Chinese editions of the Collected Writings of Mao Tse-tung and the 1969 olutionary Marxist collection Long Live Mao Tse-tung Thought.
22 mao tse tung
& the chinese revolution historical assessment comrade active in Hong Kong, who is also the author of "Behind China's
In his Role of the Individual in History, Plekhanov wrote: "The greatness of a historical figure lies not in his particular traits giving the great historical event a particular character, but in his possession of particular traits that enable him to best meet the needs of his society and Mao Tse-tung is precisely this sort of great historical figure, because it was under his leadership that the Chinese Communist party (CCP) defeated the Kuomintang, drove imperialism out of China, eliminated the remnants of feudalism, and completed the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. It was also under his leadership that the process of collectivization of agriculture and socialization of industry was initiated. However, exactly when Mao attempted to "give the great historical event a particular character" and desired to "stop and change the natural process of history" (again the words of Plekhanov), his individual force of "greatness" quietly dissolved into anonymous social and historical evolution. In 1949, when Mao issued an appeal, thousands and millions of people were prepared to follow him, and even to endanger their lives in the process. By 1976, however, the appeal of the "anti-rightists" led by Mao was answered with the demonstration in Tien An Men Square. When Mao died on September 9, 1976, Mao the great historical figure had already long since ceased to exist. The Mao who had accompanied and guided great historical changes existed only in history. And the death of Mao . has raised the curtain on another coming historical storm. I. MAO'S LEADERSHIP AND THE VICTORY OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION The Chinese Communist party seized power in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. This victory of the third Chinese revolution not only took Stalin by surprise but also astounded the Chinese Trotskyists. What accounted for this victory? One explanation that has been advanced in the Trotskyist movement is that it was primarily a result of accidental circumstance not at all of Mao's own making. It is true, ot course, that such factors are always operative in history. But an attempt to explain an event so sweeping as the victory of the Chinese revolution exclusively or even primarily on the basis of accident or happenstance inevitably minimizes or even ignores both the social dynamics underlying the superficial accidental features and the subjective forces that directed and channeled these dynamics. The proper way to formulate the question is as follows: What were the policies followed by the CCP which enabled it to centralize and accumulate the gigantic social forces in play, to gain the support of the proletariat and peasantry, and then to score social, political, and military victory? In pursuance of Stalin's policy of the "bloc of four classes, "the CCP surrendered all the gains of the second Chinese revolution during the 1920s, gains achieved by the blood of the workers and peasants, to the Kuomintang. Once it had usurped these gains, the Kuomintang centered its fire on the CCP in the most brutal manner. With Chiang Kai-shek's coup in Shanghai on April 12, 1927, the working class of that city, backbone of the Chinese proletariat, was sacrificed on the altar of the opportunist line of the Communist International, already well on the road to Stalinization. The reactionary wave soon spread throughout the major cities of China. Everywhere the workers were hunted down, arrested, slaughtered. The workers movement was broken and the second Chinese revolution defeated. The strong concentration of the working class in the cities is one of the factors that account for its strength. It is this same factor, however, that also explains the rapid decline of the working class movement during periods of reaction. On the other hand, the decentralization of the peasantry constitutes one of the decisive weaknesses of this class, both socially and politically. But it is that same factor that enables the peasant movement to maintain a certain continuity even under conditions of decline. Because of this feature of the peasant movement, combined with the Kuomintang's inability to unify the country in 1927 (a reality expressed most graphically in the persistent power of local warlords), the echos of the second Chinese revolution continued to reverberate in the countryside even after the urban workers movement had been smashed and the general trend was one of decline and counterrevolution. These after-effects of the second Chinese revolution in the countryside formed the connection between the second and third Chinese revolutions. And it was Mao Tse-tung more than any other single figure who reinforced this connection and continuity. In early 1927, after a month-long investigation of the situation of the peasantry in Hunan, Mao wrote that "the national revolution requires a great change in the countryside. The revolution of 1911 did not bring about this change, hence its failure. This change is now taking place, and it is an important factor for the completion of the revolution. " In itself, of course, this conclusion was in no way ground-breaking. Both Lenin and Trotsky had written abundantly on the importance of the worker-peasant alliance, and Trotsky in particular had stressed the centrality of the agrarian question in the process of permanent revolution. For the Chinese Communist party in the 1920s, however, Mao's conclusion was significant, for it represented a rediscovery of a forgotten truth. There were two main reasons for this. First, in order to maintain its alliance with the Kuomintang during the 1925-27 period, the CCP had limited the development of the peasant movement, particularly the armed peasant movement. Most of the CCP leadership thus viewed Mao as advocating peasant riots. Second and more important, the members of the young CCP generally regarded the October Revolution as the single valid model of revolution, whether consciously or not. Hence, beginning from the correct understanding that the proletariat is the leading class in the worker-peasant alliance, they inferred that strategically power had to be seized first in the cities through the workers insurrection as a preliminary to spreading the revolution throughout the countryside.
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CHINA There was thus a strong tendency to stress work in the cities to such an extent as to downplay or even ignore the peasant movement. This mechanistic outlook was common to both the central leadership of the CCP, which rejected Mao's proposal to "push the party to formulate a new policy toward the peasant movement, " and the Chinese Trotskyists. In October 1927 Mao assembled the remnants of the defeated army of the Autumn Harvest Uprising and established a revolutionary base in Chiang Kang Shan. From that point on, Mao's major arena of activity was the countryside. In spite of its opportunist policies on many levels, the CCP under the Mao leadership group was able to win the support of the poor and lower-middle peasants, a result of the party's land reform policies. While this gigantic force had no independent role politically, it did, under the leadership of the CCP, become the decisive social factor in the third Chinese revolution. Mao's general strategy for the revolution was to surround the cities from the countryside and to wage revolutionary war by a peasant army in order to seize power. This strategy represented the culmination of Mao's empirical practice. What was the source of the Red Army's strength? This is the key to the explanation of the victory. In his "Why Is It that Red Political Power Can Exist in China?" Mao pointed out that "the present Red Army ... is a split-off from the National Revolutionary Army which underwent democratic political training and came under the influence of the masses of workers and peasants. " This proletarianized Red Army nucleus was an important factor in resisting assimilation of the backwardness of the peasants as the CCP began building a peasant army. In order to arm the peasants and maintain the existence of the Red Army, the CCP had to consolidate revolutionary bases. This was possible because of "the divided policies of exploitation of local agricultural economy (which is not a unified capitalist economy) and of the regions dominated by imperialism. Because there are persistent splits and wars between the white regimes, it is possible to establish the red regime amid the white regimes in a small locality or several small localities. ... So long as we are convinced that the splits and wars among the white regimes will continue, the occurrence, existence, and development of the red regimes is not in doubt." But Mao did not lose sight of the long-term perspective: "Whether the worker-peasant-soldier soviet regime will be able to exist in the long run is determined by whether the revolutionary situation in the whole coun try will advance. If it does, then the red regime in those small localities can exist in the long run. And it will be one force among others in seizing power in the whole country. If it does not, and if the revolutionary situation stagnates for a comparatively long period, like the period between 1905 and 1917 in Russia, then the red regimes cannot hold out in the long run. 24
The final reason offered by Mao to explain the existence of the red regimes in the countryside was "the strength of the CCP and the correctness of its policies. " The content of the latter phrase was not explained concretely. But anyone who looks at the question objectively must admit that the key question here was the implementation of land reform. The Communist party's agrarian policy shifted many times, swinging from left to right and back again. But it was never the case that the CCP did not confiscate the land of the rich peasants. Nor did the CCP ever cease to apply land reform. The essential content of its policy was to confiscate the land of the landlords and distribute it to the poor peasants and hired laborers. The policy toward the rich and middle peasants changed from time to time, but the basic line remained to win over the majority of the middle peasants and block the development of the rich peasants.
Man Tsetung at a poor peasants' conference in 1933 What were the effects of the land reform in the Chinese countryside in places where the poor and lower-middle peasants constituted the great majority of the population? Here we may cite the opinion of a Kuomintang historian: "After the distribution of the land, the CCP did its best to mobilize all the labor force of the countryside, including old and young, women and children, to carry out production. The peasants were glad to receive land. Therefore, unconsciously, all the peasant laborers were controlled by the CCP. The peasants not only carried out production, but in times of military the penrich goather en heR were realized. The land insurgency they entered the Red Army. revolution became the bait and trap of the peasants. " (Wang Ji-Men, History of the Chinese Communist party, Hong Kong, 1974.) A more positive description of this process may be summarized as follows: At that time land reform benefited the poor peasants, middle peasants, and hired laborers and liberated them from the old society. The peasants
rewarded this by accepting the leadership of the CCP and by following the CCP politically. The function of the soviet regime was thus economically to implement the land reform, politically to win the support of the peasantry, and militarily to centralize the revolutionary forces of the poor peasants and hired laborers. The strength of Mao's strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside lay in this. Without land reform, it would have been impossible to concentrate the force of the peasants in the whole country. Surrounding the cities from the countryside was a new revolutionary strategy after the October Revolution. The basis of the strategy was this: Because of the uneven development of the workers movement in the cit¡es and the peasant movement in the countryside (and with the proviso that the CCP did not abandon its political independence), the CCP was able to build its revolutionary bases first in the countryside, implement the policy of land reform, consolidate its leadership of the poor peasants, arm the peasantry, and then utilize the decisive social force of the peasantry to seize state power. This strategy was workable in spite of the fact that there were two permanent dangers: first, that the CCP would find its relations with the working class severed, and second that the CCP would be corroded and assimilated by the backward consciousness of the peasantry. So long as the CCP was able to resist these two dangers, Mao's strategy remained a practicable one. Regardless of the manner in which Mao formulated the line, its successful application demonstrates that in reality the CCP was able to resist these dangers, and credit for this must go primarily to the Mao leaderStalin's policy and Mao's orientation Another important factor in the victory of the third Chinese revolution was this: On two essential questions Mao did not follow Stalin's policy - the character of the second Kuomintang-CCP alliance (during the second world war) and the policy of the CCP after the war • In July 1935, at the Seventh Congress of the Third International, Stalin officially ended his ultraleft "third period" orientation and swung over to the rightist policy of the Popular Front. The results were disastrous for nearly all those Communist parties which accepted and implemented this policy. The Chinese CP, however, not only escaped disaster but was finally victorious. Why? Under the Mao leadership the CCP maintained the independence of its own armed forces and applied this watchword of Mao: "The Communist party should resort to its own positive, thorough, and correct anti-Japanese, anti-traitor speech and action so as to gain hegemony within the anti-Japanese front. " During the time it maintained its front with the Kuomintang during the Sino-Japanese war, the CCP did raise such slogans as "Long live Chiang Kai-shek!" At the same time, however, Mao pointed out: "Though the Chinese bourgeoisie can join the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle under certain historical circumstances, because of its own economic and political weakness in another historical environment it will waver and betray the struggle. Chinese history has already demonstrated this law. Therefore, history has determined that it is not through bourgeois leadership but necessarily through the leadership of the proletariat that the mission of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudalist bourgeois-democratic revolution can be achieved in China. . Either the proletariat will follow the bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie will follow the proletariat. This question of the responsibility of the revolutionary leadership in China is the determining factor in the victory or defeat of the revolution." And further: "Our correct and independent political orientation and solid unity serve the purpose of winning over millions of people to the Resist Japan People's Front." Thus, the second alliance of the Kuomintang and the CCP was qualitatively different from the first in that the Communist party maintained its political, military, and organizational independence in this second alliance. In addition, during the period of the alliance the CCP successfully developed its bases in many provinces. The CCP thus gradually extended the dual power situation throughout the country. At the same time, Mao called for "a real people's representative assembly and the adoption of a genuine democratic constitution." Socially, the CCP advocated "the improvement of the wages of the workers, peasants, clerks, and soldiers resisting Japan . . . and the abolition of excessive taxes, the lowering of rent and interest. " These demands, combined with the CCP's practical contribution to resisting Japanese aggression, enabled the party to win an enthusiastic response from the laboring masses throughout the country. The inherently defeatist popular-front-type alliance was thus transformed into a front based on the masses. It is this transformation that explains why the CCP was able to gain in strength during the period of this alliance, not only in absolute terms but also relative to the Kuomintang. Stalin attacked Mao's orientation in this alliance as a left deviation, while the Chinese Trotskyists characterized it as a rightist betrayal, neither understanding the real content of the transformation that was occurring. This is not to say that the Mao leadership did not commit serious errors or that the CCP's victory compensates
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124 • ! Mao Tsetung in 1958, inspecting wall posters for all the political mistakes. But criticism of the policy of the CCP must begin from the fundamental consideration that the mistakes did not prevent victory, which means that the mistakes must be evaluated in the light of the victory, especially when it is taken into account that the Popular Front had such disastrous consequences throughout most of the international Communist movement. When the second world war ended, China was not within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Stalin's policy advocated that the CCP and the Kuomintang form a united government, even at the cost of the CCP's giving up part or all of its military forces. But Mao did not follow this line. As Mao pointed out later: "The Chinese revolution won victory by acting contrary to Stalin's will. (He) 'did not allow people to make revolution.'. . If we had followed Wang Ming's, or in other words Stalin's, methods the Chinese revolution couldn't have succeeded. When our revolution succeeded, Stalin said it was a fake. " (Talks at the Chengtu conference, March 1958, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, Pelikan Books, p. 102-103.) The policy of the Kuomintang immediately after the war was to rely on the imperialists to recover the regions that had been occupied by the Japanese army and to prepare an all-out offensive against the Red Army. Mao did call for a united government, but he did not forget the experiences of the second Chinese revolution. On the contrary, he was prepared to throw the 910, 000-strong People's Liberation Army, the 2,200, 000-strong militia, and the 10 million-strong 26
Self-Defense Forces — all of which had been developed during the Sino-Japanese war - into the battle. On August 9, 1945, Mao called upon the "Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and other People's Forces to attack in all possible circumstances those aggressors who are unwilling to surrender, to eliminate their logistical strength, to seize their arms and property, to vigorously expand the liberated zones, to reduce the occupied regions, and to organize military forces .. to immediately organize an underground army and to prepare for an armed uprising. " On August 10, 1945, Chu Teh, commander-in-chief of the Red Army, ordered an all-out offensive. This policy was to extend the dual power situation. The slogan of the united government was conceived of only to benefit the development of the dual power situation. At the most decisive moment, Mao openly disobeyed Stalin's orders, not only refusing to obey Chiang Kai-shek (as ordered by Stalin), but even branding him the common enemy of the people. Had Mao really entertained illusions in the united government at that point, the revolution could well have failed. II. MAO AND PERMANENT REVOLUTION Mao's theory of New Democracy clearly indicated that he stood for revolution by stages. But it is equally clear that in the course of the third Chinese revolution, Mao empirically took the path of permanent revolution. What is the explanation for this evolution wherein theory and practice were contradictory? First of all, it must be noted that Mao, having gone through the second Chinese revolution, the land reform, and the red regimes in the countryside, had not ignored the question of the non-capitalist future of the revolution. He wrote, for example: "Many comrades have already posed the question of the nature and future of the Democratic Republic of China. Our answer is that its class nature is based on the alliance of all classes, but its future can be non-capitalist, because our Democratic Republic is built in the process of fulfilling the task of national resistance, under the leadership of the proletariat and in the new international environment (the victory of Soviet socialism and the eve of world revolution). Therefore, according to the social conditions the Democratic Republic is in general not beyond the nature of the bourgeois state. However, in accordance with the concrete political conditions, it should be a state based on the alliance of the proletariat, peasantry, and the bourgeoisie. Therefore, though there is a possibility of capitalist development, the possibility of a complete transformation along non-capitalist lines is open. The Chinese proletarian party should do its best to fight for this second possibility." After the third Chinese revolution the "people's democratic dictatorship" was established. According to Mao's definition, the role of this dictatorship was as follows: "to forge a united front of the proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie under the leadership of the proletariat and to develop
from this an alliance of the proletariat and peasantry led by the proletariat as the foundation of the state of the people's democratic dictatorship. " In accordance with this line, in September 1949 the CCP convened the first Chinese People's Consultative Congress. In September 1954, supposed representatives of these four classes participated in the First People's Representative Congress. Behind the form of this regime, however, in practice the Communist party held hegemony. Mao later ad-
"The difference between the soviets in the Soviet Union and the People's Representative Congress in our country is in name only. Both are representative bodies. In our People's Representative Congress there are representatives of the bourgeoisie, those who split off from the Kuomintang, and other democratic people. They all accept the leadership of the Communist party, although some of them tried, in vain, to make trouble. "
Mao concluded that the democratic people's republic established in 1949 was "fundamentally the same as the form of proletarian dictatorship established in Russia in the October Revolution. " And this was true, regardless of the deformed character of the proletarian dictatorship established in China in 1949. Why was the bourgeoisie unable to "make trouble"? First, because the third Chinese revolution not only defeated the Kuomintang militarily, but also politically defeated the bourgeoisie as a class. When the Kuomintang and the bulk of the bourgeoisie fled China, the remaining part of the bourgeoisie was unable to unify and centralize its forces politically. With the destruction of the Kuomintang army, the collapse of the Kuomintang party, and the disintegration of the Kuomintang state apparatus, there was no political structure through which the remaining bourgeoisie could exert its rule over the Chinese masses. Second, the third Chinese revolution defeated the imperialists in China. This was a decisive blow for the remaining bourgeoisie. The subsequent "containment" policy of world imperialism even further weakened the bourgeoisie by severing its relations with international capital and markets. Third, the social base of the bourgeoisie in the countryside was economically destroyed by land reform, the development of cooperatives, and collectivization. The direct and strong intervention of the new government in banking, finance, foreign trade, capital-labor relations, production-marketing relations, and marketing-exchange relations put the bourgeoisie in a completely helpless and passive position. The political powerlessness and paralysis of the bourgeoisie was, in the final analysis, simply a reflection of this social and economic weakness.
Did the general line of socialist transformation formulated by the CCP in 1952 represent a turning point in the party's policy under which the theory of revolution by stages was abandoned and replaced by the theory of permanent revolution? In terms of practical developments, this new "general line" was a continuation of the previous policy. After the CCP established its deformed form of proletarian dictatorship, it confiscated "comprador capitalist" property, which amounted to 80 percent of the fixed capital of industrial and transportation enterprises. Policies of fixed output were implemented. In another respect, joint state-private management had already been put into practice as early as 1949. As a result of all these policies, gross product of private industry amounted to 55 percent of total gross industrial product in 1949, but this percentage had fallen to 28.7 percent by 1951. During these few years various campaigns, such as the "three antis" and "five antis, " were directed against the economic, commercial, financial, and social power of the bourgeoisie. These campaigns accelerated the process of the nationalization of industry. It was in this context that the CCP declared its general line and prepared the first five-year plan, which began the socialization process in an active manner. In 1961 Mao made this comment about the nature of the transitional period: "If we think that after the liberation of the whole country the revolution in the initial phase was mainly bourgeois democratic and developed into a socialist revolution only in the future, this is incorrect. " The empirical Mao recognized the form of this socialist transformation. In 1959 he wrote: "On the uninterrupted revolution, our revolution is one after another. From 1949 when we seized power in the whole country we began the anti-feudalist land reform. After the completion of the land reform the cooperatization of agriculture began. It was then followed by socialist transformation of private commerce, the three great socialist transformations, a socialist revolution in the means of production and the system of ownership, and was basically completed by 1956. It was then followed by the socialist revolution on the political and ideological front last year." But Mao was unable to theorize this transformation in Marxist terms. For him the uninterrupted revolution represented only the orders and forms of the transformation that had actually occurred during the process of the third Chinese revolution. What are the mechanisms by which the forms and orders of the transformation are determined, and does the transformation itself manifest historical necessity? If it does, what are the political and strategic implications for the Communist party during this period? What are the fundamental errors of the theory of New Democracy? These are the most important theoretical questions that arise from the third Chinese revolution, questions whose importance Mao did not recognize. Thus, his conception of uninterrupted revolution remained an empirical one and never reached a theoretical plane in Marxist terms.
TO BE CONTINUED
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DEMOCRATIZATION':
ruling class today.
1 Within the context of the international crisis of imdo perialism, political differences have emerged between the imperialist leaderships on the one hand and
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