co-operation with the Kuomintang.(17)
As early as 1923, Ch'en Tu-hsiu denied that the Chinese
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We shall see later that Ch'en's distrust of the peasant movement and his refusal to support it or to accept its arming, were diametrically opposed to other specific resolutions adopted by the Comintern. The right opportunists of the CCP verbally accepted the International's recommendations and then acted in the opposite sense, as they were encouraged to do by Voitinsky and Borodin.(19) To present them as consistent and lucid revolutionaries obeying, nevertheless, 'perinde ac cadaver', is a fable which does not stand up to examination.
TROTSKY AND THE CHINESE REVOLUTION (1923-7)
Principle alone cannot decide whether Trotsky was right on this question. It is necessary to study the facts and to endeavour to study thoroughly the specificity of the Chinese situation at that time. Between 1922 and 1927, the number of members of the CCP increased from 300 to nearly 70,000 and the unions which they controlled reached 3 million members. They penetrated the Kuomintang apparatus from top to bottom. Chou En-lai carried on the functions of Assistant Political Director of the Whampoa Military Academy,(21) Mao Tse-tung was a member of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang and Director of the Peasant Movement Training Institute (cadre school). Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Borodin were the lieutenants of Sun Yat-sen and then of Wang Ching-wei. Other Kuomintang leaders were very close to them, such as Liao Chung-k'ai who, for this reason, was assassinated by the rightists. The communists and the left Kuomintang controlled 90 per cent of the Kuomintang committees at the base and intermediary levels. At the same time, the communists retained in practice the autonomy of their organisation and made propaganda quite freely. In fact, until Chiang Kai-shek's about-turn, the middle or national bourgeoisie played an objectively revolutionary role, while remaining hesitant and vacillating. Concern for its interests induced it to fight imperialism and its allies - the warlords and the comprador bourgeoisie. Semi-feudal relations in the countryside and wars
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In May 1927, that is, after the break with Chiang Kai-shek, Trotsky, making a complete 'volte-face' at the 8th Plenum of the International, denied advocating the withdrawal of the communists from the Kuomintang.(24) This is a fact little known to Trotskyists - and Deutscher passed it over in silence.
It was in April 1927 that Trotsky seized upon the Chinese question as a warhorse in the struggle he was then conducting along with Zinoviev and Kamenev against the Political Bureau. Until then he had only concerned himself with the question from the point of view of the state interests of the USSR. In 1926, he had chaired a commission whose task was to elaborate recommendations for the Political Bureau regarding the line of Soviet diplomacy in China. He submitted the report on 25 March. Here is what Deutscher said about it:(25)
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Trotsky clearly underestimated the revolutionary potential of the peasant class in China. He says that 'there is almost no estate of landlords in China' (sic), and he adds that 'the specific weight of the agrarian question in China is therefore much lighter than in Tsarist Russia'.(26) In the same work, which as we know dates from November 1929, he quoted one of his old speeches, 'The town is the hegemon of modern society and only the town is capable of assuming the role of hegemon in the bourgeois revolution,' and he added in a note, 'Do the belated critics of the permanent revolution agree with this? Are they prepared to extend this elementary proposition to the countries of the East, China, India, etc.? Yes or no?'(27)
No, Mr Trotsky! Of course the proletarian party secures the hegemony in the revolutionary movement at the level of ideological and political leadership, but its most numerous troops and also some of its leaders come to it from the peasantry. Its most promising field of action is the countryside, for 'the revolution is always strongest where the counter-revolution is weakest' (Mao). It was by encircling the towns from the countryside that it was eventually able to liberate China. The poor peasants were the principal motive of the Chinese revolution. Trotsky's prognosis was exactly the opposite. In July 1928, he wrote, 'It is only with a new rising wave of the proletarian movement that one will be able to speak seriously about the perspective of an agrarian revolution.'(28)
Causes of the opportunist errors of the CCP leadership