With the launching of new material on this website, we are also archiving some articles that the handful of ultras involved in this project have written elsewhere. This is one of those archived pieces, originally published and reposted in several other locations.

Mao or Maoism?

A recent piece by Chino (formerly Ba Jin) of Unity and Struggle has again raised the question of contemporary communists’ appraisals of Chinese revolutionary history. While Chino’s piece claims to be a critique of Maoism as such, it is not. The author does not address Maoism as a whole, only Chinese socialist history. The difference is a subtle but important one. Chino’s piece can be seen, somewhat, as a critique of the historical roots of Maoism, which only took on its specific name and character around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and mostly took on this character outside of China. “Maoism,” then, was very much a foreign export—speaking more to the appropriation of certain doctrines and spectacles from Chinese revolutionary history by radicals elsewhere.

And that is a broad elsewhere. The Maoisms of Latin America remained distinct from the Maoist influence on Black Liberation in the US or the Maoist student groups in France. There are shared characteristics, but these are not necessarily discernible through an examination of Chinese revolutionary history—and particularly not one that emphasizes the early revolutionary years and ignores the majority of the “long” (’66-’76) cultural revolution, which was the primary vehicle for the later export of specifically “Maoist” theory, aesthetics and mythologies. What did these “Maoists” take from the Chinese experience and what did they leave? This is should be a key question in any critique of Maoism, yet Chino leaves it unanswered.

These various Maoist histories are largely exhausted. In most places, Maoism not the name for a vital communist politics today, even if there are a few select lessons and tools that might be salvageable. There are, obviously, living exceptions to this in places such as India, Nepal and the Philippines. Chino’s stated goal is, then, a worthwhile one. Maoism itself needs to be excavated, explored and properly buried. It is an understudied topic. A one-to-one conflation of Maoism with Chinese history, however, actually prevents this burial from taking place—or, more accurately, buries one corpse in another’s grave.

That said, it is an equally important endeavor to excavate, explore and properly bury Chinese socialist history itself. This is not only useful for the lessons and tools that we might extract from the process, but also for the concrete insight it can give us into the capitalist powerhouse that China has become. Chino’s approach, however, detracts from both projects, weakening the historical critique through an overemphasis on textual, aesthetic and ideological dimensions, while also overburdening the theoretical critique with history’s obtuse weight.

In what follows, I take Chino’s piece to be exploring these historical questions, rather than critiquing Maoism as such, since the piece lacks any discussion of Maoism’s extension (and in fact creation) outside of China. By contrast, the essay discusses many points of history at length and in substantial detail.

History and Organization

In this regard, Chino’s effort is serious, developed through a process of collective study and debate, with the result being an 84-page essay that summarizes the entire socialist era from a critical communist perspective. Though framed in some of the same terms, the essay is far more nuanced and rigorous than the theoretically flat tract produced by Loren Goldner a year ago, which simply retooled Trotskyist and Anarchist dogmas. The result was something reminiscent of those contrived, corporate-sponsored holiday remixes of the previous years’ top hits—the same hook is preserved, some sparkles are pasted on, but most of the original luster (if any) is lost. That piece instigated some interesting discussion at the time between Red Spark and the China Study Group—summarized here—but it was a discussion mostly among radical China scholars of one sort or another, with most participants agreeing that the starting point of the discussion (the Goldner piece itself) was functionally useless.

Chino’s essay, though suffering a few of the same problems, does not fit into this category. It is a serious piece produced through some degree of collective study and debate. It has a tone of earnest interest and clearly displays a desire to push the critical discussion forward. At the same time, it tends to reinforce some troublesome presumptions—particularly the idea that specific positions on communist history are primary to (or even have that much relevance for) present political allegiances.

Organization emerges out of struggles confronting and overcoming their material limits in the real world, not out of ideal configurations and “models” of revolution imposed on struggle from the outside. The idea that communist organizations must purify their theory, including positions on history, organize based on unity of this theory and then transform this unified theory through engagement with material struggles is backward.

More importantly, it is an unacknowledged revival of the mutually reinforcing binary of unity and sect that predominated during the New Communist Movement (and, ironically, one that was most popular among Marxist-Leninist and avowedly Maoist groups in that era). The result, then as now, was a delineation in each group of extensive political, historical and theoretical positions, the splitting of groups based on the most infinitesimal of these differences, and the presumption that having the most authentically communist “line” would ready a given sect to absorb the proletariat like a ShamWow soaking up spilt milk.

It’s unclear how much of this Chino intends—but the implication that such questions of history would be primary to political organization today objectively carries on this tradition, and its result will be the fruitless segmentation of a young communist movement that has a large de facto degree of methodological similarity (if not methodological unity) with respect to its direct engagement with peoples’ struggles.

Hopefully, Chino will bring the debate into the present, discussing how revolutionary organization might function today, in addition to how it failed last century.

Stalinism and Development

The cover of Chino’s article is a picture of Chinese peasants holding up images of Stalin at a “celebration of Stalin’s birthday” in 1949. The subtitle, “A Critique of Maoism,” paired with this photograph, emphasizes one of the piece’s main theses: Maoism comes out of the Stalinist tradition. At first, this pairing seems to make the stronger claim that Maoism is Stalinism, or is wholly reducible to it. Chino later makes clear that this is not the case:

I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism itself. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR, and thus failed to examine and break with many of the assumptions he shared with the Stalinist model. Thus Mao’s politics remained fundamentally Stalinist, critiquing the USSR from a position as untenable in theory as it was eventually proven in practice. (p. 2)

Elsewhere (in a debate about the Goldner piece that took place on Red Spark’s website, Libcom and the China Study Group, summarized here), I’ve made similar claims. That debate continued through the China Study Group, and, through that process (and later debates on the same topic), I’ve come to clarify some of these questions, while also becoming more sensitive to the danger of miscommunication and to the unintentional reinforcement of anti-communist myths that tends to occur (especially for a general audience) when we parrot McCarthy-era language in our own critiques.

I hold to the main theses I laid out in that earlier debate—in this list I have bolded sections that differ substantially from Chino’s account:

Maoism proper, as well as the specific Chinese revolutionary experience, emerged from the revolutionary cycle that also included Stalinism. The Mao-aligned factions of Chinese revolutionaries sought to distance themselves from Stalinism through an immanent critique, and ultimately failed in this attempt—sealing and exhausting that revolutionary cycle at the same time that it was being forcibly defeated elsewhere.

The main point of difference between the developmental models of China and the USSR was in their relationship to the peasantry. The Great Leap Forward saw the saturation of Mao’s strategy in the countryside, and the chaos unleashed made visible certain, if marginal, authentically communist elements and was distinct from Russian collectivization, even if it was incorporated after the fact into something similar. It is important to remember, then, that throughout Chinese socialist history, the vast majority of people in China were peasants. It thus behooves anyone analyzing the era to examine relations in the countryside, and not just the condition of waged workers in urban industry.

In the cities, Mao’s strategy reached its saturation point during the Cultural Revolution, which also saw the limited emergence of communist elements primarily through the disruption of productive activity, the expropriation of arms from the military, and the late development of a coherent, sufficiently large, self-designated ultra-left (极左派 “jizuo pai”), which was crushed at the behest of Mao himself—for a mixture of reasons, not necessarily just out of ideological disdain or programmatic disagreement.

The Chinese experience is better described in its specificity, rather than as an unproblematic variant of the “state capitalism” that existed in the USSR. This specific mode of production might be seen as a “developmental proto-capitalism” (to steal a phrase from Hu Sunzi in the China Study Group debate), as “socialism” or as some form of “socialist developmentalism.” Or it may be more accurately described as a competing patchwork of many different relations and potentials vying for some greater coherence. Without yet making a decision on these specifics, we can identify that the system was, indeed, specific and only marginally “capitalist” in the Marxist sense of the word, though it may have been prototypical of or an inverse parallel to authentically capitalist modes of production.

At the same time, again, “Maoism” cannot be reduced to the experiences of China—to do so obscures the meaning of the term as it was used elsewhere and as it is still used by most communists today who come out of the Maoist tradition.

On most of these theses, Chino and I seem to have strong agreement. Obviously, points 4 and 5 exhibit the biggest differences. But, although I uphold these theses, I’ve also realized that many of the referents in these debates are steeped in conflict and make for poor communication. “Stalinism,” “the state,” and “state capitalism,” above all else, have widely different meanings for different people and sometimes dangerous anti-communist implications for a general audience.

They are fuzzy categories. I oscillated between their use in the earlier debate on this same topic, sometimes opting for “Stalinism,” and sometimes for “determinism/productivism,” or “developmentalism.” In the present piece, Chino does not even interchange the categories that much—taking “Stalinism” to designate something perfectly concrete and coherent though failing to ever define the term.

The closest he gets is this: “What we call ‘Stalinism’ today is essentially a distorted version of Marxist theory, taken up and reworked for use as the ideology of a new ruling class” (p. 6). It’s notable here that Chino sees the “new ruling class” as existing a priori, rather than being generated by structural tendencies in the mode of production itself. Instead, they are already there, and they “distort” Marxism to serve their interests. This “distortion” is elaborated in Chino’s textual critiques of the Shanghai Textbook and Mao’s theoretical writings. Its connection to what was really happening on the ground (rather than in the textbooks) is not strongly established by Chino, but the presumption is, again, that it has something to do with development and the national build-up of industry.

Maybe there is agreement here, nonetheless. In my earlier use of the term, “Stalinism” was intended to designate both the concrete tools and theories imported from the USSR (a specific set of technical, political and managerial tools, as embodied in China’s first 5-year plan, the one-man management system, and other forms of industrial organization favored by some in the upper echelons of the CCP), the political practice of party-substitutionism, and the general economic model of developmentalism, in which China saw an absolute increase of production and population at a compounding rate that mirrored the growth patterns of capitalist nations. It designated, then, the specific use of quasi-capitalist value-forms in socialist ideology, the attempt to transform relations on the ground to correlate to that ideology, and the use of state planning, executive industrial structures and well-trained engineers in order to increase the country’s industrial base at a compounding rate, all through a party that tended, increasingly, to substitute its own agency for that of the people themselves.

One problem here, however, is that the term “Stalinism” tends to over-associate the phenomenon with the ideology of a particular ruler—decoupling it from the material limits that led to the development of these tools and theoretical presumptions in the first place, whether in Russia or China. Ideologically, it also elides the roots of this developmentalism, which extend back far past Stalin to Kautsky, Bernstein, and Engels as well as any number of early Russian Marxists with whom Marx himself disagreed (especially on the question of the Russian peasant commune and the “necessity” of capitalist development in such conditions). The same is true for the theory of the party inherited by the Chinese through the USSR, theories shared just as much by Trotsky and Lenin as by Stalin.

Even if we accept that “Stalinism” designates a certain conglomeration of technical, political and managerial tools aimed at generating a net increase in industrial production, the use of the term actually obscures the reason for the development of these tools in the first place—none of which burst ex nihilo from the forehead of Mao or Stalin. Instead, they were all developed out of the revolution’s confrontation with entangled material limits. Chino pays lip service to this problem, but ultimately defers its solution to the successful world or regional revolution that never arrived:

For an underdeveloped country such as China in the 1940s, rapid improvement of living standards is a paramount task of any revolution. A world revolution, or at least a regional revolution that includes a chunk of the advanced capitalist zones, is able to accomplish this task without relying on capitalist exploitation. Communes in advanced capitalist countries are able to freely share supplies, technologies and skills with their counterparts in the global periphery. But when limited to the bounds of a single nation-state, and embedded in a capitalist world-system, this kind of transformation is impossible.

Under these conditions, underdeveloped socialist states must either pay for the resources they acquire on the world market, or supplement for them by hyper-exploiting their own populations. They must compete with other capitalist countries through trade, currency, and military might. All these factors require underdeveloped socialist states to carry out capitalist production and development in some form, often through a close alliance with the preexisting bourgeoisie. Mao’s formulations of the united front and New Democracy explicitly aim at this outcome, and provide ideological legitimation for doing so. The strategies formulated in Yan’an thus provide a justification for would-be communist parties to act as surrogate bourgeoisies in underdeveloped contexts, and to generate a new capitalist ruling class which believes itself to act in the name of the proletariat and socialism. (pp. 18-19)

What’s notable here is the basic acknowledgement of the problem—and then the utter determinism of its solution. The equation is simple: either world revolution, or failure. Without said world revolution, “this kind of transformation is impossible,” “these factors require underdeveloped socialist states to carry out capitalist production and development,” etc. Even within the bounds of this binary, however, Chino fails to explain what the Chinese revolutionaries might have done to help instigate revolution elsewhere. Instead, we are simply given this explicitly Stalinist false choice: short of world revolution, one must choose socialism in one country.

This binary forecloses other options that may not have required such industrial build-up. If Chino’s logic were to hold, for example, we ought to be seeing similar programs of massive industrial development in Chiapas under the Zapatistas—yet we don’t. Why? And why could China not have pursued a model more similar to the agrarian communism advocated by Marx in his letters on the Russian mir? This may not have been the best solution (this sort of speculation becomes very useless very fast), but the point is to break down the narrow determinism behind Chino’s appraisal of what was possible and what was necessary.

Returning to the original point: “Stalinism” is also deeply entwined with the presumptions, tactics and history of anti-communism, particularly in the US. It traces back to impoverished theories of “totalitarianism” that fail to see any difference between the failure of authentic revolutions (in China or the USSR) and the complete routing of attempts at revolution by the forces of absolute reaction (in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pinochet’s Chile, etc.) More importantly, it perpetuates the ruling class myth that history is driven by “great men,” rather than masses of people and the material relations they build. This baggage often prevents contemporary communists from coming to a truly critical understanding of the Stalin era. It is one form in which our own history (for which we must take responsibility, without falling into apologetics for the numerous crimes and betrayals of failed revolutions) has been stolen from us and monopolized by the enemy.

States and “State Capitalism”

“The State” is often just as ill-defined as “Stalinism.” Some mean by it any type of representation, others any structure for the distribution, administration and accounting of production, and still others any form of hierarchy. All of these definitions (and there are many more) tend toward ahistoricism. “The state” is portrayed as something that spans modes of production, stretching back into the murky depths of human history—some primeval, essential evil burdening us like the mark of Cain, which, even if temporarily obscured, always re-emerges to torment humanity.

The state is rarely seen as a concrete process, continually produced and reproduced around a set of specific technological, administrative and social tools that can be expropriated, repurposed, transformed, discarded and substantially destroyed—for better or worse. These tools are not by any means neutral—they inveigh strongly back on the mode of production—but they emerge from processes that can be disrupted or redirected.

Any given state is completely inseparable from the mode of production in which it is embedded. The state is an emergent property of the relations of production and reproduction which then intervenes back into those relations, helping to preserve them, adapt them and facilitate their expansion. It is impossible to understand “the state” as a substantial entity that simply exists beyond, between or beneath modes of production. In exceptional circumstances, a state in one mode of production may become the shell of transition to another, usually worse, mode of production.

This is not at all to say that “the state” is simply unproblematic—it is, in fact, very problematic—but Chino again fails to define the term. Were he uses it, he seems to imply an ahistorical state that transcends its own production. The “ruling class” of the party-state is portrayed as pre-existent, for example. Even while Chino sometimes refers to it as a “becoming class,” he presumes its class existence without substantially exploring its “becoming.” Nowhere in Chino’s account do we see how that ruling class was, in fact, generated by socialism as time went on.

This ignores the methods through which the old state structures were smashed, whether these be the nationalist or Japanese colonial administration concentrated in the cities or the looser Confucian governance that set semi-formal standards for the preservation of patriarchy and the landlord system in the countryside. This state was not substantially entered or seized by the Chinese communists. In the Chinese Soviet Republic and Yan’an, the CCP did prefigure certain new structures of administration, distribution, etc., but these largely rural systems were never transferred simply and directly onto newly liberated territories, and certainly not to the administration of cities or heavy industry. Some limited elements of the old governmental system were preserved, but far more were imported from the USSR (especially when it came to industrial administration) and plenty were invented anew (especially in the countryside).

Socialist China, then, saw a process of state creation that included the invention of new administrative tools, the formalization of new hierarchies, and the overt development of a new ruling class. This process had two dimensions. The first was productive. This new state formed as an ostensible solution to the real problems of material and mental scarcity faced by the society at the time. All of the early state structures were emergent effects of attempts to increase productivity at a compounding rate, which then fed back into the system, eliciting that productivity in the future.

The second dimension was force, broadly understood. The new state was in part developed through the build-up of a defensive military force to deflect attacks from international enemies. The Korean war was, therefore, central to early state formation in Chinese socialism. At the same time, the state grew out of internal applications of force, in which the CCP chose to treat some contradictions within the liberated territories in a fashion similar to those external and opposed to the communist project. In other words, the new state was in part created through the use of military or quasi-military force against the Chinese populace itself. The suppression of workers’ revolts in the Hundred Flowers years was, then, just as central to this early state formation as the Korean War. It’s notable that, beginning in this period, the CCP chose to apply criminal, effectively military, legal strictures against striking workers, including execution, blacklisting, social banishment, etc. whereas it chose relatively “soft” methods when punishing students who had engaged in the same activity (see Jackie Sheehan’s Chinese Workers: A New History).

The same theoretical opacity is present in Chino’s use of “state capitalism.” This is a slightly less fuzzy concept, since it refers directly to specific critiques of the USSR, most of which center on the idea that the same uniquely capitalist value-forms (or possibly “deformed” ones, a la Aufheben) were operational in supposedly “socialist” systems, with the primary difference being the fact that the state operated as sole monopoly over value extraction, with its different state organs devolved into competition with one another, replacing the function of capitalists in value-creation. The commodity still exists, money still exists (both as concrete forms of scrip and as more amorphous blat, or bureaucratic influence/prestige), labor is still purchased and managed, surplus is still extracted from it, and there is still net compounding growth of production (and population) in absolute terms.

My purpose here is not to explore the validity of this concept as applied to China—that requires a more singular analysis. Instead, I want to point out two things:

First, that the task has not been done—i.e., that, contrary to the extensive literature analyzing the USSR and arguing that it was something called “state capitalist” (whether or not we agree), there has been no comparable work done for China. Instead, we have seen attempts (Chino’s included) to simply transpose those categories developed for the USSR onto China in a one-to-one fashion. Chino presupposes the conclusion (“state capitalism”) before even beginning the analysis, often resulting in fairly strained attempts to display complete homology where there is significant difference.

Pointing out, for example, that China largely avoided the violent, forced agricultural collectivization seen in the USSR, Chino is then forced to find any analogue to that violence, settling on the famine that followed the Great Leap as such an analogue (since both resulted in somewhat similar percentages of dead). The problem is that the collectivization of the Mao era could have happened just as easily without the famine—Chino fails to even begin to make the case for why the famine might have been structurally necessary—whereas collectivization in Russia was arguably not possible (at that time) without state force. In China, the peasants were already collectivizing. Yes, it was at the behest of the party, but they were not designated as kulaks, threatened with murder, expropriation, etc. The famine was largely a result of the over-reporting of grain harvests as different regions competed to boast the largest amount of surplus (not necessarily value) extracted. But that surplus labor could have just as easily been extracted within a toned-down framework of competition, preventing the famine and sustaining the extraction of surplus labor over time. In fact, it seems reasonable that this would have been a preferable solution for those who were avowedly “Stalinist” within the CCP—given that the famine ultimately prevented the efficient extraction of grain to industrial cores, resulting in economic stagnation.

In some sense, the famine could be seen as a sort of bureaucratic speculative bubble, produced by the basic dynamics at play in the drive for increased productivity that undergirded the patchwork of social relations in China at the time. This would be a far more interesting thesis to explore, rather than seeking a one-for-one match between the experiences of Russia and China.

The second point is simply that Chino does not base his theory of state capitalism in the actual material relations of China in the socialist era so much as on a textual analysis of the ideology and propaganda of the time. He critiques the Shanghai Textbook instead of the actual industrial relations of Shanghai itself. He critiques Mao’s statements on the nature of socialism rather than understanding the mode of production by looking at the way in which peasants (the majority of the population throughout the era) actually lived—how much of their labor was waged? How much of their consumption was tied back to this wage? How was “communal” property distributed? How did “ownership” of collective resources at the village level actually work?

Instead of asking these questions, he takes as given the arguments of party leaders on how these things should work, rather than how they actually did. For example—throughout the early socialist era in China, the vast majority of the population (peasants) were not paid direct wages in the same way that urban workers were. Instead, they were paid in “work points,” sometimes with a “wage” or piece-rate on top. The majority of central consumer goods (clothes, food, housing, cookware, etc.) were at times provided for free, rather than in exchange for work points or wages. There was also a brief period (during the Great Leap Forward), in which a great amount of labor performed was not “paid” in either wages or work points, to the extent that conservative critics have compared the system to older imperial labor regimes of corvée bondage.

It’s entirely arguable, however, that the work point is, in the Marxist sense, still a wage, especially since it was often combined with some sort of piece-work. But Chino does not make this argument. Instead, he ignores the phenomenon entirely, acting as if the industrial wage system, which was applied to a minority of the working population, was the general condition under which labor occurred in socialist China. The essay does not so much as mention the work point, much less construct a state-capitalist argument around it.

Chino therefore repeats the Maoist gesture itself, exporting a superficial aesthetic and theoretical sheen from the Chinese historical experience and thereby obscuring the real history beneath. Severed of its material production, this history becomes nothing more than the clean unfolding of ideal categories over time. The complex process of the theory’s creation, attempts at application, and continuous adaptations are boiled down to nothing but a contrived spectacle played out on the glowing screen of an iPad.

This is where the conflation of Maoism-as-theory and Chinese history does the most damage. It’s notable that Chino’s bibliography actually lacks any real embedded ethnographic accounts of the socialist era itself (like Endicott’s Red Earth, Mobo Gao’s Rural Life in Modern China or Hinton’s Shenfan). Every mode of production projects forward a distorted mirror of itself in the form of ideology, socialism is no different here. It’s just as problematic to critique socialism on the basis of this ideology as it would be to judge capitalism according to the terms set by Thomas Friedman.

When you do explore these ethnographic accounts, the picture becomes much messier. Socialist China appears to be a patchwork of competing social relations, some openly capitalist, some modeled on the USSR, some harkening back to Confucianism and Chinese imperial/feudal history, with a spare few authentically communist elements mixed up in this. If Mao’s strategy was indeed to leverage pieces of this patchwork in such a way as to expand its communist elements, this strategy failed.

Its ultimate test was the “cold” period of the later Cultural Revolution (late ’69-’76), in which there were widespread attempts at class leveling, industrial restructuring, and rejuvenation of the party. At this point, the party (with Mao’s blessing) had already crushed the coherent and disciplined ultra-left—not to be confused with the suppression of myriad other armed factions who masked their often conservative demands in an ultra-left aesthetic. A double-pronged ruling class had already formed (composed of technical elites and political elites), and the attempt to depose this class through widespread reforms, though showing some success (such as expanding middle school access for peasants), was ultimately defeated in the worst way possible.

It’s notable that Chino ignores this period—and somewhat strange, since it is precisely here that Mao’s strategy mirrors the USSR’s own attempts at class leveling in 1928-1931, before the “great retreat” of the 1930s began. Almost all the same tools are used—expansion of primary and secondary education, state sanction for bottom-up critique of party cadres, the reservation of college admissions and political positions for people of worker and peasant background, the elimination of entrance examinations, the monitoring of experts and engineers by rank-and-file workers, etc. The primary difference being that the “long” segment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution came after a period (’66-’69) of mass mobilization, the gains of which it ostensibly aimed to “consolidate.”

In the end, the patchwork of social relations in China was instead knit together into a coherent and much more familiar mode of production. First, this mode of production took on an almost Saint-Simonian form. The technical and political elites underwent a gradual fusion and sought a highly technocratic socialism as the best method for increasing absolute productivity—a socialism that was supposedly meritocratic, but within the strict guidelines of a state bureaucracy. Conservatives in the party leveraged the developmentalist assumptions that spanned much of the initial early-socialist patchwork in order to construct an increasingly pervasive dual structure in the reform era, where markets (and market prices) operated alongside planned production (and state-set prices), communal resources were brought under more direct state administration, then privatized, peasants’ work points were gradually replaced by explicit wages, piece-rates, and cash crop markets, and the hukou system became a fundamental tool for labor discipline. All of this amplified the capitalist tendencies within the technocratic socialist state, until the 1990s and early 2000s saw the relatively peaceful transformation of the mode of production into an overtly capitalist one, though largely framed in the same language of “socialist harmony” and justified by the same meritocratic and productivist presumptions.

All of this happened through a contest over the uneven terrain of the early socialist period, in which many new potentials were opened and nearly as many foreclosed. More importantly, this contest was not merely a contest within the party. The battle over China’s future was not simply a matter of several leaders wrangling in the highest echelons of the heavenly palace. This future was radically open. And it was just as open (if not more) in the fields, factories and streets as it was in the halls of party and state.

Spooky Action at a Distance

This leads to the final problem, one that pervades the logic of the entire piece: Chino’s account tends, in two main respects, toward more or less metaphysical explanations.

On the one hand, he reproduces the fanciful assumptions of orthodox, worldview Marxism itself in an inverted form. Like Goldner, Chino falls back into a “great men” theory of history, over-attributing the revolutionary process to the leadership of the CCP, and Mao specifically. Many Maoists do basically the same thing, upholding Mao’s positions in this regard and portraying the reproduction of class and transition to capitalism as simply the victory of a particular faction of leaders (the “capitalist roaders,” led by Deng) within the top of the CCP over the Maoists (then represented by the Gang of Four). It’s portrayed in a moralistic fashion, as an individual betrayal that doomed the revolution, not as a betrayal facilitated by the very structural tendencies of socialism itself and the new technical and political classes it had created.

The problem here is twofold: first, this blinds us, again, to the material relations that actually existed in China. Chino is unable to critically explain the creation of the new technical elite at universities like Tsinghua (see Joel Andreas’ Rise of the Red Engineers). In his account, this technical elite is a requirement of the guiding ideology, not a product of certain forms of administration or the response to an actual material problem (lack of expertise). Similarly, the development of a new political class (again, see Andreas) remains unexplained. The CCP is treated as if it is, throughout, simply representative of this new class. Chino does not examine the transformations in party membership, the expansion of the party and implementation of class-background ranking systems after the revolutionary war, the development of new forms of administration and elite training, etc.—all of which began to actually develop this political segment from something much more embedded among the people into a distinct class. Nor does he explain the failure of attempts to level this political class structure during the Cultural Revolution, when even the upper echelons of the party were opened to a new cohort of peasants and workers.

The result is that the actual class relations in China are oversimplified by Chino—who sees a singular ruling class, rather than two nascent and developing ruling classes (political and technical) vying for power. Andreas argues that Mao, in fact, identified this phenomenon, attempted to overcome it through the Cultural Revolution and, when it appeared that the mass mobilization period of the Cultural Revolution (’66-’69) would fail in its attempt to push these elites from power, resulting instead in a reaction led by these elites, Mao himself advocated the crushing of these mobilizations. This sacrificed the greatest potential of the Cultural Revolution, but at least in a way (Mao hoped) that might preserve and consolidate its potential. According to this account, then, the shift to the “long” cultural revolution (’69-’76) was an attempt to preserve that movement from being crushed by these technical and political elites in the hope that it might recuperate itself througha rejuvenated party. Though I don’t necessarily endorse this account, its method contrasts sharply with Chino’s.

This isn’t to say that such attempts were at all sufficient or that this was actually the intent of Mao’s faction. The fact remains that Mao’s crushing of the mobilizations of ’66-’69 failed to rejuvenate the party, failed to consolidate the gains of this early stage of the Cultural Revolution, and failed to satisfy the people themselves.

But at the same time, this failure was itself the space in which the fusion of the political and technical elites took place and a truly unified ruling class was for the first time developed in socialist China. Many of the technical elites were gradually incorporated into the political class through party membership while the party itself conceded fully to the developmental models of these technical elites. This, moreover, was not something that happened only in the upper echelons of the party apparatus (through purges, propaganda campaigns, etc.). It was deeply intertwined with the demands and momentum of the people themselves.

And it is in this regard that we see Chino’s second tendency toward the metaphysical. The masses of people at the bottom of the system are simultaneously evacuated of all agency and treated as a seething, undifferentiated mass of communist energies, constantly suppressed, occasionally explosive, but ultimately contained by the various villains of the story. And this story boils down to a fairly simple recipe: pressure-release, suppression, repeat.

The result is that the majority of events in China are treated as the domain of the Party, led by Mao (or others in the CCP), with the people simply following. They are a monolithic mass being managed, directed, herded, facilitated, etc. by the Party. When not being managed, directed, herded or facilitated, their inherent communist essence leads them to revolt through mass mobilizations, whether in the Hundred Flowers’ campaign or in the Cultural Revolution, but these mobilizations are, invariably, suppressed. The content, incentives, demands and self-understanding of the mobilizations is not thoroughly discussed, nor are the concrete alternatives offered in these moments (though Chino does note the consolidation of a coherent ultra-left in the Cultural Revolution, and correctly points to this as one of the few moments in which the Chinese communist project might have been truly rejuvenated).

But, outside these moments of mobilization, the class is portrayed as having no agency—or, more accurately, having a unitary, essentialized, non-contradictory and unproblematic agency that is flatly repressed. To take an extreme, but informative example: Chino’s account, like many worldview Marxist accounts, ultimately ignores the role that peoples’ own mobilizations played in the dismantling of the “long” Cultural Revolution, the dethroning of the Gang of Four and the reform-era incorporation of China into the global capitalist economy.

During the “Tiananmen Incident” of 1976 (different from the Tiananmen Square protests a decade later), mass protests broke out against the Cultural Revolution government (at that time explicitly Mao-aligned). The protests at first took the form of collective mourning rituals for the recently-deceased Zhou Enlai, who had become a symbol of conservative moderation within the party. Such mass mourning was quickly banned, and a large riot broke out in Tiananmen square. The party then moved to suppress demonstrations in large urban centers across the country. Similar protests re-emerged around the “democracy wall” movement in 1978. Both protests were simultaneously crushed and used as justifications for dismantling and “reevaluating” the cultural revolution from the right, as Deng Xiaoping rose to power.

These movements didn’t come from nowhere, and they were not necessarily supportive of Deng and his factions in the CCP. Wages and benefits had stagnated throughout the “long” cultural revolution (’66-’76), with only marginal gains won in the form of limited collective resources (see Jackie Sheehan, Chinese Workers: A New History). Industry had been restructured slightly, with committees elected by workers allowed some degree of influence in managing certain factories—a popular program at the time, but one that decreased in popularity over the decade as it became clear that, though there had been elections, there were often not reelections, meaning that those workers elected six to eight years prior were now often simply bureaucrats of a lesser sort. Such dissatisfaction created a situation in which the “reformists” within the CCP (i.e., Deng and those explicitly seeking to institute market reforms, to open the country to more foreign trade, and to reinstate elitist credentialing systems) could offer substantial concessions to certain demands in exchange for ultimately foreclosing any attempt to build an actual communist project.

Initially, this is how mass support was won for the power shift and why China did not see immense protests against the new regime until 1989 (though there were regular, if more isolated, strikes, big character posters, etc. throughout the decade). Wages in many areas substantially increased, consumer goods became more accessible, certain oppressive political laws were rolled back, time-consuming mass meetings were decreased. Meanwhile, the right to strike was removed from the constitution, as were other hallmark legal protections. Soon the iron rice bowl would be gutted, millions would be thrown into effective unemployment, political censorship and repression would take new forms, and mass protests would continue to be crushed. But this simply points to the often contradictory nature of collective action—especially in scenarios where the most coherent communist poles (in this case the more disciplined ultra-left) have already been suppressed, killed or otherwise excluded from the process.

This is true throughout socialist history in China, not just in the reform era. Peoples’ uprisings were often contradictory, with their interests and allegiances deeply ambiguous. This is because the uprisings were usually the result of a complex interplay of material limits faced by the communist project in that moment—they were sites in which culture, contingency and structural tendencies all collided to create a particularly explosive situation. Mao did not call into being the Hundred Flowers’ workers protests or the Cultural Revolution so much as he added a particular (and temporary) state sanction to pre-existing tendencies, which then made these tendencies themselves visible, leading to a sudden, exponential growth in their resonance.

But not all of these things simply “got out of control” in the same way and were then scaled back. After the revolutionary era, Chino seems to only acknowledge people’s agency when it existed perpendicular to the state. When this agency ran parallel, he ignores it, treats it as suppressed, or simply “managed, facilitated,” etc. by the Party. But the situation on the ground was always much more complex—something evident in the ethnographic accounts provided by researches like Endicott, who actually went to the people and asked them, at various stages, how they felt about what had happened, about what they had wanted to happen, and about why they supported (or didn’t) certain programs in the socialist era.

The result is incredibly entangled and messy in the way that most things human can be. Some mass campaigns had enormous, earnest support of the people. This was particularly true of nationwide public health and education campaigns, such as the movement to abolish snail fever. This movement was one of the biggest public health campaigns in the history of the world, utilizing a bottom-up network of volunteer labor at the village level in a surprisingly effective way. The result was the near-elimination of the disease in socialist China. Ironically, snail fever returned during the reform era after public healthcare systems were gutted and grassroots monitoring systems collapsed.

It would be silly to portray this as a simple act of top-down repression by the state. There was clearly support for the initiative, and a lot of authentically voluntary work went into it. It was one example in which China’s patchwork of social relations actually neared an authentically communal structure of administration that was still scalable across large distances. This isn’t to say that the project wasn’t tied in with other, more controversial ones (including ones that led to widespread environmental destruction)—the point is simply to show that there were, in fact, periods of mass support for some party initiatives.

Even the most tragic aspects of Chinese socialist history, such as the Great Leap, contained these mixed attitudes. Many interviewees noted their own opposition to the over-reporting of grain harvests, to the kind of degenerative competition it encouraged and to the absurdity of other village cadres being punished for staying true to their principles and only reporting the actual output. At the same time, many of these same interviewees spoke supportively of the initial goals of the campaign, acknowledging that some of the fruits of the unpaid labor projects such as local fertilizer facilities, wells and irrigation canals, were an enormous boon to the community. In the same breath, they would then speak of its abysmal failures—the death and starvation, the unusable pig iron and the general wastage of peoples’ potential.

This isn’t to say that such qualitative accounts are more accurate than the big, structural picture. Much of this ethnographic work is distorted at various points by peoples’ own post facto rationalizations of their past behavior and allegiances. In order to correct for this, such detailed pictures of peoples’ own agency must be paired with longer views of Chinese socialism’s trajectory.

Burial Rites

What are we to take from this, then?

We have a broad picture, not at all meant to be encompassing or conclusive: Chinese socialism emerged from the same cycle of struggle as the USSR, and was theoretically and practically immanent to the logic of productivism and developmentalism that predominated in Russia—due to similar conditions of material and mental scarcity, the presence of external military threat, and because of particular inherited theoretical canons and political practice. Chinese socialism attempted an immanent critique of the USSR’s failures, with the factions around Mao advocating for a much more continuous model of socialist transition that at least partially acknowledged the patchwork and contested nature of how production worked on the ground—all the while couching this variable practice in much more orthodox theoretical treatises.

Meanwhile, the actual nature of production in the socialist era remains significantly unexplored, with a strong tendency to instead displace cut-and-dry (and often questionable) categories from the USSR onto China in a symmetrical fashion. The vast majority of the population were peasants, and there was more variability in forms of administration and production at the village-level than is often acknowledged. At the same time, the fundamental point of gravity of the entire system remained, throughout, the urban industrial cores. Every part of the country produced goods (particularly grain) that were ultimately siphoned into these industrial cores. The patchwork, insofar as it can be identified, seems to have been knit together by the same objective logic of development and production—though this stitching was in some places tighter than others. Even if this in some way approximates what Chino means by “state capitalism,” it was still highly volatile and deeply uneven.

The ruling class in socialist China was generated over time by the material dynamics of the era. It did not simply pre-exist socialism in the form of the party, even though the original party became one of its early breeding grounds. Two distinct ruling classes developed through these dynamics—one political, and one technical. These classes were then fused into a singular ruling class through the Cultural Revolution, which forced them into cooperation in order to overcome a mutual enemy. The potential embedded in the Cultural Revolution was greatly weakened when its still-small revolutionary wing (the disciplined ultra-left) was crushed by the faction aligned with Mao, whose strategy of a rejuvenated party and state-directed class leveling project ultimately failed.

Throughout, the agency of the Chinese people was mixed and often conflicting. Support for party-led initiatives often co-existed with workers’ strikes for higher wages, grassroots rebellions against bureaucratic and intellectual privilege, and protests against political and intellectual censorship. The situation was made more complex by the post-facto state endorsement of some of these grassroots tendencies, which often led to an increased resonance and an explosion of new demands (sometimes deeply conservative) from all quarters. This was, then, not a simple situation of a suppressed populace periodically bursting into revolt and being beaten back.

There is an enormous amount to be studied here. How can we really characterize the mode of production, when we aren’t trying to force-fit it to the pre-determined shape of the USSR? Were there ways in which this mode of production might have escaped the crude, determinist developmentalism inherited from its Russian and German progenitors? Why and how did the attempt to rejuvenate the party and level the nascent class structure of socialism fail in the “long” end of the Cultural Revolution? Why was the right-wing of the party able to utilize spontaneous, grassroots mobilizations to support the implementation of early capitalist reforms, and why did a large, bottom-up opposition to this never cohere?

These are relevant questions and Chinese socialist history is a relevant topic of study. This study itself can act as the initial burial rites for that history, which is not as easily discarded as others may think.

Chino has, then, raised two important and inter-related discussions—one on Maoism, one on Chinese socialist history. Hopefully, we can develop a continuing conversation on these topics, and attempt to more clearly understand the mutual relationship between historical processes and theoretical doctrines, without reducing one to the other, and keeping in mind that it is material dynamics that drive the process, not the ideal categories of socialist theory. At the same time, we must be careful to keep both history and history-bound theory distinct from discussions of present capitalist dynamics and communists’ attempt to intervene in them.

Giving that history a proper burial means removing it from the mausoleum in which the enemy has sealed it. It means ceasing to repeat the myths about our own failures crafted by the state department and Reagan-era ideologues between their shrill anthems to the end of history and the democratizing effects of free and easy financing. It means acknowledging these dead as our dead, taking the corpses someplace fertile, where they can at least rot into the earth and contribute to the birth of something new.

At the same time, this is still burial. And burial means that questions of history are not primary or even all that relevant to present allegiances. Organization is the name for a confrontation and overcoming of material limits to the struggle in the here-and-now. History inveighs on this only lightly, and from great distance. We can learn general points of strategy, the nuance of confronting complex problems from an embedded position, and maybe take some inspiration here and there. Other than that, we’re left with only dead weight.

—NPC