Book Review: Maoism and the Chinese Revolution by Elliot Liu

by Tom “Big Warrior” Watts and Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Tom: When asked if I would like to collaborate with my dear friend and comrade, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, in writing a review of a new book on Maoism, I agreed without giving it a second thought. I didn’t realize until I got a copy of the book that it was written from an Anarchist-Communist perspective. My first reaction was, “Shit! Now I have to read this trash and try to write something about it that will serve some constructive purpose.” So I began reading it expecting the worst. Grudgingly, I reminded myself of Mao’s instruction:

“If we have shortcomings, we are not afraid to have them pointed out and criticized, because we serve the people. Anyone, no matter who, may point out our shortcomings. If he is right, we will correct them. If what he proposes will benefit the people, we will act upon it.” “Serve the People” (September 8, 1941), Selected Works, Vol. III, P. 227.

Rashid: I asked Tom “Big Warrior” Watts to join me in writing this book review because I saw a need to respond to a resurgence of misleading revisionist writings concerning Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Revolution he led, and against communism in general. I choose him because we have a considerable history of shared political work and in the study and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). As Tom quotes from Mao, as Communists we have a duty to serve the people and base our work firmly on the truth. Therefore, we welcome honest criticisms of our errors in order to correct them and refine our work. But, we also stand prepared to expose false and incorrect claims that serve (whether intentionally or not) to misinform and misguide the people and undermine our work.

Introduction

Anarchism and Marxism have common roots in the Young Hegelian Movement and the 1st International (Workingman’s Association), but quite different world views. As Lenin explained: “Anarchism is bourgeois individualism in reverse. Individualism is the basis of the entire anarchist world outlook.”[1] Anarchists and Marxist share a common desire to advance society to a classless and stateless stage but have very different ideas on how to achieve this. Communists focus on the community and class struggle rather than individualism. Most particularly, they clash over the need for a transitional state, (socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat,) to advance from capitalism, (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), to classless, stateless society, (or communism).

This becomes particularly critical when only a single country or a few countries are able to free themselves from bourgeois dictatorship and the tentacles of imperialism. To the Anarchists, smashing the state is an end in itself, as if with one blow the proletariat can abolish all of class society forever. To the Communists, smashing the bourgeois state creates the opportunity for the proletariat to create its own state to suppress the overthrown bourgeois and defend their liberated territory, while carrying out the process of socialist reconstruction, at least as far as they can under the conditions. When the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Comrade Lenin, overthrew the bourgeois Provisional Government in the October Revolution in Russia, they fully expected it to be the spark that would ignite a world proletarian socialist revolution across the industrialized countries and then the world.

But the rot of modern revisionism and economism that caused the betrayal of the Second International during the World War was followed by social democratic betrayal of the revolution when it broke out in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The proletariat was not prepared to seize the time. In no other country was there a vanguard party like the Bolsheviks or the mass revolutionary consciousness and organization to do so successfully. No one, least of all Lenin, had anticipated that the Russian workers and peasants would have to defeat the combined force of the imperialist powers and the various reactionary forces they supported on their own, and then hold them at bay while beginning the process of socialist reconstruction. As Stalin expressed in the first edition of ‘Problems of Leninism’ [a.k.a., ‘Foundations of Leninism,’ April 1924]:

“…the main task of socialism – the organization of socialist production – still remains ahead. Can this task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible … For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist construction, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. For this the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are necessary.”

Being an impossible task, it was only accomplished in part with great sacrifice and shared hardships under the leadership of Comrade Lenin, and after his untimely demise, Comrade Stalin. Not only did they succeed in these tasks, but they gave leadership to the creation of a new International (the 3rd) which led in the formation of Marxist-Leninist parties around the world in opposition to the sell-out parties of the 2nd International and the various other opportunist formations vying for influence over the proletariat. Most notably, under Lenin and Stalin’s leadership, the Communist International (Comintern) championed the struggle of the colonial and semi-colonial countries striving for national liberation. Among these countries was China.

Did they make mistakes? Certainly! How many times did Edison not invent the lightbulb before he lit up the world? What is remarkable is how well they did, and the explanation is the basic correctness of their theory, their courage and determination, and application, however flawed, of historical and dialectical materialism. The Chinese Revolution was an even more impossible project. The Chinese empire was prostrate and being picked over by the vultures of western imperialism. If Russia was a backward peasant country, China was positively medieval. Aside from a few colonial and semi-colonial capitalist enclaves along the coast, the vast reaches of China were divided between local warlords and landlords with feudal power. The masses of peasants were poor, illiterate, and superstitious, barely eking out a living under the centuries old oppression of patriarchy and feudal obligations.

Still, the Comintern dispatched agents to go there, hook up with the nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen and initiate a communist party to organize and lead the proletariat, (such as there was), and advise the Chinese on how to make a revolution that would break the encirclement of the newly created Soviet Union. It was a real life “mission impossible.”

Chapter One: Prologue: The First Chinese Revolution

Elliott Liu begins with a rant characterizing the Comintern (the 3rd International) as a “state capitalist foreign policy.” Skipping over the cause of the defeat of the revolutionary wave that swept over Europe in the wake of the October Revolution, he chides the Russians for attempting to correct these problems while adjusting to the reality that they will have to rely upon themselves to defend soviet power and begin the task of socialist reconstruction in the territory they had liberated. Around the world, (and particularly in Europe), the socialist parties that had succumbed to modern revisionism and alliance with their own bourgeoisie in the World War and against socialist revolution in the war’s aftermath, split apart with their revolutionary factions aligning with Russia and the Comintern. Many Anarchists also hooked up with the growing Communist movement as did many revolutionary nationalists in the colonial and semi-colonial countries and oppressed nationalities within the imperialist countries.

As Comrade Stalin pointed out:

“Formerly, the national question was usually confined to a narrow circle of questions, concerning, primarily, “civilized” nationalities. The Irish, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Finns, the Serbs, and several other European nationalities — that was the circle of unequal peoples in whose destinies the leaders of the Second International were interested. The scores and hundreds of millions of Asiatic and African peoples who are suffering national oppression in its most savage and cruel form usually remained outside of their field of vision. They hesitated to put white and black, “civilized” and “uncivilized” on the same plane. Two or three meaningless, lukewarm resolutions, which carefully evaded the question of liberating the colonies — that was all the leaders of the Second International could boast of. Now we can say that this duplicity and half-heartedness in dealing with the national question has been brought to an end. Leninism laid bare this crying incongruity, broke down the wall between whites and blacks, between European and Asiatics, between the “civilized” and “uncivilized” slaves of imperialism, and thus linked the national question with the question of the colonies. The national question was thereby transformed from a particular and internal state problem into a general and international problem, into a world problem of emancipating the oppressed peoples in the dependent countries and colonies from the yoke of imperialism.”[2]

Lenin himself noted that there are two stages to the national question:

“Developing capitalism,” says Lenin, “knows two historical tendencies in the national question. First: the awakening of national life and national movements, struggle against all national oppression, creation of national states. Second: development and acceleration of all kinds of intercourse between nations, breakdown of national barriers, creation of the international unity of capital, of economic life in general, of politics, science, etc.

“Both tendencies are a world-wide law of capitalism. The first predominates at the beginning of its development, the second characterizes mature capitalism that is moving towards its transformation into socialist society” (see Vol. XVII, pp. 139-40).[3]

For the countries oppressed and exploited by Western imperialism, like China in the 1920’s, the newly emerged Soviet Union was both an inspiration and a source of material and technical support. The Third International intended to fight “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.” The Comintern was founded at a congress held in Moscow on March 2–6, 1919, against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War. There were 52 delegates present from 34 parties. Among those represented were members of the Socialist Workers Party of China. The Socialist Workers’ Party was a political party, formed by Chinese workers in Russia in January 1919. Its founders were active in the Union of Chinese Workers.

The Comintern reached out to the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), headed by Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian), as well as to radical intellectuals to form a Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1923, the KMT and its government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers — the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern – arrived in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s.

The CCP began as a study circle of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Its origins were in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, during which radical ideologies like Marxism and Anarchism gained traction among Chinese intellectuals. Li Ta-chao (Li Dazhao), the head librarian at Peking University, was the first leading Chinese intellectual who publicly supported Leninism and world revolution. In contrast to Ch’en Tu-hsiu (Chen Duxiu), Li did not renounce participation in the affairs of the Republic of China. Both of them regarded the October Revolution in Russia as groundbreaking, believing it to herald a new era for oppressed countries everywhere. The CCP was modeled on Vladimir Lenin‘s theory of a vanguard party. The founding National Congress of the CCP was held from the 23rd to the 31st of July, 1921. While it was originally planned to be held in the French Concession in Shanghai, police officers interrupted the meeting on July 3rd. Because of that, the congress was moved to a tourist boat on South Lake in Chia-hsing (Jiaxing), Chekiang (Zhejiang) province. Only 12 delegates attended the congress, with neither Li nor Chen being able to attend. Chen sent a personal representative to attend the congress. One of those attending was Li’s impoverished assistant librarian named Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong). The resolutions of the congress called for the establishment of a communist party (as a branch of the Communist International) and elected Ch’en as its leader.

The CCP was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join the KMT while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the “First United Front” between the two parties. Mao Tse-tung and other early members of the CCP joined the KMT in 1923 as individuals. The fledgling CCP did not enjoy a great deal of respect in Moscow, whereas Sun Yat-sen’s prestige was high:

“The Communist International, or Comintern, centered in Moscow, had told China’s Communists that they should collaborate with Sun’s Guomindang [Kuomintang] party. The Comintern criticized China’s Communists for failing to associate with the masses and for studying Marx and Lenin as they had once studied Confucius – the Comintern believing in political activity and social action as in Marx’s statement about changing the world rather than contemplating it. Moscow saw Sun Yat-sen as China’s leading anti-imperialist and that anti-imperialism was the target that would attract the greatest support in China. China’s little Communist Party had its doubts about working with a non-communist group, but it went along with the Comintern and joined the Guomindang, agreeing to obey its rules and to act as individuals rather than as a block. “Sun Yat-sen was impressed by the willingness of the Communists to cooperate, and in January 1923 he and Moscow signed an agreement. The Russians promised Sun arms and advisors, and the Russians agreed that Chinese conditions did not require a Soviet style solution. Despite Sun’s alliance with Communists he saw his goals for China as being attainable without class struggle. He continued to be feted by wealthy Chinese businessmen, who liked the idea of China regaining its sovereignty and not being at a disadvantage with foreign business concerns.”[4]

Sun sent his lieutenant, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), to Moscow for three months of military and political study, and he appointed him commandant of the Soviet-sponsored Whampoa Military Academy in Canton (Guangzhou). Chou En-lai (Zhao Enlai), a Communist, was placed in charge of political education at the Academy. The KMT and its military arm, (the National Revolutionary Army (NRA)), and the rapidly growing CCP integrated into the KMT, were being crafted by Comintern advisors on the soviet model, with Chiang Kai-shek, who for a time was called “The Red General,” in the driver’s seat, with the full confidence of the ailing Sun Yat-sen. Chiang Kai-shek even sent his son off to Moscow for extended military training. It looked like a perfect set up for the international Communist movement to stage manage the Chinese Revolution and provide the Soviet Union with an ally along some 2,700 miles of its Asian border. When Sun Yat-sen succumbed to cancer on March 12, 1925, a struggle for power broke out between the right and left wings of the KMT, but temporarily, the common struggle against foreign imperialists and the warlord Beiyang regime in Peking (Beijing) held the united front together.

From 1922 to the end of 1924, the CCP had grown from 200 to some 20,000 cadre. The masses were in motion with strikes and boycotts against the imperialists in the major cities. Peasants were rising up demanding land reform, and Mao Tse-tung was running the KMT’s Peasant Movement Training Institute in Canton. The left wing of the KMT was on the ascendency over the right wing with Chinese Communists being appointed to many key positions, when everything started to unravel in August of 1925 with the assassination of Liao Zhongkai, one of the most powerful leaders in the KMT, who had been the chief architect of the KMT-CCP united front. Liao was gunned down in Canton just before a Kuomintang Executive Committee meeting, as he stepped out of his limousine. Suspicion for the act fell upon Hu Hanmin, another powerful figure in the left-wing of the KMT, who was then arrested. This left only Wang Jing-Wei as a rival to Chiang Kai-shek for leadership of the Kuomintang.

Hu’s arrest led to Chiang’s promotion as head of the army. Then on March 20, 1926, Chiang declared martial law in Canton and had Whampoa cadets arrest various leading Communists including Chou En-lai and the Comintern representatives, claiming they were plotting against him. Two garrisons were removed and the Communist-led Workers’ Guard was disarmed. Chiang then negotiated a new deal with the Soviets (over Trotsky’s objections). Some Comintern representatives were recalled, Chou En-lai was reassigned to Shanghai, and Chiang secured a dominant position over the KMT. The United Front was secured, but the honeymoon was over.

The Communists prepared for the long-planned Northern Expedition under Chiang’s undisputed leadership, paving the way with mass strikes and worker’s uprisings in the industrial centers along the route, but meanwhile, a new wind was beginning to blow:

“In 1925, Chiang and his Guomindang army extended Guomindang authority north from around Guangzhou 400 miles or so into Jiangxi Province. Briefly that year a Communist Party organizer, Mao Zedong, now thirty-one, was in neighboring Hunan Province to the west. Mao saw peasants rising spontaneously against their landlords. Here conditions were conducive to peasant revolt. They were forced to pay their taxes years in advance, they were paying high rents and were often in debt to landlords, who charged exorbitant interest rates. The average peasant in Hunan Province was having a hard time surviving. “A landlord army drove Mao out of Hunan. Back in Guangzhou, Mao spoke and wrote articles in support of peasant uprisings – contrary to Marxist orthodoxy. He pointed out that the proletariat in China was a small minority and that without the peasantry the proletariat would not win their revolution. Rather than having found peasants in need of guidance from an existing Communist Party vanguard, Mao found their passionate vigilantism as a model for revolution. The peasants, wrote Mao, were using “terror with fanfare,” bringing their community together in meetings in which community members accused individuals of wrong-doing and intimidated the accused into making confessions. Mao described communities of peasants as attacking “local bullies and bad gentry and the lawless landlords.” These community sessions, wrote Mao, are a force to which people either submit or perish. Mao recognized these vigilante groups as the “sole organ of authority” in their community. Even a quarrel between a man and his wife, he wrote, are settled at community meetings. As a result, he added, “the privileges which the feudal landlords have enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces.” Mao wrote that the peasants had accomplished “in a few months” what Sun Yat-sen had failed to accomplished in his forty-year effort at revolution (Mao ignoring changing conditions and attitudes across those forty years). A revolution, wrote Mao, is not the same as inviting people to dinner, painting a picture or doing fancy needlework. The peasants, he claimed, must use their maximum strength or they could never overthrow the deeply rooted authority of the landlords. “Communist Party leaders refused to publish his article in any Party literature. Contrary to Mao, Party leaders held to the position of the Communist international – the Comintern. The Communist Party was in a coalition within the larger more moderate Guomindang Party, and the Comintern’s position was that peasants should not be encouraged to try to make revolution, that what was needed instead was national unification and China’s Communists not aggravating moderates in the Guomindang Party.”[5]

The Northern Expedition was a resounding success, Chiang had to defeat three separate warlords and two independent armies. Chiang, with Soviet supplies, conquered the southern half of China in nine months. Wang Jing-wei, who led the KMT leftists, took the city of Wuhan in January 1927. With the support of the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang declared the National Government as having moved to Wuhan. Having taken Nanking (Nanjing) in March, Chiang halted his campaign and prepared a violent break with Wang and his Communist allies whom he believed to be plotting to arrest him. The split was temporarily patched over by Stalin, and the Northern Expedition continued.

As the National Revolutionary Army approached Shanghai, Chou En-lai and Ch’en Tu-hsiu (Chen Duxiu), the Trotskyist General Secretary of the CCP, organized an armed uprising of the CCP and KMT-led trade unions on March 21-22, 1927, defeating the warlord forces occupying the city. They took over all but the international settlements, which were defended by foreign imperialist militaries and police. As the KMT Nationalist Revolutionary Army took over, the Communists continued to hold daily student demonstrations and workers’ strikes demanding the international settlements be returned to Chinese control. On April 5th, Wang Jing-wei arrived in Shanghai and met with Ch’en Tu-hsiu. After their meeting they issued a joint declaration re-affirming the principle of cooperation between KMT and CCP, then Wang left for Wuhan.

Chiang then called on his old associates in the notorious Green Gang, Shanghai’s underworld bosses, to form a rival union to oppose the Communist-led union. On April 9th, he declared martial law in Shanghai. On April 11th, Chiang issued secret orders to all KMT commanders to purge the Communists throughout KMT-controlled China, and the following morning ordered the Army to disarm the worker’s militia in Shanghai, while the Green Gang went on the offensive attacking union headquarters and activists. More than 300 people were killed or wounded. The next day, workers held a mass meeting and marched to the Army headquarters. The NRA troops opened fire on them with machine guns, killing more than 100.

Chiang dissolved the provisional government in Shanghai and banned all Communist-led organizations. Tens of thousands were arrested and thousands were either officially executed or disappeared. In cities across China, more than 10,000 Communists were killed over the next 20 days. But the “Red General” was not done yet. 39 members of the Kuomintang Central Committee in Wuhan publicly denounced Chiang as a traitor to Sun Yat-sen, (including Sun’s widow Soong Ching-ling), immediately after the purge. The leadership dismissed Chiang, called him a counter revolutionary and offered a reward on him, dead or alive. But Chiang Kai-shek was defiant, forming a new “Nationalist Government” at Nanking (Nanjing) to rival the Communist-tolerant Nationalist Government in Wuhan controlled by Wang Jing-wei on April 18, 1927.

Meanwhile, Wang initiated a purge of his own, claiming to have discovered secret orders from Stalin to Borodin to have the CCP overthrow the left-KMT government in Wuhan. Then Wang fled the country for Europe. After that, the left-KMT government crumbled. Chiang captured Peking and won recognition by the Western powers, then officially moved the capital to Nanking. Ch’en Tu-hsiu and his Soviet advisors took the blame for the disaster that had befallen the CCP, and he was replaced by Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai (Qu Qiubai), another of the founding members of the CCP and one of Mao’s mentors, but he continued the folly of armed urban uprisings and wasting more cadre until he was recalled to Moscow.

“The Communist Party of China was losing membership by death and defection. Stalin, in power in Moscow, had believed that China’s Communists working with the Guomindang would be most effective and serve the Soviet Union’s interests, but now that Chiang and others in the Guomindang were slaughtering Communists, Leftists and labor union activists, Stalin declared that “the scoundrels” had to be punished. He blamed China’s Communist Party leaders for the Party’s failure in China. China’s Communist Party purged itself of its discredited top leadership, but it did not have the power to punish those Stalin thought of as scoundrels. The Communist Party in China tried to gain control of some Guomindang military units but failed, and the Communists were unable to reorganize the Guomindang. “A war between those who supported the Communists and those who supported the Guomindang lasted throughout the [year] 1927. Mao was in Hunan and barely escaped execution at the hands of Guomindang forces. His wife, Yang Kaihui, was captured and beheaded. Soldiers were sent to dig up the graves of Mao’s parents. “Mao found refuge along the border between Hunan and Jiangxi provinces – a hilly region covered with bamboo and pine, with pheasants, deer and tigers, and only a few remote villages in the valleys, where people grew rice and beans. Joining Mao there were about a thousand others who had fled the Guomindang’s crackdown. And in other remote locations in central China other Communist refugees were gathering. Mao now favored creating a Red Army as well as organizing the peasantry into a force to take power. And, drawing from recent experiences, he constructed what was to be one of his maxims: that power comes from the barrel of a gun. This was in defiance of Stalin’s views, but at this point the influence in China on which Stalin had spent millions of gold rubles had been reduced to nothing. Communists working within the Guomindang had come to an end.”[6]

On September 7, 1927, Mao led an attack on the city of Hunan in what became known as the “Autumn Harvest Uprising.” It was another disaster, and he only managed to escape with a rag tag force of around a thousand poorly armed peasants. Retreating into the Chingkangshan mountains, they hooked up with a force of armed miners, and the remnants of another Red Army group under Chu Teh (Zhu De). Two rival gangs of bandits in the mountains were also convinced to join them. A second attempt to take Hunan also failed, after which Mao concentrated on creating a rural soviet with great success. Across the South, pockets of surviving CCP forces followed his example of creating rural base areas. With Mao and Chu Teh’s success at repulsing KMT attempts to drive them out of their rural base area came the surviving members of the Central Committee and their Comintern advisors to reestablish their authority.

We must bear in mind that everything that was happening, from the October Revolution to the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic in November 1931 in the Jiangxi–Fujian base area, was unprecedented. Neither Marx and Engels nor Bakunin, (for that matter), anticipated these developments. Their experiences were with the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the West and the short lived Paris Commune of 1871. The advent of capitalist-imperialism, the world war and the betrayal of the parties of the 2nd International had changed everything. Lenin, Stalin and Mao were struggling to apply revolutionary science to analyze these changes and adapt Marxism to the new conditions to advance the World Proletarian Socialist Revolution.

Anarchism had been proven ineffectual idealism in practice. It played little role, (and that mostly negative and counter-revolutionary), in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. As Stalin pointed out: “Socialism is divided into three main trends: reformism, anarchism and Marxism.”[7] Ironically, a century later and this is still true, for what is revisionism but reformism with a Marxist vocabulary? And what is ultra-leftism but anarchism waving a red flag? Ultra-leftism is rightism in essence, and Marxism, which has evolved into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, zig-zags between right and left errors and tendencies, struggling to ascertain the correct line and apply it correctly to advance history from the Epoch of Exploitation to the Epoch of Communism – classless, stateless, egalitarian society.

Chapter Two: People’s War from the Countryside

The Kiangsi (Jiangxi) Soviet, also called the Chiang-hsi Soviet or Chinese Soviet Republic, (1931–34), was an independent government established by Mao and his comrade Chu Teh in southeastern China. It was from this small state within a state that Mao gained the experience in guerrilla warfare and peasant organization that he later used to accomplish the conquest of China in the late 1940s.

“Quite clearly, the experience of Chingkangshan was essentially one of failure, and in early 1929 it effectively ceased to exist as a revolutionary base area when Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, and their followers withdrew under Kuomintang [KMT] pressure to search for a more suitable location. Nevertheless, Mao concluded that his policies of creating an army, operating out of a rural base area, were fundamentally correct. Departure from Chingkangshan meant, not a return to the cities, but the establishment of a new soviet base, which proved to be a far more enduring and viable political entity than any of its forerunners. Chalmers Johnson has aptly described the idea of the territorial bases as a ‘rebel infrastructure,’ or ‘autonomous government,’… [providing] food, refuge, an area in which military equipment may be manufactured, and training bases; and they

weaken the status quo power by removing territory from the system’s productive substructure.” It is greatly to be doubted whether the Chingkangshan base met such requirements, but it was there that the foundation was laid for the future Chinese Soviet Republic. “Breaking through the KMT blockade in January 1929, Chu and Mao, with P’eng Te-huai’s Fifth Army guarding their rear, began campaigning in Kiangsi. During 1929 they consolidated their base in the south Kiangsi and west Fukien area, with Juichin as its center. By the end of1930 nearly the whole of south Kiangsi had fallen to the Red Army, and the base of the central soviet regions had been established, an area of about seventeen hsien[8] on the Kiangsi-Fukien border with a population of three million.[9] In line with the demands of the Ninth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern [ECCI], held in Moscow in February 1928, the CCP leadership attempted to create a single centralized Red Army from bands of roving guerrilla units in order to carry out the agrarian revolution. By 1930 therefore, the stage was set for the protracted struggle of the Party leadership to call the First National Soviet Congress, establish a formal soviet regime, and thereby extend their authority over the Red Army and the soviet bases. The struggle was to last almost two years.”[10]

It was in Kiangsi that Mao and Chu Teh were able to transform their peasant militia into an effective fighting force:

“A voracious reader in his youth, Mao had studied the lives and victories of many great commanders, from Alexander the Great to George Washington – however it was the teachings of ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu that impressed him most. In his famous The Art of War, Sun Tzu emphasized the military value of speed, deception, concealment and morale; his credo “avoid what is strong, attack what is weak” formed the basis of what we know today as guerrilla warfare. Mao embraced these tactics and worked to incorporate them into the Red Army. Large divisions were organized into smaller guerrilla-based regiments, capable of operating autonomously. Mao also implemented a Leninist command structure and placed political commissars in army units to report on discipline, political attitudes and morale. A Red Army school was established in Jiangxi where CCP instructors, many of them veterans of the Huangpu [Whampoa] Military Academy, drilled officers on tactics, leadership and modern warfare techniques, such as communications and code-breaking. In just a few years the Red Army hardened from a rag-tag peasant militia into a well-trained and competent military force.”[11]

The Kiangsi Soviet was also a laboratory for Mao to test his theories on “New Democratic Revolution”:

“The Jiangxi Soviet became a political entity as well as a military base. The formation of this ‘state within a state’ provided the CCP with valuable experience in running a government. The Soviet was officially formed in November 1931, when 15 CCP-controlled settlements around Ruijin were amalgamated into a new independent state called Zhonghua Suwei-ai Gongheguo, or the Chinese Soviet Republic. The government of this new republic was modelled on the soviet government formed in Russia after the October 1917 revolution. An executive committee was elected to oversee policy and appointments, while a smaller commissariat oversaw day to day government. Mao Zedong was elected chairman of both bodies, in addition to his duties as Jiangxi’s military commander. He would later be sidelined from power after the CCP hierarchy relocated from Shanghai to Jiangxi. The Chinese Soviet Republic also adopted its own flag, the Soviet Union hammer and sickle on a red background, and drafted its own constitution, which read in part: “The Chinese soviet regime is a state based on the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants. All the power of the soviet shall belong to the workers, peasants and Red Army soldiers and the entire labouring population. Under the soviet regime the workers, peasants, Red Army soldiers and entire labouring population shall have the right to elect their own deputies to give effect to their power. Only militarists, bureaucrats, landlords, the despotic gentry, capitalists, rich peasants, monks and all exploiting and counter-revolutionary elements shall be deprived of the right to elect deputies to participate in government and to enjoy political freedom…” “In keeping with this vision, Mao and his supporters initiated ambitious economic reforms in Jiangxi. In 1930 the soviet government ordered that all surplus land be confiscated from landlords and affluent peasants, then handed to villages for redistribution. The process did not punish landlords or rich peasants, who like all others were entitled to ownership of land. Mao’s view was that declaring war on landlords ‘wasted’ revolutionary energy. He preferred a more inclusive approach that encouraged co-operation and production, rather than provoking internal disruption. Land policies in the Chinese Soviet Republic shifted radically in 1933, when Mao’s leadership was overtaken by the Comintern-backed Shanghai leaders. Post-1933 land policies in Jiangxi began to resemble those employed in Stalinist Russia. Land redistribution was controlled by the party centre, more closely monitored and conducted more ruthlessly. Landlords and wealthy peasants were excluded or given poor quality land; hundreds were persecuted, driven into exile or murdered. The CCP central executive condemned Mao’s land policies as too moderate and bourgeois – yet under Mao’s leadership agrarian production in Jiangxi had steadily increased. At its peak in around 1932 the Jiangxi region was outdoing most other Chinese provinces in terms of food production.”[12]

In 1933 the CCP’s Russian-oriented Central Committee moved its headquarters from its precarious urban base in Shanghai to the Kiangsi Soviet. With support from Moscow, the members of the Central Committee gradually took over the leadership of the soviet from Mao, radicalizing Mao’s land reform policy so that not only large landlords but also rich peasants and small landlords had their possessions confiscated and redistributed. When Chiang Kai-shek launched his fifth military encirclement campaign against the Kiangsi Soviet in 1933, the new leadership resorted to a strategy of fixed positional warfare, and the soviet was overwhelmed. In October 1934 the Red Army abandoned its Kiangsi base and began its famous Long March.

Otto Braun, the Comintern military advisor, and Wang Ming, the leader of the Moscow-trained Chinese communists who had reduced Mao to a mere figurehead, were responsible for massive casualties, broken morale and increasing desertions among the Red Army. To remedy this situation, an emergency meeting was called as soon as the army had broken clear of the pursuing KMT forces. The Tsunyi (Zunyi) Conference held in Kweiyang (Guiyang) province was a turning point that propelled Mao and the policies he advocated to dominance in the CCP. The Comintern advisors and Russian-trained Chinese leaders had failed to grasp the realities of the Chinese Revolution. Stalin must bear great responsibility for these errors, not that Trotsky’s line was correct, but concrete analysis of concrete conditions, as they say, is the “living soul of Marxism.” The model of the October Revolution was inadequate to solve the problems that were occurring. A fresh analysis and application of Marxism was called for, and this was provided by Mao Tse-tung.

Mao had not yet worked out his strategy and where to go with the remnants of the Red Army, but he had won the support of the majority that guerrilla warfare and creating rural base areas was the way to go. Immediately, the task was to evade the KMT, but eventually, Mao decided to march all the way to Yen’an in the Shansi-Kansu-Ningsia (Shanix-Gansu-Ningxia) border region. This would put the Red Army in position to fight the advancing Japanese imperialists. It would put them closer to the Soviet Union and farther from the base of Chiang’s seat of power. The Long March was an epic achievement. Many died or dropped out along the way, but those who survived would become the core leadership of the Chinese Revolution for decades to come. It was a humiliation for Chiang Kai-shek and made Mao and the CCP international heroes. In Yen’an, Canadian journalist Edgar Snow interviewed Mao and made him famous with his bestselling book Red Star Over China.

As the Japanese invasion advanced, the pressure mounted on Chiang to call a truce with the Communists and build a new united front against the Japanese imperialists. In December of 1936, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by KMT warlord Marshal Chang Hsiao-liang (Zhang Xueliang) in the “Sian (Xi’an) Incident.” Chiang was forced to agree to a “Second United Front” with the Communists, which was supported by the Soviets and the United States. The Generalissimo never forgave Marshal Chang for this humiliation, and kept him under house arrest for 50 years, wherever the KMT was headquartered, until Chiang died in 1975. A hero to the Communists, Chang Hsiao-liang declined invitations to return to mainland China, professing his loyalty to the KMT, and died in Honolulu at the age of 100 in 2001.

In Yen’an, Mao was again able to test his theories on “New Democratic Revolution” in practice and shape the ideological and political line of the CCP. In the caves of Yen’an, cadre schools were established to train young communists from all over China, most of them from poor peasant backgrounds, while basic literacy as well as political education was made available to the masses. KMT blockades prevented most of the aid from the Allies ever reaching Yen’an, but practicing self-reliance, they manufactured what they could to supply the communist-led forces, who captured most of their arms and munitions from the Japanese. Land was redistributed to the peasants, who in turn supplied the food, sent their sons to fight, and bore up under the savage repression of the Japanese occupiers.

Elliot Liu criticizes the Maoists for not being his sort of “feminists,” but they put a real dent in the centuries old patriarchal relations that weighed so heavily on the Chinese peasants, campaigning against foot-binding, wife beating, rape and prostitution, while integrating women into production and political life. Women’s militia detachments were formed and women’s organizations were among the varied mass organizations the communists sponsored and promoted in the communities in both the liberated and occupied territories. Jack Belden, an American war correspondent who covered the Japanese invasion of China, the Second World War and the Chinese Revolution noted in Gold Flower’s Story: “I discovered that the Communists’ drive for power was touched at almost every point by women, by their feelings, by their relationship to men, by their social status, by their symbol as an object of property, religion and sex.”[13] Gold Flower (Kinhua) was a poor peasant woman in a small village in central Hopei province. Forced into an arranged marriage with an older man who raped her on her wedding night, abused and treated as a possession, Gold Flower fights back with the help of the Red Army and the Communist women’s association established in her village.

Mao was not a “nationalist” and was quite aware of the significance the example they were setting would have on the other colonial and semi-colonial countries.

“SNOW: With the achievement of victory of a Red movement in China, do you think that revolution would occur quickly in other Asiatic or semi-colonial countries, such as Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, and India? Is China at present the “key” to world revolution? “MAO: The Chinese revolution is a key factor in the world situation…. When the Chinese revolution comes into full power the masses of many colonial countries will follow the example of China and win a similar victory of their own. But I emphasize again the seizure of power is not our (immediate) aim. We want to stop civil war, create a people’s democratic government with the Guomindang and other parties, and fight for our independence against Japan. “Bao’an, July 19, 1936 “On Land Distribution “SNOW: What is the foremost internal task of the revolution, after the struggle against Japanese imperialism? “MAO: The Chinese revolution, being bourgeois-democratic in character has as its primary task the readjustment of the land problem – the realization of agrarian reform. Some idea of the urgency of rural reform may be secured by referring to figures on the distribution of land in China today. During the Nationalist Revolution I was secretary of the Peasant Committee [department] of the Guomindang and had charge of collecting statistics for areas throughout twenty-one provinces. Our investigation showed astonishing inequalities. About 70 per cent of the whole rural population was made up of poor peasants, tenants or part-tenants, and of agricultural workers. About 20 per cent was made up of middle peasants tilling their own land. Usurers and landlords were about 10 per cent of the population. Included in the 10 per cent also were rich peasants, exploiters like the militarists, tax collectors, and so forth. “The 10 per cent of the rich, peasants, landlords, and usurers together owned about 70 per cent of the cultivated land. From 12 to 15 per cent was in the hands of middle peasants. The 70 per cent of the poor peasants, tenants and part-tenants, and agricultural workers, owned only from 10 to 15 per cent of the total cultivated land…. The revolution is caused chiefly by two oppressions – the imperialists and that 10 per cent of landlords and Chinese exploiters. So we may say that in our new demands for democracy, land reform, and war against imperialism we are opposed by less than 10 per cent of the population. And really not 10 per cent, but probably only about 5 per cent, for not more than that many Chinese will turn tailor to join with Japan in subjugating their own people under the device of the joint “Anti-Red Pact.” “SNOW: Other things in the soviet program having been postponed in the interest of the united front, is it not possible to delay land redistribution also? “MAO: Without confiscating the estates of the landlords, without meeting the main democratic demand of the peasantry, it is impossible to lay the broad mass basis for a successful revolutionary struggle for national liberation. In order to win the support for the peasants for the national cause it is necessary to satisfy their demand for land….” [14]

One of the basic tenants of Maoism is to unite all who can be united at each stage of the struggle and to use struggle to create more favorable conditions for struggle. Of course this isn’t new to Marxism. Marx sought to unite a broad spectrum of political-ideological tendencies (including Anarchists) in building the First International. This sort of unity is conditioned on programmatic agreement, as ideological-political unity is not possible. It is also closely related to application of the principle of the mass line. As Lenin expressed:

“One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. A vanguard performs its task as vanguard only when it is able to avoid being isolated from the mass of the people it leads and is able really to lead the whole mass forward. Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.”[15]

Maoism both concentrates and gives fuller expression to these concepts, but they are basic to Marxism. Everything develops in stages, with lower stages giving rise to higher stages of development. One does not sit down to a piano for the first time and play “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven. Neither do societies jump from feudalism to the higher stages of socialism in one leap. As the masses are the makers of history, it is incumbent on those who wish to change the world to win the masses to grasp the necessity and means of doing so. Commandism doesn’t work, even if at times it is not possible to fully implement the mass line. Sometimes authority must be invoked, as when a captain of a ship gives an order to keep a ship from floundering and being wrecked, but on the whole, collective wisdom trumps the subjective thinking of one individual. The concept of Democratic Centralism is based upon combining the greatest degree of inner-party democracy with unity of action in implementation of policy.

“From the time that Mao took over the leadership of the CPC, he made all efforts to develop the Party on true Leninist lines. Due to the domination of the earlier incorrect lines, particularly the third ‘Left’ Line of Wang Ming there were many deviations in party functioning. Due to the sectarian understanding there were no proper norms of democratic centralist functioning and a totally wrong approach to the two-line struggle. Decisions were taken without consultation and without involving the Party cadre and by manipulating the holding of plenums and other meetings. “Two-line struggle was not conducted openly and representatives of another point of view were harassed and punished. Also due to dogmatism there was no implementation of mass line. Mao made all attempts to rectify these deviations as well as build up proper forums and bodies. In the process Mao also clarified and developed many organizational concepts. He also tried to correct certain wrong understanding that had grown in the international communist movement and also in the CPSU under the leadership of Stalin. Democratic Centralism: Mao’s attempt to correct sectarian and bureaucratic deviations is seen in his explanation regarding democratic centralism. Mao’s understanding of democratic centralism is clearly ‘first democracy, then centralism’. He explained this in many ways – ‘if there is no democracy there won’t be any centralism’, ‘centralism is centralism built on the foundation of democracy. Proletarian centralism with a broad democratic base’. “This view of Mao was based on his understanding that centralism meant first of all the centralization of correct ideas. For this to take it was necessary for all comrades to express their views and opinions and not keep it bottled up inside them. This would only be possible if there was the fullest possible democracy where comrades would feel free to state what they want to say and even vent their anger. Therefore, without democracy it would be impossible to sum up experience correctly. Without democracy, without ideas coming from the masses, it is impossible to formulate good lines, principles, policies or methods. However, with proletarian democracy it was possible to achieve unity of understanding, of policy, plan, command and action on the basis of concentrating of correct ideas. This is unity through centralism. “Mao did not restrict the understanding of democratic centralism only to party functioning. He broadened the understanding to the question of running the proletarian state and building the socialist economy. Mao felt that, without democratic centralism, the dictatorship of the proletariat could not be consolidated. Without broad democracy for the people, it was impossible for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be consolidated or for political power to be stable. Without democracy, without arousing the masses and without supervision by the masses, it would be impossible to exercise effective dictatorship over the reactionaries and bad elements or to remold them effectively. Mao was making these observations after the rise of modern revisionism in the Soviet Union and saw that the masses had not been mobilized to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. He also saw the rise of revisionist tendencies within the CPC at the highest levels and recognized that the only safeguard against such trends was the initiative and vigilance of the lower level cadre and the masses. “Thus Mao said in his talk in January 1962, “Unless we fully promote people’s democracy and inner-Party democracy and unless we fully implement proletarian democracy, it will be impossible for China to have true proletarian centralism. Without a high degree of democracy it is impossible to have a high degree of centralism and without a high degree of centralism it is impossible to establish a socialist economy. And what will happen to our country if we fail to establish a socialist economy? It will turn into a revisionist state, indeed a bourgeois state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat will turn into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and a reactionary, fascist dictatorship at that. This is a question, which very much deserves our vigilance, and I hope our comrades will give it a good deal of thought.” “The Two-Line Struggle is another aspect of party organizational principles, regarding which Mao developed Marxist understanding and theory. Mao’s approach, based on dialectical materialism was to see incorrect opinions within the Communist Party as the reflection of alien classes in society. Thus as long as the class struggle continued in society there was bound to be its reflection in the ideological struggle within the Party. His approach towards these contradictions too was different. He saw them as non-antagonistic contradictions initially which through ‘serious struggle’ we should try to rectify. We should give ample opportunity to rectify and only if the people committing errors ‘persist’ or ‘aggravate them’, then there was the possibility of the contradiction becoming antagonistic. “This was a correction of Stalin’s understanding, which he had presented in Foundations of Leninism. Stalin was opposed to any attempt to rectify wrong trends through inner-party struggle. He called such attempts as a “theory of ‘defeating’ opportunist elements by ideological struggle within the Party”, which according to him was “a rotten and dangerous theory, which threatens to condemn the Party to paralysis and chronic infirmity”. Such a presentation refused to accept the possibility of a non-antagonistic contradiction and treated the struggle against opportunism as an antagonistic contradiction from the very beginning. “Drawing lessons from the same historical experience, Mao presented the methods of inner-Party struggle in the following manner. “All leading members of the Party must promote inner-Party democracy and let people speak out. What are the limits? One is that Party discipline must be observed, the minority being subordinate to the majority and the entire membership to the Central Committee. Another limit is that no secret faction must be organized. We are not afraid of open opponents; we are only afraid of secret opponents. Such people do not speak the truth to your face, what they say is only lies and deceit. They don’t express their real intention. As long as a person doesn’t violate discipline and doesn’t engage in secret factional activities, we should allow him to speak out and shouldn’t punish him if he says wrong things. If people say wrong things, they can be criticized, but we should convince them with reason. What if they are still not convinced? As long as they abide by the resolutions and the decisions taken by the majority, the minority can reserve their opinions.” “Mao’s understanding thus was on the clear basis that as long as class struggle existed in society there was bound to be the class struggle in the Party—i.e., the two-line struggle. Therefore, it was only correct that this struggle should be fought out openly according the principles of democratic centralism. Thus Mao, through his understanding and implementation of the concept of two-line struggle, attempted to bring about a correct dialectical approach to classes, class struggle and inner-party struggle.”[16]

Now it is true that the continued existence of classes and commodity relations under “New Democracy” and the lower stages of socialism will regenerate the bourgeoisie, and as socialist reconstruction moves forward there is a contradiction between state capitalism and the further development of socialism, but as with all contradictions there will be a principal aspect and a secondary aspect. If the secondary aspect becomes primary, then capitalist restoration will take place and the socialist system will become a state capitalist system. This is in fact what happened after Stalin died and after Mao died, and Mao recognized this danger. As pointed out by Chang Chun-chiao (Zhang Chunqiao):

“Historically, every major change in the system of ownership, be it the replacement of slavery by the feudal system or of feudalism by capitalism, was invariably preceded by the seizure of political power, which was then used to effect large-scale change in the system of ownership and consolidate and develop the new system. Even more is this the case with socialist public ownership which cannot be born under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Bureaucrat capital, which controlled 80 per cent of the industry in old China, could be transformed and placed under ownership by the whole people only after the People’s Liberation Army had defeated Chiang Kai-shek. Similarly, a capitalist restoration is inevitably preceded by the seizure of leadership and a change in the line and policies of the Party. Wasn’t this the way Khrushchev and Brezhnev changed the system of ownership in the Soviet Union? Wasn’t this the way Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao changed the nature of a number of our factories and other enterprises to varying degrees?”[17]

Classes and the “Epoch of Exploitation” can only be done away with by carrying the class struggle all the way to the negation of the negation with the elimination of classes, and this must be done globally. As problematic as it is to build socialism in one country or a group of countries while the rest of the world is under capitalist-imperialism, let alone while the world as a whole is dominated by the capitalist system, (and in the epoch of imperialism, it is imperialism that is the principal aspect), it is impossible to create classless, stateless society as an island surrounded by capitalist-imperialism. Without a state, an army and centralized authority to wield it, how can independence be maintained? As Huey P. Newton pointed out, liberated territory is not sufficient, it is not satisfied, because it exists in contradiction to the world around it and is beset on all sides and from within, and can only exist temporarily as a base for the World Proletarian Socialist Revolution.

“As early as 1920, Lenin, basing himself on practical experience in leading the Great October Socialist Revolution and directing the first state of proletarian dictatorship, pointed out sharply, “The dictatorship of the proletariat is a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy , the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its overthrow (even if only in one country), and whose power lies not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit , in the strength of small production . For, unfortunately, small production is still very, very widespread in the world, and small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. For all these reasons the dictatorship of the proletariat is essential.” Lenin pointed out that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative—against the forces and traditions of the old society, that it means all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. Lenin stressed time and again that it is impossible to triumph over the bourgeoisie without exercising a protracted, all-round dictatorship over it. These words of Lenin’s, especially those he underscored, have been confirmed by practice in subsequent years. Sure enough, new bourgeois elements have been engendered batch after batch, and it is precisely the Khrushchev-Brezhnev renegade clique that is their representative. These people generally have a good class background; almost all of them were brought up under the red flag; they have joined the Communist Party organizationally, received college training and become so-called red experts. However, they are new poisonous weeds engendered by the old soil of capitalism. They have betrayed their own class, usurped Party and state power, restored capitalism, become chieftains of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, and accomplished what Hitler had tried to do but failed. Never should we forget this experience of history in which “the satellites went up to the sky while the red flag fell to the ground,” especially not at this time when we are determined to build a powerful country. “We must be soberly aware that there is still a danger of China turning revisionist. This is not only because imperialism and social-imperialism will never give up aggression and subversion against us, not only because China’s old landlords and capitalists are still around and unreconciled to their defeat, but also because new bourgeois elements are being engendered daily and hourly, as Lenin put it. Some comrades argue that Lenin was referring to the situation before collectivization. This is obviously incorrect. Lenin’s remarks are not out of date at all. These comrades may look up Chairman Mao’s On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People published in 1957. There Chairman Mao shows by concrete analysis that after the basic victory in the socialist transformation of the system of ownership, which includes the achievement of agricultural co-operation, there still exist in China classes, class contradictions and class struggle, and there still exist both harmony and contradiction between the relations of production and the productive forces and between the superstructure and the economic base. Having summed up the new experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat after Lenin, Chairman Mao gave systematic answers to various questions arising after the change in the system of ownership, set forth the tasks and policies of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and laid the theoretical basis for the Party’s basic line and for continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Practice in the past 18 years, particularly in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, has proved that the theory, line and policies advanced by Chairman Mao are entirely correct.”[18]

The proletarian state is not really a state but its antithesis, because in-so-much as its principal aspect is the dictatorship of the proletariat, its purpose is to create the conditions for the resolution of the class struggle by the advance of the World Proletarian Socialist Revolution to victory. If the principal aspect becomes the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it becomes state capitalist and counter-revolutionary, thus a true state. It is not the degree of state ownership but the ideological-political line of the Party that determines its character. Everything is in motion, the question is; which direction it is going?

As pointed out in the Peking Review #15, April 9, 1976, exactly four months before Mao’s death:

“We have won great victories. But class struggle is acute and complicated, and there will still be resistance and twists and turns on the road of our advance. We must take class struggle as the key link, firmly keep to the general orientation of the struggle, and carry through to the end the struggle to repulse the Right deviationist attempt to reverse correct verdicts. “In criticizing the Right deviationist attempt to reverse correct verdicts, Chairman Mao points out: “In 1949 it was pointed out that the principal contradiction within the country was one between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Thirteen years later the question of class struggle was reiterated, and mention was also made of the fact that the situation began to turn for the better. What is the Great Cultural Revolution for? To wage class struggle. Liu Shao-chi advocated the theory of the dying out of class struggle, but he himself never ceased to wage class struggle. He wanted to protect his bunch of renegades and sworn followers. Lin Piao wanted to overthrow the proletariat and attempted a coup. Did class struggle die out?” Hitting the nail on the head, Chairman Mao’s instruction exposes the reactionary character and fraudulence of the theory of the dying out of class struggle peddled by Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piao and that unrepentant Party capitalist-roader. It penetratingly expounds the nature of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and once again teaches us that we must analyze the contradictions in socialist society from the viewpoint of class struggle. The counterattack against the Right deviationist attempt is a continuation and deepening of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; it is also a serious class struggle. We must analyze the class nature of the tendencies and slogans that appear in the course of the movement from the viewpoint of the struggle by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. “We must not be academic and oversimplify the complex class struggle.” “It is essential to put the study of Chairman Mao’s important instructions in the first place. These instructions are a sharp weapon for us to beat back the Right deviationist wind and a beacon illuminating our way in continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. We should study conscientiously and be clear about the nature of the current struggle and the guiding principles and policies for it. If we do not study, we are liable to lose our bearings and be taken in. “We should direct the spearhead of the struggle at the Party capitalist-roader who has refused to mend his ways. Chairman Mao points out: “With the socialist revolution they themselves come under fire. At the time of the co-operative transformation of agriculture there were people in the Party who opposed it, and when it comes to criticizing bourgeois right, they resent it. You are making the socialist revolution, and yet don’t know where the bourgeoisie is. It is right in the Communist Party—those in power taking the capitalist road. The capitalist-roaders are still on the capitalist road.” The unrepentant Party capitalist-roader is the general representative of the bourgeoisie. His revisionist program, his revisionist line and his reactionary words and deeds are a concentrated embodiment of the desire of the bourgeoisie for restoration. By directing the spearhead of the struggle at him and making a penetrating exposure and criticism, we shall be able to distinguish between right and wrong political lines, unite upwards of 95 per cent of the cadres and masses, and win still greater victories in the counterattack against the Right deviationist wind. If we keep a firm grip on this point, the class enemy’s scheme to switch the general orientation of the struggle will be brought to total bankruptcy.”[19]

In this period, a socialist country cannot relax or ignore the reality of the danger of capitalist restoration. Indeed, as truly independent nations cannot exist, it is questionable if socialism is possible before the back of capitalist imperialism is broken globally. As Lenin pointed out, in mature capitalism, the tendency towards the creation of international unity of capital and economic life in general predominates. China’s economy and the U.S. economy are greatly integrated even as tensions mount politically and militarily. The U.S. imperialists are desperate to bring the Chinese oligarchy under their hegemony while the Chinese ruling oligarchy is desperate to become imperialists in their own right and not be subordinated. The principal contradiction in the world has changed. Mao himself recognized this in 1968, when he talked about the world revolution entering a new period:

“At present, the world revolution has entered a great new era. The struggle of the Black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of all the people of the world against U.S. imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution. I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to fight against U.S. imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States! People of the whole world, unite still more closely and launch a sustained and vigorous offensive against our common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and its accomplices! It can be said with certainty that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation, and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed peoples and nations of the world are not far off.”[20]

Two years later, Huey Newton laid down his “Theory of Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” stating:

“In 1917, when the revolution occurred, there could be a redistribution of wealth on a national level because nations existed. Now, if you talk in terms of planning an economy on a world-wide level, on an intercommunal level, you are saying something important: that the people have been ripped off very much like one country being ripped off. Simple reparation is not enough because the people have not only been robbed of their raw materials, but of the wealth accrued from the investment of those materials-an investment which has created the technological machine. The people of the world will have to have control – not a limited share of control for “X” amount of time, but total control forever. “In order to plan a real intercommunal economy we will have to acknowledge how the world is hooked up. We will also have to acknowledge that nations have not existed for some time.”[21]

How the world is hooked up, is that the U.S. is no longer a country but a globe-reaching empire driven to consolidate its global hegemony. The monopoly capitalist ruling class is transnational. A handful of super-rich capitalists control the wealth of the world and own the mass media and the basic means of production. Their interests are in contradiction with the broad masses of humanity. The principal contradiction in the world today is between their need to consolidate their global hegemony and the chaos and anarchy, including the threat of nuclear war, they are unleashing on humanity by attempting to do so. To survive we must overthrow their rule and establish a global dictatorship of the proletariat.

In every country, there has been a dramatic shift in population from rural to urban areas as monopoly-driven capitalist agriculture displaces the world’s peasantry. At the same time, the capitalist-imperialists cannot profitably exploit an increasing number of people as workers. This growing mass of marginalized, urban proletarians and lumpens will be the mainstay of the next wave of the World Proletarian Socialist Revolution. In many places there is still a basis for rural-based people’s war, such as is going on in India and the Philippines, but Maoism must continue to evolve and adapt to changing conditions and developing contradictions.

Chapter Three: The CCP in State Power

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

After defeating Chiang and his KMT forces on the mainland, Mao officially proclaimed the formation of the People’s Republic of China in October of 1949. Chiang and the remnant of his forces crossed to the Island of Formosa (Taiwan), where the U.S. Navy prevented the communist forces from pursuing him. Other KMT forces crossed over into Burma and northern Thailand in the “Golden Triangle,” where, with CIA assistance, they went into the business of growing opium and making heroin to finance the maintenance of their army.

With assistance from the Soviet Union, the CCP made steady and remarkable progress in developing the economy and achieving the goals of the “New Democratic Revolution” and proceeding to the task of socialist reconstruction. True to his word, Mao did not dispossess the “patriotic national bourgeoisie” without compensation and instead phased them out as the state was able to take over the administration of their industries. Following the policy of “Land to the Tiller,” the estates of the landlords were parceled out to the tenants, and poor people’s cooperatives were formed based upon voluntary collectivization. Mass literacy campaigns were carried out and all manner of schools and colleges were established as well as healthcare systems, public sanitation and other programs to serve the people. Initially, the emphasis was on basic industries like steel mills and power plants built in cooperation with the Soviet Union.

U.S. aggression in Korea prompted China to commit to aiding the regime of Kim Il-sung drive back the imperialist invaders. Despite U.S. military superiority, the war ended in a stalemate which bolstered China’s international standing, particularly among the Third World countries struggling to shake off the yoke of foreign colonial domination. After centuries of being beaten and treated as inferior, the non-white people of the world had found a champion to rally behind. Then in 1953, Joseph Stalin, the great leader of the Soviet Union passed away. He had led the Russians from a semi-feudal, wooden plow economy to the “Space Age” and the status of a world power. Speaking in Moscow in 1957, Mao proclaimed:

“‘There are two winds in the world, the east wind and the west wind’. There is a saying in China: ‘If the east wind does not prevail over the west wind, then the west wind will prevail over the east wind. I think the characteristic of the current situation is that the east wind prevails over the west wind; that is, the strength of socialism exceeds the strength of imperialism.’[22] “Chairman Mao pointed out first of all that the October Socialist Revolution marks a turning point in world history; the appearance in the heavens of two artificial satellites and the coming to Moscow of delegates from the sixty-four communist and workers’ parties to celebrate the holiday of the October Revolution mark a new turning point. The forces of socialism surpass the forces of imperialism. The imperialist forces have a leader, America; our socialist camp must also have a leader, and that leader is the Soviet Union. If we do not have a leader our forces might disintegrate! Chairman Mao… said it was an event of great significance that the communist and workers’ parties of sixty-four countries attended the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the great October Socialist Revolution. It showed the solidarity of the socialist countries, led by the Soviet Union. It showed the solidarity of the communists and workers’ parties the world over, with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as their center. Chairman Mao said that the direction of the wind in the world had changed. In the struggle between the socialist and capitalist camps, it was no longer the West wind that prevailed over the East wind, but the East wind that prevailed over the West wind. The world now has a population of 2.7 billion, the countries now struggling for independence or for complete independence plus the capitalist countries with neutralist tendencies 600 million, and the imperialist camp only about 400 million, besides which they are also divided internally. Earthquakes are likely to occur over there. At present, Chairman Mao said, it was not the West wind that was prevailing over the East wind, but the East wind prevailing over the West wind.”[23]

Despite Mao’s publicly expressed optimism, beneath the surface, the World Communist Movement was already pulling apart. In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, dropped a bomb at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in the form of a “secret speech” delivered to selected delegates attacking Stalin and his legacy, which was soon leaked and appeared to the world in the NY Times. As Elliot Liu notes, “it sent shockwaves through the world socialist movement.”[24] Mao’s initial response was to unite with the criticisms he believed to be valid while upholding Stalin’s positive contributions and trying to maintain the unity of the world communist movement:

“When we talk about committing errors we mean committing errors in subjective [perception] and mistakes in thinking. The many articles that we have seen criticizing Stalin’s errors either don’t mention this issue at all, or mention this issue only very infrequently. Why did Stalin commit errors? It’s because on some questions his subjective [perception] did not correspond to objective reality. At present, things like this still [occur] frequently in our work. To be subjective is to proceed not from objective reality or from realistic possibility but rather from subjective desires….” “Reinforce the Unity of the Party and Carry Forward the Party Traditions” (Aug. 30, 1956), a speech at a preparatory meeting for the Eighth National Congress of the CPC. WMZ2, p. 112. “The first thing is to unite with the several dozen Communist parties and with the Soviet Union. Since some mistakes have occurred in the Soviet Union and those things have been much talked about, they have been exaggerated, and now there is the impression that mistakes of that kind are really terrible. There is something wrong with such an outlook. It is impossible for any nation not to commit any mistakes at all, and [since] the Soviet Union was the first socialist country in the world, and has had such a long experience, it is impossible for it not to have made some mistakes. Where are the mistakes of the Soviet Union, such as Stalin’s mistakes, located [in the scheme of things]? They are partial and temporary. Although we hear that some [of these] things have been around for twenty years already, they are nevertheless still temporary and partial and can be corrected. The main current in the Soviet Union, its principal aspect, the majority [of its people], was correct. Russia gave birth to Leninism, and after the October Revolution, it became the first socialist country. It built socialism, defeated fascism, and became a great industrial state. It has many things from which we can learn. Of course, we should study the advanced experiences, and not the backward experiences. We have always proposed the slogan of studying the advanced experience of the Soviet Union. Who asked you to learn the backward experiences? Some people say that no matter what, even the farts of the Russians smell good; that too is subjectivism. Even the Russians themselves would admit that they stink! Therefore, things must be analyzed. We’ve said before that with regard to Stalin, we should [see him as having been] three parts [bad] and seven parts [good].” , pp. 113-4. An editor’s note states that this is probably the first public statement of the “three parts bad, seven parts good” summation of Stalin that Mao repeated subsequently on a number of occasions (see below). “Stalin should be criticized, but we have differing opinions as to the form the criticism ought to take. There are some other questions, too, on which we disagree.” Remarks about the Criticism of Stalin (Oct. 23, 1956), WMZ2, p. 148, in full. A comment made to P. F. Yudin, the Soviet ambassador to China. “I’d like to say something about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As I see it, there are two ‘knives’: one is Lenin and the other is Stalin. The Russians have now relinquished the knife represented by Stalin. Gomulka and some people in Hungary have picked up this knife to kill the Soviet Union, [by] opposing the so-called Stalinism. The Communist parties of many European countries are also criticizing the Soviet Union; the leader [of these parties] is Togliatti. The imperialists are also using this knife to kill people; Dulles, for one, picked it up and played around with it for some time. This knife was not loaned out; it was thrown out. We, the Chinese, did not discard it. Our first [principle] is to defend Stalin; the second is also to criticize Stalin’s mistakes; [so] we wrote the essay ‘On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ “We are unlike some people who smeared and destroyed Stalin. Rather, we have acted in accordance with the actual situation. “Are parts of the knife represented by Lenin now also being discarded by people in the Soviet leadership? As I see it, much of it has already been discarded. Is [the experience of] the October Revolution still valid? Can it remain a model for all other countries? Khrushchev’s report at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU stated that it is possible to achieve political power through parliamentary means. This is to say that other countries no longer need to emulate the October Revolution. Once this door is opened, Leninism will basically be abandoned…. “How much capital do you have? All you have is a Lenin and a Stalin. But you have discarded Stalin, and most of Lenin too. Lenin’s legs are gone, perhaps there’s still a head left, or perhaps one of Lenin’s two hands has been chopped off. We study Marxism-Leninism, and we learn from the October Revolution. Marx has written so much, and Lenin has also written so much! Relying on the masses and taking the mass line are things we learned from them. It is very dangerous not to rely on the masses in waging class struggle and not to distinguish between the enemy and ourselves.” Speech at the Second Plenum of the Eight Central Committee (Nov. 15, 1956), Version I, WMZ2, pp. 166-7. This version of the speech, however, had many strong criticisms of Stalin removed from it. (See the next item below.) “From the very beginning our Party has emulated the Soviet Union. The mass line, our political work, and [the theory of] the dictatorship of the proletariat have all been learned from the October Revolution. At that time, Lenin had focused on the mobilization of the masses, and on organizing the worker-peasant-soldier soviet, and so on. He did not rely on [doing things by] administrative decree. Rather, Lenin sent Party representatives to carry out political work. The problem lies with the latter phase of Stalin’s leadership [which came] after the October Revolution. Although [Stalin] was still promoting socialism and communism, he nonetheless abandoned some of Lenin’s things, deviated from the orbit of Leninism, and became alienated from the masses, and so on. Therefore, we did suffer some disadvantages when we emulated the things of the later stages of Stalin’s leadership and transplanted them for application in China in a doctrinaire way. Today, the Soviet Union still has some advanced experiences that deserve to be emulated, but there are some other [aspects] in which we simply cannot be like the Soviet Union. For example, the socialist transformation of the capitalist industries and commerce, the cooperativization of agriculture, and the Ten Major Relationships in economic construction; these are all ways of doing things in China. From now on, in our socialist economic construction, we should primarily start with China’s circumstances, and with the special characteristics of the circumstances and the times in which we are situated. Therefore, we must still propose the slogan of learning from the Soviet Union; just that we cannot forcibly and crudely transplant and employ things blindly and in a doctrinaire fashion. Similarly, we can also learn some of the things that are good in bourgeois countries; this is because every country must have its strengths and weaknesses, and we intend chiefly to learn other people’s strengths. “Stalin had a tendency to deviate from Marxism-Leninism. A concrete expression of this is [his] negation of contradictions, and to date, [the Soviet Union] has not yet thoroughly eliminated the influence of this viewpoint of Stalin’s. Stalin spoke [the language of] materialism and the dialectical method, but in reality he was subjectivist. He placed the individual above everything else, negated the group, and negated the masses. [He engaged in] the worship of the individual; in fact, to be more precise, [in] personal dictatorships. This is anti-materialism. Stalin also spoke of the dialectical method, but in reality [he] was metaphysical. For example, in the [Short] History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), he wrote of the dialectical method, [but] put [the theory of] contradictions [only] at the very end. We should say that the most fundamental problem of dialectics is the unity of contradictory opposites. It is [precisely] because of his metaphysical [character] that a one-sided viewpoint was produced, in which the internal connections in a thing are repudiated, and problems are looked at isolatedly and in a static way. To pay heed to dialectics would be to look at problems and treat a problem as a unity of opposites, and that is why it would be [a] comprehensive [methodology]. Life and death, war and peace, are opposites of a contradiction. In reality, they also have an internal connection between them. That is why at times these oppositions are also united. When we [seek to] understand problems we cannot see only one side. We should analyze [it] from all sides, look through its essence. In this way, with regard to [understanding] a person, we would not be [taking the position] at one time that he is all good, and then at another time that he is all bad, without a single good point. Why is our Party correct? It is because we have been able to proceed from the objective conditions in understanding and resolving all problems; in this way we are more comprehensive and we can avoid being absolutists. “Secondly, the mass line was seen as tailism by Stalin. [He] did not recognize the good points about the mass line, and he used administrative methods to resolve many problems. But we Communists are materialists; we acknowledge that it is the masses who create everything and are the masters of history. [For us] there are no individual heroes; only when the masses are united can there be strength. In fact, since Lenin died, the mass line has been forgotten in the Soviet Union. [Even] at the time of opposing Stalin, [the Soviet Union’s leadership] still did not properly acknowledge or emphasize the significance of the mass line. Of course, more recently, attention has begun to be paid to this, but the understanding is still not [sufficiently] deep. “Furthermore, class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat were [items] that Lenin had emphasized. At one time, the divergence between Lenin and the Third International and the Second International was mainly along the lines that the Marxists emphasized the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat whereas the opportunists were unwilling to acknowledge them. One of the lessons to be learned from the occurrence of the Polish and Hungarian Incidents, in addition to [the fact that] there were shortcomings in the work [of the Communist parties], is that after the victory of the revolution they had not properly mobilized the masses to weed out thoroughly the counterrevolutionary elements.” “Speech at the Second Plenum of the Eight Central Committee (Nov. 15, 1956), Version II, WMZ2, pp. 185-6. One excessively long paragraph in the report of this speech has been broken up into three paragraphs for readability purposes. Note that an expurgated version of this speech, which drastically tones down the criticisms of Stalin, is given as “version I” in WMZ2, and was also published in slightly different form after Mao’s death in the Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. V. (An excerpt from “version I” is presented above, just before this item.)”[25]

China was deeply invested in and dependent upon Soviet aid and technical support, but this now became leverage for Khrushchev to try to impose hegemony over the CCP and silence its criticism. Mao, however, became more vocal. The same sort of revisionist rot that had infected the 2nd International was infecting the Communist movement, particularly in the imperialist countries and Eastern Europe. In the socialist bloc, upward mobility corrupted party officials and state bureaucrats while improved conditions and living standards lulled the workers into complacency. As Marx had observed:

“The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. … The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers …”[26]

The siren’s song delusion of “peaceful coexistence” lured many to crash upon the rocks of U.S. imperialist hegemony. In part this delusion was fed by the World War II alliance against the Axis Powers, and even Stalin fell for the promises of post-war detente between the East and West that preceded the “Cold War.” At every bend in the road, opportunists will jump out, saying: “Enough Comrades, let us rest awhile and enjoy the fruits of our struggle. We are weary of the hardships of war and class struggle and deserve rewards for our past deeds of sacrifice. Let us enjoy a ‘normal life’ and put aside our guns and banners for a while.” Stalin had let go the Comintern in 1943 to assure the Allies of his peaceful intentions and sincerity towards the Anti-Fascist United Front. In 1944, Earl Browder had liquidated the Communist Party-USA and morphed it into a “Communist Political Association” to act as a “pressure group” within the Democratic Party under FDR.

Even before the war, the Comintern – under Georgi Dimitrov – made the error of forgetting that bourgeois democracy is but a concealment of the reality of bourgeois class dictatorship:

“Fascism is not a form of state power “standing above both classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie,” as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,” as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations. “This, the true character of fascism, must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy, fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat. These would never have supported fascism if they had understood its real character and its true nature. “The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country. In certain countries, principally those in which fascism has no broad mass basis and in which the struggle of the various groups within the camp of the fascist bourgeoisie itself is rather acute, fascism does not immediately venture to abolish parliament, but allows the other bourgeois parties, as well as the Social-Democratic Parties, to retain a modicum of legality. In other countries, where the ruling bourgeoisie fears an early outbreak of revolution, fascism establishes its unrestricted political monopoly, either immediately or by intensifying its reign of terror against and persecution of all rival parties and groups. This does not prevent fascism, when its position becomes particularly acute, from trying to extend its basis and, without altering its class nature, trying to combine open terrorist dictatorship with a crude sham of parliamentarism. “The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie — bourgeois democracy — by another form — open terrorist dictatorship. It would be a serious mistake to ignore this distinction, a mistake liable to prevent the revolutionary proletariat from mobilizing the widest strata of the working people of town and country for the struggle against the menace of the seizure of power by the fascists, and from taking advantage of the contradictions which exist in the camp of the bourgeoisie itself. But it is a mistake, no less serious and dangerous, to underrate the importance, for the establishment of fascist dictatorship, of the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie at present increasingly developing in bourgeois-democratic countries — measures which suppress the democratic liberties of the working people, falsify and curtail the rights of parliament and intensify the repression of the revolutionary movement.”[27]

Benito Mussolini had been more correct when he stated: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Lenin had been even more spot on when he summed up: “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” Buying into the delusion that U.S. imperialism is not fascist, or that the Republican and Democratic parties are not equally fascist, that the bourgeois dictatorship in the U.S. is anything other than a two-party fascist dictatorship, has seriously undermined the Left both in the U.S. and internationally. It blinds us to the horrors committed decade after decade, from dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the genocidal war committed against the Vietnamese and the millions killed since then in the Middle East and Africa, to the routine killing of Black and Brown youth on the streets by the police and the strategy of mass incarceration at home. What difference does it make if the perpetrators are Americans or Germans, Republicans or Democrats? What difference does it make if the troops goosestep or do the Harlem Shuffle?

In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants,[28] men like Otto von Balschining, a former SS officer and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the “final solution,” who wrote texts on how to terrorize and exterminate Jews, and Reinhard Gehlen, a former German major general and head of military intelligence on the Eastern Front, who was recruited by the U.S. military to form the “Gehlen Organization” of ex-Nazi agents to spy on the Soviet Union. Gehlen was later made head of the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). In the Philippines, Manuel Roxas, who had been chief rice collector for the Japanese, was selected to serve as the first President of the “independent” Philippines in 1946, and he pardoned other Japanese occupation collaborators.

Prior to, during and since the “Cold War,” the imperialists have employed legions of secret agents, romanticized in culture like James Bond movies, directed by “Think Tanks” of academics, psychologists, political scientists, economists and experts of mind manipulation and preying upon human weaknesses, to undermine and misdirect the struggle of the proletariat and oppressed peoples. The cutting edge of technology has been employed to spy upon and accumulate data on the most minute aspects of the socialist movements and activists on all levels and in all countries with relentless intent to hold back the liberation of humanity from class exploitation. Billions of dollars have been expended on such activities and agencies, and maintaining the illusion that we are not being manipulated and controlled, that “democracy” and “liberty” are being defended.

When the archives of the secret police in Tsarist Russia were opened, Lenin and the other comrades were shocked to discover how many of their associates had been paid agents, informers and moles, and this was “amateur night” compared to the intensity of the “Cold War” and the present era. It is understandable that Stalin was suspicious of everyone, but the greater problem has always been the spontaneous tendencies emanating from the class relations in capitalist society that carry over into socialism. Is it really shocking that so many of the “Old Bolsheviks” were purged? Maybe they were innocent of being hired agents of foreign powers, but the records show that they were not innocent of betrayal of the revolution. The later restoration of capitalism demonstrates that such betrayal became epidemic within the ranks of the “Party and State” of the socialist countries and socialist movements.

Mao’s initiation of the “Hundred Flowers” campaign was intended to break the mold of stereotypical party writing, conformist artistic expression, scientific straight-jacketing, and constricting of two-line struggle. Later, the intellectuals would whine that they had been set-up when it was followed by a crackdown on rightist tendencies, but nobody said “let a hundred poisonous weeds bloom.” There is a dialectic between encouraging proletarian democracy and exercising proletarian dictatorship. The “art of civilization” is doing one thing while pretending to be doing something else. The bourgeoisie and bureaucrats are masters of the art.

Political line can be sabotaged while appearing to be implementing it faithfully. Collective communal kitchens were intended to free women from household drudgery and allow them to integrate more fully into socialized production, but confiscating pots and pans to feed into backyard steel furnaces as “scrap metal” had the effect of making people dependent, discouraging private gardening and weakening the sense of family togetherness and privacy. Ideally, people should have the option of dining at home or grabbing a meal at the communal kitchen, and the option of alone time, family time and community socialization. Not to mention the folly of backyard steel furnaces in the first place or Mao being tricked into approving them by showing him steel from a conventional steel mill and telling him it was made in a backyard furnace. In some places, where there were people with knowledge of the traditional art of making steel in a forge, it could be, and was, done, but with great effort and much less efficiently than by a modern steel mill.

The “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1961) was opposed by many in leadership positions because it represented socialist reconstruction and self-reliance. Liu Shao-ch’i (Liu Shaoqi), the Vice-Chairman of the CCP and President of the People’s Republic of China, and Teng Hsiao-p’ing (Deng Xiaoping), the Vice Premier, who along with Premier Chao En-lai (Zhou Enlai) were in charge of the day to day running of the Party and State, resented Mao’s leadership, blamed him for the split with the Soviet Union and were in position to see the “Great Leap Forward” hit every bump in the road. Quite the opposite of Mao’s line of putting politics in command and unleashing the initiative of the masses, they favored financial incentives and reliance on experts.

The first year of the “Great Leap Forward” went well, and by the end of 1958, 700 million people had been placed into 26,578 communes. The peasants showed great enthusiasm for collectivization, the weather was good and there was a record harvest. 1959, however, did not go so well. The excellent growing weather of 1958 was followed by a very poor growing year in 1959. Some parts of China were hit by floods. In other growing areas, drought was a major problem. Feeling pressure to not only meet but exceed quotas, many local officials turned in inflated statistics, which meant grain needed for local consumption was being shipped to the Soviet Union to pay debts. The weather got worse in 1960 and rationing had to be introduced. In some areas famine, the tradition scourge of China’s subsistence agriculture, broke out, and delays in reporting meant delays in redirecting grain shipments back to the affected areas.

Many officials blamed Mao for the difficulties. Marshall Peng Te-huai (Peng Dehuai), the hero of the Korean War, was particularly