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Title: Bloom and Contend
Author: Chino
Date: 20 November 2013
Language: en
Topics: maoism, Mao, China, Chinese Anarchism, Chinese Revolution, anti-state, anti-authoritarianism
Source: Retrieved on 2019-08-15 from https://tubmanbrownorganization.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/bloom-and-contend_chino.pdf

Chino

Bloom and Contend

A Note

The author of this piece used to publish under the name Ba Jin. But

because Ba Jin was an actual historical figure, active in political

movements in the period this piece discusses, the author has changed his

pen name to “Chino” to avoid confusion.

This piece draws on many sources from different time periods, and thus

mixes Wade-Giles and Pinyin forms of transliteration. The author has

done his best to standardize names and places, but may have missed some.

(Cover photo: celebration of Stalin’s birthday, 1949.)

Introduction

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?

This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.

–Mao Tse-tung, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, 1926

The Chinese revolutionary experience comprised one of the great

world-historical revolutions of the 20^(th) century. It spanned the

overthrow of the dynastic system that had governed China for over 2,000

years; years of rapid modernization that saw the growth anarchist and

communist politics in East Asia; two decades of mobile rural warfare,

leading to the triumph of a state socialist project; and finally, to a

series of internal upheavals and external conflicts that brought the

country to the brink of civil war, and culminated in the emergence of

the capitalist dreadnought which now stands to shape the course of the

21^(st) century. One fruit of this rich historical experience is Maoism.

The term “Maoism” is used differently by different political tendencies,

to describe syntheses of the theories and strategies that Mao Zedong,

and his allies in the Chinese Communist Party, developed from the 1920s

to the 1970s. In its various iterations, Maoism has made a considerable

impact on the U.S. revolutionary left. In the 1960s, a wide range of

groups in the black liberation, Chicano, and Puerto Rican movements, and

later the New Communist movement, looked to Mao for inspiration and

theory. This influence continues today, not only through

well-established groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party and the

two Freedom Road Socialist Organizations, but also through smaller and

younger groupings such as the Kasama network and the New Afrikan Black

Panther Party—Prison Chapter. If any wave of social movement is to

appear in the U.S. in the coming years, Maoist politics are likely to be

a significant element of its revolutionary wing.

If this is the case, then today’s revolutionaries must ask: what is our

understanding of Maoist politics, and of the Chinese revolution that

produced them? What are the major pillars of “Maoism” in its various

forms, and in what historical contexts did these elements emerge? How

might these politics be enacted in the present moment, and how do they

help or hinder us in developing a revolutionary movement for today? This

piece offers a set of preliminary answers to these questions. It is the

result of several months of study and discussion, both individually and

in groups with Maoist, left communist and anarchist comrades. In the

pages below, I provide a brief survey of the 50-year Chinese

revolutionary experience for militants who may be unfamiliar with it,

and contextualize the main elements of Maoist politics within that

history. Along the way, I develop a coherent analysis of the Chinese

revolution, and of Maoist politics, from an anarchist communist

perspective.

While I disagree with him on particulars, my take on the Chinese

revolution is in broad agreement with the central claims of Loren

Goldner’s controversial “Notes Toward a Critique of Maoism,” published

online in October 2012. The Chinese revolution was a remarkable popular

peasant war and led by Marxist-Leninists. Taking the helm of an

underdeveloped country in the absence of a global revolution, the

Chinese Communist Party dealt with its conditions by acting as a

surrogate bourgeoisie, and developing the country along state capitalist

lines. The exploitation and accumulation around which Chinese society

was subsequently organized transformed the party into a new ruling

class, with interests distinct from the Chinese proletariat and

peasantry. Believing itself to be revolutionary, the Maoist wing of the

party worked to avoid the problems of bureaucratization and

authoritarianism, using the Soviet experience as a foil. But even as it

called forth popular movements to de-bureaucratize the state, Mao and

his allies were continually forced to choose between sanctioning the

overthrow the system that guaranteed their continued existence as a

class, or repressing the very popular energies they claimed to

represent. Mao and his allies repeatedly chose the latter, ultimately

weakening the self-activity of the Chinese proletariat, and clearing the

way for the triumph of openly capitalist rule after Mao’s death.

My take on the various elements of Maoist politics are varied, depending

on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element

in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of

Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism itself. Over many years,

Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the

negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to

locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of

the USSR, and thus failed to examine and break with many of the

assumptions he shared with the Stalinist model. Thus Mao’s politics

remained fundamentally Stalinist, critiquing the USSR from a position as

untenable in theory as it was eventually proven in practice. This piece

makes an initial attempt to interrogate Maoist concepts in this context.

Other militants will have to take this task further. Only when Maoism is

subjected to an immanent critique and “digested” in this manner will it

be possible to effectively re-embed elements of Maoist politics in a

new, coherent political approach adequate to our present situation.

Before we start, I should outline my use of the term “state capitalism,”

a concept that is central element in my understanding of Mao’s China.

The term has been used in many different contexts. In Russia in the

1920s, anarchists such as Alexander Berkman and Voline, and left

communist groups such as Gavril Myasnikov’s Worker’s Group, used the

term to describe the kind of exploitative political and economic system

they saw emerging in the USSR. Lenin used the term positively in the

same period, to describe the method the Bolsheviks would use to

industrially develop Russia under Bolshevik control, while preventing

the return of the overthrown ruling classes to power. Marxists

throughout the 20^(th) century—such as Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick,

C.L.R. James, Tony Cliff, Hillel Ticktin, and the Aufheben group—have

worked to develop the term theoretically, in order to grapple with what

happened in the USSR, and uncover the implications of the Soviet

experience for revolutionary movements yet to come.

I use the term “state capitalist” to refer to any system in which the

exploitation and capital accumulation described by Marx occurs in a

system in which the vast majority of the means of production have been

nationalized, or otherwise placed under the control of a state

apparatus. In such a system, the fundamental aspects of capitalist

social relations remain. A proletariat, defined by its lack of access to

and control over the means of production and subsistence, is forced to

alienate its labor to a separate social group and attendant

institutions, which to an ever greater degree comes to resemble a

distinct ruling class. As ongoing exploitation yields capital

accumulation, this becomingclass continually expands its control over

wealth and political power through its position in the relations of

production, and determines the trajectory of the reproduction of

society. The use values produced by the proletariat, and appropriated by

the state, are distributed back to society under the direction of a

bureaucratic ruling class; some of these are sold as commodities, paid

for by the money earned through waged work, while others are sold on the

global market.

Because this exploitation takes place under the auspices of a state-run

economy, and often in states whose rulers believe themselves to be

pursuing communism, state capitalism “looks” very different from other

forms of capitalism. Wages, prices, commodities, and forms of ownership

may be profoundly shaped by state intervention, and take different forms

than in other capitalist societies. The Aufheben group in particular has

explored the “deformations of value” that occurred in the USSR, when

commodity exchange was greatly restricted, and money could no longer

serve its historical role as the primary medium of capital

accumulation.[1] Nonetheless, as long as the conditions described above

exist, “value” in the capitalist sense continues to exist as well. This

“value” in the capitalist sense will provide the metric through which

use-values are equated, production is conceptualized and coordinated,

and foreign trade is conducted. The resulting “law of value” will tend

to impose seemingly objective limits and presuppositions on those living

under its auspices, including those in positions of state power—no

matter their subjective intentions or political pedigree.

To explore the implications of this concept further, we must examine the

broad path of the Chinese revolutionary experience. I begin at the

transition from the late 19^(th) to the early 20^(th) century, when

modern China was born in toil, fire and bloodshed.

I. Prologue: The First Chinese Revolution

1. The Emergence of Modern China

Revolutionary movements in China emerged from a contradictory process of

economic and political development, which, starting in the 1800s,

brought together precapitalist political and economic structures with

rapid industrialization, political modernization and conflict with the

West. The process led to massive social upheaval, the establishment of a

modern political state, the development of anarchist and communist

movements—and eventually, the emergence of Maoism.

In the mid-19^(th) century, the British opened Chinese markets to

foreign products with a series of imperialist conquests known as the

Opium Wars. The advanced British military delivered punishing losses to

the Qing dynasty, winning control of Hong Kong, and forcing down trade

barriers to British goods. The defeat was a powerful blow to imperial

pride, as it marked the first time in centuries the Chinese state had

suffered so decisive a loss to a foreign power. Over the following

decades, other imperial powers followed suit, forcing open Chinese

markets at gunpoint, imposing war debts, and taking control of

“concession” territories on the Chinese mainland where they enjoyed

exclusive access to raw materials and industries. The French, Dutch,

Russians, Americans and Japanese seized chunks of China in this manner

throughout the late 1800s.

Imperialist domination generated upheavals in Chinese society, even as

its Qing rulers struggled to modernize the empire. The Taiping and Boxer

rebellions swept China in the 1800s, threatening both imperialist powers

and the Qing state itself. At the turn of the century, a whole

generation of Chinese intellectuals turned to revolution. Once Confucian

education was abolished in 1905, many Chinese intellectuals pursued

Western-style educations, traveling to Tokyo, Paris or London to study

Western the natural and social sciences. As peasant and worker

rebellions grew in force, this layer of students and intellectuals

longed for a Chinese national state on par with the other global powers.

These factors culminated in the 1911 overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and

the founding of the first Chinese republic. Soon afterward, the

“Revolutionary Alliance,” a group of secret societies which had helped

stage the revolution, formed the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang (KMT)

party under the leadership of Sun Yat-Sen.

The overthrow of the Qing dynasty only deepened the social turmoil,

however. By 1916 the country had collapsed into a checkerboard of

territories controlled by local feuding warlord armies, and imperialists

continued to dominate the coastal areas. Three years later, the

nationalist May 4^(th) Movement drew thousands into the streets to

proclaim Chinese unity against imperialist domination. A small group of

revolutionaries emerged from this experience to found the Communist

Party of China (CCP) in 1921. The party held its first congress on a

boat in a lake in Changsha, in Hunan province, with thirteen delegates

representing fewer than sixty members in all.[2] From this tiny

beginning, the CCP quickly grew to a party of tens of thousands. It

based its activities in the struggles of the growing Chinese

proletariat, which itself comprised just one explosive sector of an

impoverished and oppressed Chinese populace.

China in 1920 remained a predominantly peasant country, with little

industrialization of agriculture. It was home to around 500 million

peasants, most of whose living conditions had been deteriorating for

decades. Since the 19^(th) century, the population had expanded steadily

without any growth in agricultural productivity, in the first phase of a

Malthusian “dynastic cycle” that had been repeated throughout Chinese

history. Population growth, and a highly unequal distribution of land,

led to steady shrinkage in the average peasant plot: by the 1930s, the

average peasant family farmed a mere 3.3 acres.[3] Drought and famine

had become common occurrences, as had the practices of selling children

into servitude, or marrying young women away against their will to rich

landowners, in times of economic severity. The collapse of the Qing

state then intensified exploitation and corruption, with landlords and

warlords taking up to half the annual harvest in rents, and local

officials engaging in tax gouging, or debt schemes to keep peasants in

perpetual servitude. Under these pressures, the traditional peasant

family structure began to break down,[4] and mass peasant movements

emerged for the first time, which fused peasants across clan lineages

and broke traditional ties to the landlord class.[5]

China in 1920 was also being rapidly transformed by industrialization.

As industry expanded in coastal cities like Shanghai, the proletariat

expanded at a heady rate. In 1919 there were a million workers in China,

and the number had doubled by 1922. While small relative to the

population, the Chinese working class was militant, and well connected

to the global worker’s movement at its world-historic height. In 1922

there were 91 strikes across the country involving 150,000 workers. In

1924, 100,000 workers marched in Shanghai to celebrate May Day, marching

for an eight-hour day at a time when local workdays stretched from 12 to

16 hours. In 1925, 400,000 workers from Beijing to Guangzhou launched

strikes and demonstrations against foreign exploitation.[6] The CCP grew

amid this class struggle.

Perched atop the massive Chinese peasantry and restive proletariat was a

bloated landlord class, and a newborn capitalist bourgeoisie. Some

bourgeois sectors developed in the niches of the international trade

imposed by foreign powers, and were thus sympathetic to imperialist

forces. Others emerged in sectors that were threatened by outside

imports, or otherwise hampered by the imperialist presence, and these

tended to sympathize with nationalist sentiment. Many members of the

bourgeoisie had themselves only recently emerged from the wealthy

peasantry, and used their industrial profits to continue investing in

land in the countryside. This stunted industrial development, further

concentrated land ownership in a few privileged hands, and heightened

rural exploitation according to the demands of capital accumulation.

With this configuration of classes, China displayed all the explosive

potentials and glaring contrasts of a semi-colonial nation in the 1920s:

It boasted a vast agricultural economy, much of it operating outside

fully capitalist relations of production, and yet hyper-exploited by its

integration in global flows of capital. It was led by a stagnant

landlord class and a weak, foreign-dominated bourgeoisie, which was

unwilling and unable to carry out a thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution

and transform the political economy of the country. And it possessed a

numerically small working class that nonetheless displayed all the

militancy and revolutionary consciousness of the contemporary global

worker’s movement. How would these different classes relate to each

other in a new revolutionary movement? What role should communist forces

play in the development of such a revolution? These questions became

crucial for the new CCP throughout the 1920s. Every step of the way, the

CCP was guided organizationally and politically by the recently-founded

USSR, through the Third International, or Comintern.

2. The Comintern: State Capitalist Foreign Policy

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union held undisputed

leadership over the world communist movement. This was true too in

China, where the CCP developed under the close direction of the

Comintern. The CCP was profoundly shaped by this relationship, both

modeling itself after the Stalinist interpretation of Leninism, and

working to break from Soviet control. This tension would become a

defining feature of Maoism.

The history of the USSR and the Comintern is too lengthy to detail here,

but some brief comments are necessary to frame its role in the Chinese

class struggle. The Comintern was established in 1919 in Moscow, to

direct what was seen at the time as an impending world revolution. The

Russian Revolution had opened the floodgates, and now, it was believed,

revolution would sweep the Western powers in quick succession, followed

by the rest of the globe. But these hopes were dashed as the wave of

working class revolt after World War I was defeated-notably with the

cycle of failed German insurrections in 1918–19, and the defeated

Italian factory occupations in 1920. These developments caught the

Russian revolutionaries by surprise. For decades, Russian socialists

believed their revolution would occur in tandem with a wave of

revolutions in the developed capitalist countries, culminating in a

world transition to socialism. Now they found themselves trapped in an

undeveloped nation, surrounded by hostile powers, with little chance of

world revolution breaking out anytime soon.

In this climate, the Soviet state went on the defensive. The turn was

most clearly expressed in 1921, when the party suppressed the Kronstadt

uprising, and established the New Economic Policy.[7] After Lenin’s

death in 1924, Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin (who would eventually

be tried and executed by Stalin in 1938) developed the theory of

“socialism in one country.” The theory claimed it was possible to

fundamentally break with capitalist social relations, and establish a

socialist society, within the institutional framework of a single

nation-state. The Soviet state thus came to be viewed as an “outpost” of

socialism in a capitalist world, whose survival alone sustained the

possibility of world revolution in a reactionary period.

Stalin’s theory was a distortion of Marxist understandings of revolution

and the material basis for socialism. However, the Russian party was

compelled to reform its theories in part out of material necessity.

Finding themselves in control of an underdeveloped country, the rulers

of would-be communist Russia chose to act as a surrogate bourgeoisie, in

place of the ruling classes they had just deposed. After sanctioning the

return of market relations in the countryside to address food shortages,

the party carried out “primitive socialist accumulation” throughout the

1930s, hyperexploiting the peasantry to feed the cities and fund the

state, and thereby sustain a program of intense industrial development

that the previous bourgeoisie could not accomplish. The Russian leaders

believed they could carry out these tasks while remaining revolutionary

communists; but they were wrong.

As Marx argued, social being ultimately determines social consciousness.

Though the Soviet and Comintern leaders may have thought they were

defending world revolution, they were increasingly simply defending the

foreign policy interests of the ruling class of an emerging state

capitalist country, which they had equated in name with the world

proletariat. The theoretical orthodoxy produced in the USSR, and

disseminated globally through the Comintern until World War Two, was

profoundly marked by this experience. What we call “Stalinism” today is

essentially a distorted version of Marxist theory, taken up and reworked

for use as the ideology of a new ruling class. This was the set of ideas

upon which Chinese revolutionaries based their conception of revolution,

and developed their own revolutionary theory.

When the CCP emerged in China in the 1920s, the Comintern was in its

so-called “Second Period” under the leadership of Grigory Zinoviev (who

would be tried and executed by Stalin in 1936). In this period, the

Comintern rejected the possibility of world revolution in the near-term,

and prioritized defending the Soviet state from the imperialist

encroachment. The Comintern thus actively supported nationalist

movements in territories controlled by the major imperialist powers. It

also imposed the Bolshevik vanguard party as the universal model for

communist parties across the globe. And it demanded the strict

subordination of communist parties in other countries to the command and

control of the Comintern in Moscow. While Comintern members may have

believed this process would further the world revolution with which they

equated the Soviet state, it objectively had the opposite effect.

3. The Disaster of 1927

Throughout the 1920s, the Comintern dispatched advisors and funds to the

working class movement and CCP in China. In 1923, Comintern advisor

Mikhail Borodin instructed the CCP to cease building an independent

party, and merge its organization with the nationalist KMT. In line with

the geopolitical strategy of the Soviet state, and its official

interpretation of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,

Borodin believed a united nationalist movement in China would weaken

global capitalism and thereby defend the USSR. The CCP followed the

Comintern’s directives and fused with the KMT in 1924, over the

objections of some of its cadre. The same year, the Comintern helped

establish the Whompoa Military Academy in Guangzhou, to help build the

KMT military. Sun Yat-Sen died the following year, and KMT leadership

was taken over by his son Chiang Kai-Shek. In 1926, Chiang was accepted

as an honorary member of the Comintern, and the KMT was incorporated as

an associate party.

Popular rebellion in the cities and the countryside continued to grow.

The “May Thirtieth Movement” erupted in 1925, after protesters were

killed in Shanghai’s imperialist districts, leading to strikes across

China’s industrial areas. A wave of peasant insurrections swept Hunan

province starting in 1926. As it participated in both these struggles,

the CCP ballooned in size: from only 1,000 members at the start 1925,

membership leapt to 10,000 with the May Thirtieth Movement; 30,000 by

July 1926; and 58,000 by April 1927. The KMT was also emboldened by the

wave of rebellions. In 1926, Chiang Kai-Shek launched a military

campaign politically unify all of China and bring warlordism to an end.

CCP cadres moved in tandem to help bring the KMT to power. As Chiang’s

armies moved through southern China, the CCP mobilized 1.2 million

workers and 800,000 peasants in a series of strikes and uprisings.[8]

As the KMT ascended to power, its antagonism with the CCP became clear.

Shortly after a general strike led by the Canton-Hong Kong strike

committee brought Chiang Kai-Shek to power in March 1926, Chiang

disbanded the strike committee and imprisoned many CCP members. At this

“betrayal,” CCP members moved to split with the KMT, but were prevented

from doing so by Borodin, who instructed CCP members to apologize to

Chiang, and refrain from conducting agrarian reforms or seizing private

property in Guangzhou. The CCP dutifully followed suit.

With working class power stifled in the south, Chiang launched his

military campaign in June 1926. Again the CCP organized strikes and

uprisings ahead of Chiang’s advancing army. By February 1927, KMT troops

were approaching the working class stronghold of Shanghai. The Shanghai

General Labor Union called for a general strike to usher Chiang to

power, fielding 350,000 workers in street battles, but Chiang halted his

forces at the outskirts of the city and waited for the movement to

exhaust itself. Only after a second wave of street fighting brought

500–800,000 workers into the streets, at great human cost, did Chiang

take the city. With the industrial heart of China under his control and

the workers exhausted, Chiang ordered his First Division troops—composed

of revolutionary soldiers from Shanghai—out of the area. He then

executed a purge of all communist forces in the city. CCP members were

rounded up in raids on union and party offices. Hundreds were

imprisoned, and others were executed in the street by gunshot or

beheading. The Shanghai purge was repeated across KMT territory over the

following year, in a mass purge that killed as many as 200,000 CCP

members and militant workers overall. It was a crushing blow to the

working class movement.[9]

Chiang’s “coup” didn’t pass without consequence: to the south, the

left-wing elements of the KMT holding power in Wuhan split with Chiang.

The CCP leadership sought to take the lead in the situation by forming

soviets of workers and peasants in the city, but were again restrained

by the Comintern. To Stalin, the left-KMT government was the “center of

the revolutionary movement” in China, and the CCP should actively

support it. The CCP relented, thereby clearing the way for the Wuhan

government to conduct its own suppression of the communists in May 1927,

before reuniting with Chiang. At this point, Borodin and other Comintern

advisors were forced to flee China.[10] By late 1927 the Comintern had

run out of bourgeois allies, and finally reversed its course, calling

for a split with the KMT and the immediate formation of worker and

peasant soviets. It was too late: a “Canton commune” briefly flared to

life in Guangzhou in December 1927, with little popular participation.

It was crushed by local armies, leaving another 5,000 revolutionaries

dead.[11]

The Comintern’s interventions in the 1920s displayed the contradictions

of would-be revolutionaries at the helm of a capitalist state. On the

one hand, leaders like Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin believed worker and

peasant power was the goal of revolutionary movements in underdeveloped

contexts, and they advocated for it in word. On the other hand, they

were compelled to prioritize building strong nationalist allies, as the

shortest path to undermining other world imperialist powers and thereby

defending the Soviet state. This was the line they followed in deed,

repeatedly constraining, limiting and delaying class struggle, and

ultimately guaranteeing its defeat. The experience fundamentally altered

the path of Chinese communism.

4. The Turn to the Countryside

The debacles of 1927 decimated the working class movement, and

permanently undermined the relationship between the working class and

the CCP. In 1927, 3 million Chinese workers were in trade unions, but by

1928 that number was halved, and by 1932 the number had shrunk to

410,000. Class struggles throughout the 1930s remained defensive in

character, and were often dominated by corporatist unions set up under

Chiang’s regime. In some cases striking workers berated CCP cadres, or

pleaded with them to leave, arguing that communist extremism would get

them killed. Comintern representatives in Moscow were forced to admit

that the workers had rejected the CCP as a result of its disastrous

strategic errors.[12] The broken relationship between the CCP and the

class it purported to represent was reflected in the CCP’s membership.

In early 1927 before Chiang’s crackdown, the CCP had 58,000 members, of

which 58% were industrial workers. While the party rebounded after 1928,

and continued to grow in numbers throughout the 1930s as it developed

its rural base, the party’s relationship with the working class was

irreparably shattered: the proportion of workers in the party soon

shrank to 1%.[13]

In this context, the CCP turned its attention to the peasantry in the

countryside—a strategic shift that would eventually bring Mao to

prominence. Mao Tse-tung, son of a wealthy peasant from Hunan province,

had been one of the founders of the CCP in 1921. In 1927, Mao published

Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, chronicling

the wave of peasant rebellions in that province. His report identified

the poor peasantry as a revolutionary class in underdeveloped China, and

criticized the CCP’s tendency to oppose peasant “excesses” in rural

insurrections. After Chiang’s crackdown in Shanghai in September 1927,

Mao launched an uprising to take the city of Changsha, but was defeated.

He managed to flee afterward into the mountainous region separating

Hunan and Kiangsi provinces with about 1,000 men.

Gradually, Mao’s military forces and prestige in the CCP began to grow.

First a column of CCP soldiers led by Chu Teh, then a rebel KMT unit led

by P’eng Te-Huai, and finally two bandit gangs merged with Mao’s forces.

The resulting army numbered about 10,000 soldiers, about one out of

every five of whom carried a rifle. With this force, Mao managed to

repel three expeditionary attacks over the following months, and carry

out agrarian reforms that won him personal renown among the peasantry.

Clashes to the north soon drew KMT armies into other conflicts, allowing

the CCP to establish further bases in the rural areas of southern China.

After a failed attack on Changsha ordered by the Comintern failed in

1930, the entire CCP leadership relocated to Mao’s base area in

Kiangsi.[14] The period of rural guerrilla war had begun.

The politics of the ensuing Chinese revolution, and Mao’s politics in

particular, were profoundly shaped by the experiences of the CCP in the

1920s and 1930s. After doggedly following Soviet leadership into defeat

after defeat, the party was forced to develop its own theory and

strategy, drawn more clearly from Chinese conditions. Eventually Mao

would develop a distinctly Chinese version of Marxism-Leninism through a

critique of Stalin’s Russia. Already in the 1930s, the party seemed

headed in that direction. Its shift to rural base areas contrasted with

the Russian experience, wherein a generation of revolutionaries had

forsaken the countryside to focus almost exclusively on the urban

working class. In Russia the Bolsheviks seized power through urban

insurrections, and only formed a Red Army at the onset of the Russian

Civil War. In the 1930s, by contrast, the CCP set out on a prolonged,

mobile, and rural military strategy.

Independent developments in the CCP would eventually establish the

bedrock of what would come to be called “Maoism.” However, as we will

see, the new theories developed by Mao and his allies in the party were

fundamentally marked by the influence of the Soviet Union, and inherited

many of Stalin’s theoretical and strategic assumptions.

II. People’s War From the Countryside

5. The Chinese Soviet Republic and the Long March: 1931–1935

The CCP declared the founding of a “Chinese Soviet Republic” in rural

Kiangsi province in November 1931, with Mao presiding as its president.

From there, the CCP eventually established fifteen base areas across

southern China. Even in this period, however, the Comintern struggled to

retain control over the party. In 1931 the so-called “28 Bolsheviks,” a

group of CCP cadre trained in Sun Yat-Sen University in Moscow,

maneuvered to lessen Mao’s influence take control of the party

Politburo. Wang Ming, theoretical leader of the group and Mao’s main

rival, advocated using base areas as static defensive headquarters, from

which to launch direct seizures of urban areas. Mao opposed this idea,

and advocated instead for gradually encircling the cities through mobile

warfare. Mao repeatedly clashed with Comintern forces, and suffered

diminished influence in the party.

Conflicts within the CCP took place in the backdrop of constant KMT

attacks. The KMT launched a total of five “extermination campaigns”

against the CCP-controlled territories from 1930–1935, of which the

first four were defeated. KMT columns regularly charged into CCP base

areas, only to be isolated and destroyed by the elusive and mobile Red

Army. Mao began to develop his theory of modern guerrilla warfare

through these remarkable campaigns. Yet even as the civil war raged,

Japan invaded northeastern China, seizing Rehe province in a series of

offensives and annexations from 1931 to 1933. From this point on, an

impending war with Japan hung over the internal conflict in China.

A full assessment of Mao’s military theory is beyond the scope of this

document. However, Mao’s military strategy must be be recognized as a

major advance in military theory worldwide. Mao’s military texts are not

only studied by revolutionaries from all political traditions, but also

by the capitalist ruling classes—Mao’s writings are required reading for

U.S. military cadets at Westpoint. In the Kiangsi period, texts such as

Why is it that red political power can exist in China? and The Struggle

in the Chingkiang Mountains, established the foundation for classics

such as On Guerilla Warfare that would come later.

Despite its growing military prowess, the CCP was forced to abandon its

base areas in southern China during the KMT’s fifth extermination

campaign. From October 1933 to October 1934, the KMT gradually tightened

a noose around CCP territories, constructing fixed defenses with each

advance. Unable to defeat these forces in conventional assaults, the CCP

initiated an extended strategic retreat that became the stuff of legend:

the “Long March.” The Long March took over a year to complete,

consisting of a series of maneuvers that stretched thousands of

kilometers from Kiangsi to the remote areas of Yunan and Xikang, before

finally ending in a new base area in the northwest of China centered in

the city of Yan’an. Several CCP columns conducted the retreat

separately, engaging in daily combat with KMT forces, local warlords and

tribal armies.

The Long March sparked the ascendance of Mao to the leadership of the

party, a decisive break with Soviet control, and the gradual

marginalization of the party’s Sovietoriented leaders. Over the course

of the retreat, the CCP lost contact with the Comintern completely:

communication was broken in August 1934, when the CCP’s underground

radio transmitter in Shanghai was destroyed. In January 1935 the CCP

Politburo held a meeting in Zunyi, in Kweichow province in southwest

China. The “28 Bolsheviks” group was criticized for their failed

military strategy, and officially dissolved. Several of the group’s

members joined Mao’s wing of the party, while Wang Ming remained in

Moscow. Only after winning control of the party did Mao re-establish

radio contact with the Soviets, a year and a half later, in June

1936.[15]

The CCP escaped the KMT only after a great sacrifice: from 90–100,000

men at the start of the Long March, the Red Army was reduced to 7–8,000

under Mao’s command upon arrival in the north in autumn of 1935. It grew

to a total of 22,000 as scattered columns arrived over the following

months.[16] Soon afterward, however, the approaching war with Japan

granted the party a temporary reprieve from KMT attacks. Chinese public

opinion grew increasingly critical of the civil war as the threat of

Japanese imperialism loomed nearer. In 1936, the Comintern began

pressing the CCP to form an alliance with the KMT against the Japanese,

in line with its “Popular Front” strategy against global fascism (which,

at that moment, was sacrificing the Spanish revolution to bourgeois

stability in Europe). Mao supported this move and negotiated with the

KMT, but he refused to merge his party or army with Chiang’s for fear of

repeating the disasters of 1927. Talks dragged on for months.

The question of the alliance was eventually settled by conflicts within

the KMT itself. In December 1936, two of Chiang’s own generals kidnapped

Chiang in Xi’an, demanding he cease attacks on the CCP and focus on the

imperialist enemy. Chiang relented, and a shaky “Second United Front”

between the two parties was secured. Japan launched an all-out invasion

of China seven months later, in July 1937. For the time being, the CCP

and KMT paused hostilities to confront Japanese imperialism.

6. The Yan’an heritage: 1935–1945

The city of Yan’an in Shaanxi province served as the central

headquarters of the CCP throughout the war. Yan’an was a remote and

impoverished city of 40,000, where party leaders lived in dwellings

built out of caves in the hilly terrain. From its refuge the CCP

coordinated work in sixteen base areas across China, and steadily

expanded its organization. The party published theoretical journals and

daily newspapers, built radio stations, installed telephone lines, and

founded primary schools for the populace and party academies for

cadres.[17] It established small manufacturing and textile factories,

using equipment that troops had carried with them on the Long March. Mao

developed his first distinctive theoretical and strategic formulations

in this period, which is often seen as the “heroic phase” of the Chinese

revolution.

The party and the army grew by incredible proportions over a few short

years:

from 20,000 members in 1936, the CCP expanded to 40,000 in 1937, leapt

to 200,000 in 1938, and finally reached 800,000 in 1940. The Red Army

withdrew from major engagements for its first few years in the north,

and expanded from 22,000 survivors to 180,000 soldiers in 1938, and

500,000 in 1940.[18] At the same time, mass organizations of youth,

women, poor peasants, and other social categories were established in

the villages to create alternate bases of leadership from the landlord

class with its clan affiliations. In the base area surrounding Yan’an in

the 1940s, there were 45,000 members in the party’s labor association,

168,000 in its youth association, and 173,800 in its women’s

federation.[19] Most of those who joined the party in the 1930s and

1940s were young men from poor peasant households. They were politically

undeveloped and sometimes illiterate, but fiercely devoted to improving

the plight of Chinese peasants, and defeating imperial domination.

The CCP dramatically transformed social relations in the countryside.

Land reforms, elections, and public tribunals against abusive landlords

and other exploiters, became a distinguishing feature of the CCP base

areas, unseating the entrenched power of the landlord class.[20] These

mobilizations employed a repertoire of practices that were to become

commonplace in Chinese politics—including mass criticism sessions,

public confessions with occasional beatings, and the use of dunce caps

or placards to identify targets of critique. Hundreds of thousands of

peasants made use of the party’s organizational vehicles to denounce and

punish their exploiters. Thousands of abusive landlords and creditors

were punished, and hundreds of new local governments were put in place.

By 1944, 50–75% of the peasants in CCP-controlled territories had taken

part in some kind of moderate land reform.[21]

Gender relations were not so profoundly transformed. Like most parties

in the communist tradition, the CCP maintained control over its mass

organizations, and constrained their actions according to the party’s

overall strategy. With the shift to rural areas, the CCP leadership

limited the party’s action on women’s issues, in order to maintain

smooth relations with the peasant population, and the party’s

predominantly male recruitment pool. Women in many base areas were

encouraged to fulfill domestic roles, contributing to the movement

through household textile production, and at the same time discouraged

from raising independent demands. In a 1942 speech, Peng TeHuai (then

deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army) argued that feminist slogans

should only be raised if they didn’t conflict with other spheres of the

peasant movement, and slogans such as “freedom of marriage” should not

be raised until the peasants were fully mobilized. In other cases,

slogans such as “equality between men and women” should be raised in

word, but not implement them in deed.[22]

This approach was criticized by an opposition current in the party, and

most visibly by Ting Ling, a party member who had been active in

feminist and free love circles in the cities in the 1930s. In a 1942

article for International Women’s Day in Yan’an’s Liberation Daily, Ting

argued that party policies and the culture of Yan’an placed women in a

double-bind. On one hand, they were expected to participate fully in

political life, and were criticized if they fell short; on the other,

they were expected to fulfill traditional gender roles, and were

criticized if they broke with gender norms. Women’s situation was thus

contradictory and untenable. Against those “who make fine speeches

bragging about the need to first acquire political power,” Ting argued

that “if women want equality, they must first strengthen

themselves.”[23] Ting’s piece was rebuked by Mao and other party

leaders, and Ting underwent self-criticism before being removed from

political duties for two years.[24] Party positions on gender would

eventually relax somewhat in the 1940s, as women were encouraged to take

part in land reforms, and permitted to raise independent demands within

limits.

The CCP leadership gradually standardized a set of work methods to

implement through its massive organizational apparatus. The most

distinctive innovation in work methods was the “mass line,” employed by

party cadres in its mass organizations. The mass line was a method of

leadership first developed in the CCP base areas in the south, which was

fully elaborated and implemented in the 1940s. With the mass line,

cadres were to

take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and

concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and

systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these

ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and

translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in

such action.[25]

This process was to be repeated continually, leading to ever more

correct and effective policies. In practice, cadres might use mass line

techniques for a variety of ends: to resolve local disputes, investigate

local conditions and concerns, or solicit adjustments to party policies

as they were imposed.

Today, many Maoist groups consider the mass line a distinguishing

feature of Maoism, and argue that it distinguishes the Maoist tradition

from the stark authoritarianism of many Stalinist parties. However, the

mass line concept admits a wide range of applications, precisely because

it leaves unspecified how cadres are to grapple with mass ideas after

having solicited them. In texts and speeches, Mao proposed that cadres

should process ideas like a “factory,” but the details remained vague:

cadres were simply to distinguish “correct” ideas from “incorrect” ones.

This ambiguity invites a variety of empiricist interpretations, which,

as we will see below, are a prominent feature of Mao’s philosophy.

Rather than analyzing mass ideas as interpretations of a contradictory

reality, whose internal contradictions must themselves be unpacked and

examined, the mass line can easily be applied by simply judging mass

ideas right or wrong based on a preexisting standard. Thus the concept

can be reduced to a populist method of manufacturing consent.

Nonetheless, the mass line and other work methods allowed the party to

plant organizational roots in the Chinese peasantry throughout the 1930s

and 1940s.

In addition to its work methods, the CCP leadership also began to

develop its own distinctive theories and strategies, distinct from those

inherited from the Comintern. The Yan’an period saw Mao develop his

military theory, with pieces such as On Guerilla Warfare, Problems of

Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War, Basic Tactics, Problems of

Guerilla Strategy in War Against Japan and On Protracted War. In 1937,

Mao published On Practice and On Contradiction, his defining statements

on philosophy, as well as a body of lecture notes on dialectics for

internal party use. Mao also developed his first complete statements on

the strategy of the Chinese revolution. These efforts began with his

formulation of the “united front” concept in the late 1930s, and

culminated with the publication of The Chinese Revolution and the

Chinese Communist Party in December 1939, and On New Democracy in

January 1940.

7. The United Front

The concepts of the united front and the New Democratic revolution

served as theoretical guideposts for the CCP. The term “united front”

has a long history in the communist tradition, starting with the Russian

revolution and continuing through most strands of Leninism and

Trotskyism. A united front is a tactic, whereby a revolutionary party

forms an alliance with reformist organizations in order to connect with

their working class base, and by waging common struggles with them, gain

influence and leadership in the working class movement. The tactic was

formalized and spread by the Comintern beginning in 1921.[26] By the

late 1930s the Comintern had expanded the notion to include alliances

with bourgeois political parties, in a “Popular Front” against fascism

designed to defend the USSR from rising fascist powers in Europe.

Mao formulated his own version of the united front in the late 1930s, as

the CCP navigated its relationship with the KMT. In line with Stalin’s

“Popular Front” strategy, Mao argued that an alliance was necessary not

only between workers and peasants, but also with progressive sections of

the bourgeoisie, in order to guarantee China’s national liberation from

Japan. Yet in contrast to some applications of the “Popular Front,” Mao

insisted the party retain its own independent initiative, and gain

leadership over the struggle as a whole. For him this leadership was

mainly militarily: Mao refused KMT demands to reduce the numbers of the

Red Army, admit KMT deputies into Red Army ranks, or submit the Red Army

to a general command.[27] But given these conditions, Mao was willing to

accept the costs of an alliance. To keep the KMT and other bourgeois

forces committed to the nationalist struggle, the CCP would have to

ingratiate itself to the KMT’s class base. This required limiting class

struggle in CCP base areas, and looking out for the interests of the

national bourgeoisie.

In The Question of Independence and Initiative within the United Front,

published in November 1938, Mao proposes that all classes in

CCP-controlled territories must make “mutual concessions” in the

interest of fighting the Japanese. For the time being, the party must

“subordinate the class struggle to the present national struggle against

Japan.” Factory workers may “demand better conditions from the owners,”

but must also “work hard in the interests of resistance.” While

“landlords should reduce rent and interest...at the same time the

peasants should pay rent and interest.” Current Problems of Tactics in

the Anti-Japanese United Front, published in March 1940, further details

how the party will gain the support of the national bourgeoisie, the

nationalist “enlightened gentry,” and regional power brokers in conflict

with Chiang Kai-shek. Winning them over, Mao notes, will require the CCP

to “respect their interests” while demonstrating the Red Army’s military

abilities. The same year, Mao also moved to integrate ruling class

sectors into the governments in the base areas, apportioning seats in

governing bodies “one-third for Communists, one-third for non-Party left

progressives, and one-third for the intermediate sections who are

neither left nor right.”[28]

Guided by Mao’s framework, the party limited itself to a “minimum

program” of land reform rather than agrarian revolution. It sanctioned

the seizure of comprador property in its base areas, often belonging to

“traitors” who had fled the area. But it prevented poor peasants from

seizing the land of “patriotic” middle and rich peasants, industrialists

or merchants. To soften the remaining inequalities, the party then

implemented progressive taxes, reduced rents by around 25%, and capped

interest at a maximum of 15% per year.[29] Many of the poor peasants who

made up the CCP’s rank and file opposed this clampdown on land reform,

and continued to support land seizures, until they were criticized and

purged as “leftists” and “Trotskyites” between 1936 and 1938. In their

place was erected a moderate land reform line, which contrasted with

Mao’s writings Mao’s writings in Report on an Investigation of the

Peasant Movement in Hunan, but paralleled the earlier land reform

policies of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Kiangsi.[30]

Mao’s formulation of the united front improved living conditions and

avoided subjugating the party to the KMT, but did so at the cost of

positioning the party itself as a mediating force that increasingly

dominated over the proletariat and peasantry, as it had over women.

While safeguarding CCP control over its army and territories, Mao agreed

to subjugate class struggle in those territories to bourgeois interests,

with the party acting as their enforcer. He thus guaranteed

“independence and initiative” not to the proletariat and the peasantry,

but to a party claiming to represent them. This arrangement helped

solidify the CCP as a body with its own interests distinct from those of

the exploited and oppressed, even as the peasantry grew entwined with

the party through its mass organizations. This orientation would

continue through the end of the war. Even after clashes between the CCP

and KMT intensified in 1940 and the Second United Front collapsed, the

party still maintained its moderate line, in order to curry favor with

the national bourgeoisie in accordance with Mao’s theory of “New

Democracy.”

8. The New Democratic Revolution

In The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party and On New

Democracy, Mao proposes a conception of revolution in semi-colonial

countries, which combines elements of Stalin’s formulations in the 1920s

with new distinct features. Just as Mao believed the party could use the

united front to ally with bourgeois elements while gaining a leading

role in the struggle, his theory of “New Democracy” proposes to do the

same thing on a national scale through the state apparatus. Mao argues

that the party can carry out a revolution in alliance bourgeois classes,

use those classes to develop the country economically after seizing

power, and ultimately expropriate them to establish a socialist society.

In The Chinese Revolution, Mao argues that the Chinese revolution

primarily aims to overthrow imperialism and feudalism, “by means of a

national and democratic revolution in which the bourgeoisie sometimes

takes part.” Because the revolution is “not against capitalism and

capitalist private property” per se, the Chinese revolution will

inevitably take on a “bourgeois-democratic” character at first: a

“degree of capitalist development will be an inevitable result of the

victory of the democratic revolution.”[31] However, in On New Democracy

Mao argues that this “democratic revolution” will not be like the

bourgeois revolutions of eras past. It will be “no longer democracy in

general, but democracy of...a new and special type, namely, New

Democracy.”[32]

Under New Democracy, China will be ruled by a “joint dictatorship of

several anti-imperialist classes” that will suppress pro-imperialist and

feudal forces, but it will mainly be led by “the proletariat and the

Communist Party.” Even though “the republic will neither confiscate

capitalist private property in general nor forbid the development of

such capitalist production,” Mao insists that “state enterprises will be

of a socialist character and will constitute the leading force in the

whole national economy.” From a position of state power, the party will

then be able to guide Chinese society peacefully into socialism.

Mao believes the shift from New Democracy to socialism is possible for

three reasons. First, he views all anti-imperialist struggles as

objectively anti-capitalist. Mao accepts the Comintern orthodoxy built

upon Lenin’s Imperialism, which argues that imperialism is a necessary

aspect of capitalism in its present stage of development, and that

nationalist struggles thus weaken world capitalism and bring world

socialism closer. For Mao, as for Stalin, every anti-imperialist

revolution “inevitably becomes part of the proletarian-socialist world

revolution.” This claim is supported by his second assertion, that the

political leadership and material support of the USSR will help

anti-imperialist struggles move in a socialist direction. “The Soviet

Union,” Mao argues, “has reached the period of transition from socialism

to communism and is capable of leading and helping the proletariat and

oppressed nations of the whole world.” Third, Mao believes that the

leadership of the CCP itself guarantees the socialist trajectory of the

revolution. The leadership of the “proletariat and the Communist Party,”

will complement growth in “the state sector of the economy...and the

co-operative sector of the economy” to ensure the transition to

socialism.

Mao’s assessment of the USSR, his belief in the infallibility of the

party, and his open embrace of nationalized industry, were all deeply

misplaced. Mao himself would eventually be forced to grapple with these

facts in the late 1950s. Far from transitioning “from socialism to

communism,” the Soviet Union in 1940 was implementing state capitalist

developmentalism based on strict control of the working class. In this

period, Russian workers faced six months probation for arriving 20

minutes late to work, and 4–6 months in prison for quitting a job.

Stalin’s purges had already executed the vast majority of the Bolsheviks

who had helped bring the party to power, and the Soviet prison system

housed upwards of 2 million people for alleged “counterrevolutionary”

crimes. In such an era, national liberation struggles allied with the

USSR objectively strengthened the state capitalist wing of global

capitalism (what Mao would later label “social imperialism”), not

socialism.

Mao’s faith in the party rested on what some have called “party

substitutionism.” Like much of the Leninist tradition, Mao assumes the

party constitutes the historical memory and theoretical brain of the

global proletariat, and can transparently represent its ultimate

interests. The party thus comes to stand in for the proletariat by way

of syllogism, “substituting” party for class. Because of these

assumptions, Mao believes it is possible for the party to quell class

struggle under the united front, and implement capitalist development

under New Democracy, while retaining its revolutionary trajectory. This

position ultimately lapses into idealism. If social being determines

social consciousness, then any party’s stated politics and class

allegiances can be reshaped by the concrete social relations within

which it operates. Just as a “progressive” CEO is forced to twist his

egalitarian ideas in order to maintain his economic position, the same

is true of a “communist” party at the helm of a capitalist economy, even

one which is heavily nationalized. The theory of “New Democracy”

willfully ignores these concerns through a series of Leninist

assumptions.

When implemented in practice over the following years, the united front

and New Democracy helped guarantee victory over Japan. But it also

inevitably required the party to constrain worker and peasant struggles,

in order to balance their interests with those of other classes.

Throughout the 1940s, Mao repeatedly cautioned cadres against supporting

seizures of land or private property, for fear of alienating progressive

sectors of the bourgeoisie.[33] After the revolution, the party then

sought to create a friendly environment for bourgeois industrialists

while preparing to substitute party cadres in their place. In 1953, Mao

would reassure a group of industrialists and liberal politicians:

Some workers are advancing too fast and won’t allow the capitalists to

make any profit at all. We should try to educate these workers and

capitalists and help them gradually (but the sooner the better) adapt

themselves to our state policy, namely, to make China’s private industry

and commerce mainly serve the nation’s economy and the people’s

livelihood and partly earn profits for the capitalists and in this way

embark on the path of state capitalism.[34]

The class collaboration inherent in the united front and the New

Democracy strategy secured the victory of the CCP in the war. At the

same time, it guaranteed the party’s gradual slide from a revolutionary

organization with an intimate relationship to the oppressed and

exploited classes, to a force dominating over them. These strategies, in

turn, were required in order to pursue “socialism in one country.” For

an underdeveloped country such as China in the 1940s, rapid improvement

of living standards is a paramount task of any revolution. A world

revolution, or at least a regional revolution that includes a chunk of

the advanced capitalist zones, is able to accomplish this task without

relying on capitalist exploitation. Communes in advanced capitalist

countries are able to freely share supplies, technologies and skills

with their counterparts in the global periphery. But when limited to the

bounds of a single nation-state, and embedded in a capitalist

world-system, this kind of transformation is impossible.

Under these conditions, underdeveloped socialist states must either pay

for the resources they acquire on the world market, or supplement for

them by hyper-exploiting their own populations. They must compete with

other capitalist countries through trade, currency, and military might.

All these factors require underdeveloped socialist states to carry out

capitalist production and development in some form, often through a

close alliance with the preexisting bourgeoisie. Mao’s formulations of

the united front and New Democracy explicitly aim at this outcome, and

provide ideological legitimation for doing so. The strategies formulated

in Yan’an thus provide a justification for would-be communist parties to

act as surrogate bourgeoisies in underdeveloped contexts, and to

generate a new capitalist ruling class which believes itself to act in

the name of the proletariat and socialism.

9. Mao and the Dialectic

Mao also used Yan’an period to deepen his philosophical acumen. For some

time, Mao had been criticized by Wang Ming of the “28 Bolsheviks” group

for his shallow understanding of Marxist philosophy. In Yan’an Mao was

finally able to address this criticism. In the late 1930s, Mao formed a

philosophy study group among the CCP leadership, meeting in his study

three nights a week. From these discussions Mao produced On Practice and

On Contradiction, the two main philosophical texts of Maoism, in July

and August 1937. In the same time period, Mao also produced Dialectical

Materialism (Lecture Notes), which were used for internal party

education, but never published independently.[35] These texts indicate

Mao’s understanding of the link between thought and practice, as well as

his relationship to Stalinist theory. They provide a window into the

philosophy underpinning Maoist politics.

Mao’s version of dialectics relied heavily on a philosophical orthodoxy

that had then recently been established in the USSR. Ten years prior,

philosophical debate in the Comintern had led to the ouster of Karl

Korsch and Gyorgy Lukacs, Marxist philosophers who retained a commitment

to the dialectic as a method of thought and social practice, while

opposing efforts impute dialectics to the natural world. After their

removal, Soviet philosophical debates refocused on the relationship of

dialectics to natural science. A division then emerged between

“dialectician” and “mechanist” wings of Soviet scholars: dialecticians

urged scientists to discover dialectical processes in the natural world,

while mechanists rejected philosophy as scholasticism, and reduced

social and mental phenomena to the properties of physical matter. Stalin

stifled the debate in the 1930s, imprisoning and executing many

scholars, and gradually imposing his own synthesis of the two positions

in the form of “dialectical materialism” or “diamat.” Diamat viewed the

dialectic as a universal law present in thought, social systems, and the

natural world, and generally reduced the former to the latter. It would

remain the official state philosophy of the USSR for decades.[36]

The new Soviet state philosophy became the basis for Mao’s study of

dialectics, through recently-translated Soviet textbooks. In Yan’an, Mao

drew on texts such as A Course on Dialectical Materialism by Shirokov

and Aizenberg (to which Mao gave nearly 13,000 characters of notation),

and Dialectical and Historical Materialism and Outline of a New

Philosophy by Mitin.[37] Long sections of Mao’s Dialectical Materialism

(Lecture Notes) are made up of verbatim, or slightly altered,

transcriptions of the Soviet texts. These manuals served as the baseline

through which Mao synthesized his reading of other first-generation

Chinese Marxists such as Li Da and Ai Siqi, and of the Marxist texts

that had been translated into Chinese years before: Engels’ Anti-Durhing

and Dialectics of Nature, Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and

brief selections from his Philosophical Notebooks, Marx’s Capital vol. I

and Poverty of Philosophy, and Stalin’s On the Problems of Leninism. The

resulting synthesis displays three defining characteristics.

The first is a form of reductive materialism. In contrast with Marxist

philosophies that view consciousness as an active process shaped by

social relationships, Mao’s philosophy reduces consciousness to physical

matter itself, through a “reflection theory” of consciousness. In his

Lecture Notes, Mao at first works to distinguish his philosophy from

such “pre-Marxist materialism (mechanistic materialism),” which he

argues “did not emphasize the dynamic role of thought in knowledge,

attributing it only with a passive role, and perceiving it as a mirror

which reflected nature.”[38] But a few pages later, Mao takes up

precisely this formulation as his own: “So-called consciousness...is

only a form of matter in movement. It is a particular property of the

material brain of humankind. It allows material processes external to

consciousness to be reflected in consciousness, which is a particular

property of the material brain.”[39] “Impressions and concepts,” he

argues, are “the reflection of objective things, a photographic image

and sample copy of them.”[40] In Mao’s view, what we experience as

consciousness is ultimately a property of the motion of brain matter,

and concepts themselves are only a kind of imprint or impression of the

world’s physical matter upon the matter of our brains. Later in his

Lecture Notes, Mao carries this logic to its conclusion, arguing that

Hegel’s idealist dialectic was simply a mirror image of the dialectical

dynamic that exists in all physical matter, much like a law of physics.

Mao’s formulation is a reworking of ideas from Engel’s Dialectics of

Nature and Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which were later

reified by Stalin. In it, thought is not viewed as an active substance,

nor as something shaped by social relationships. Instead it is something

passive and individual, upon which physical matter leaves an imprint.

Physical matter, in turn, is said to be determined by a universal

dialectical law. Like Lenin and Stalin before him, Mao insists his view

is different from “mechanical materialists.” But ultimately, Mao’s

conception itself remains a form of reductive materialism. As council

communist Anton Pannekoek observed in his 1938 book Lenin as

Philosopher, this variety of materialism is typical of Marxist

revolutionary movements in countries battling feudal conditions and

ideologies.[41] Pitted against ancient idealist philosophies, such

revolutionaries tend to draw upon the materialism prevalent in the

advanced capitalist countries, and inadvertently inherit the latter’s

embrace of positivism, itself a philosophical counterattack against

revolutionary Marxism.

A second feature of Mao’s philosophical writings is Mao’s tendency

toward empiricism, reflected in his lack of attention to the active

nature of thought. In works such as the Science of Logic, Hegel

distinguishes between three levels of cognition: First, basic sensory

perception of phenomena. Second, “Knowledge,” which organizes these

sense data into a system of categories of thought (for example, our

experience of the color green, the texture of rough bark, and the sound

of wind in leaves, all become “tree”). While the categories of Knowledge

are essential for human activity, they can also limit us. In Hegel’s

system, a further transformation must take place in order for our mental

categories to grasp the world around us in its essence: seemingly

coherent Knowledge categories must themselves blossom with internal

dialectical oppositions, and go through successive negations, in order

to produce qualitative leaps in cognition that recontextualize all

pre-existing Knowledge. Hegel refers to this third, dialectical level of

cognition as “Reason.” For Marxists such as C.L.R. James, Reason is the

mental operation needed to grasp dialectical contradictions inherent in

social phenomena themselves.

Mao’s philosophical texts collapse Knowledge and Reason, however, and

fail to make a clear distinction between the two. The first level of

cognition is apparent in On Practice: “In the process of practice, man

at first sees only the phenomenal side, the separate aspects, the

external relations of things. … This is called the perceptual stage of

cognition, namely, the stage of sense perceptions and impressions.”

Then, Mao explains,

As social practice continues, things that give rise to man’s sense

perceptions and impressions in the course of his practice are repeated

many times; then a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain in the

process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are no longer

the phenomena, the separate aspects and the external relations of

things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations

of things.

In this passage, Knowledge and Reason blur together. Mao essentially

says one can grasp the dialectical essence of phenomena by steadily

stacking empirical perceptions on top of each other, until a conceptual

leap takes place by unexplained means.[42] Mao’s account of

consciousness thus remains more rudimentary than Hegel and many other

Marxist philosophers. For the latter, dialectical Reason involves active

cognitive work upon Knowledge categories, and takes place through a

process of dialectical oppositions, negations, and leaps. In place of

this, Mao sees in thought only the gradual accumulation of empirical

data, generating new categories of thought, which are then tested in

practice. At this level of sophistication, there is little to

distinguish Mao’s notion of cognition and practice from that of a

natural scientist.

A third feature of Mao’s philosophy is his original additions to the

notion of “contradiction” itself. In On Contradiction, for example, Mao

establishes a distinction between “primary” and “secondary”

contradictions. He argues that “there are many contradictions in the

process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is

necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development

determine or influence the existence and development of the other

contradictions.” Mao takes Chinese society as an example: the

contradiction between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism is

the primary contradiction at the moment, displacing the contradiction

between the CCP and the KMT and allowing for the Second United Front,

but when Japan is defeated the order will change again.

Mao also distinguishes between antagonistic and non-antagonistic

contradictions: “Some contradictions are characterized by open

antagonism, others are not. In accordance with the concrete development

of things, some contradictions which were originally non-antagonistic

develop into antagonistic ones, while others which were originally

antagonistic develop into non-antagonistic ones.” At the same time, he

downplays the notion of “negation,” a process through which something is

destroyed, even as elements of it are incorporated at a higher level in

a new phenomena.[43] In place of negation, Mao emphasizes the process

through which the “principal” and “nonprincipal” sides of a

contradiction transform each other, and trade places:

the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform

themselves into each other and the nature of the thing changes

accordingly. In a given process or at a given stage in the development

of a contradiction, A is the principal aspect and B is the non-principal

aspect; at another stage or in another process the roles are reversed—a

change determined by the extent of the increase or decrease in the force

of each aspect in its struggle against the other in the course of the

development of a thing.

Here Mao’s notion of dialectics stays well within the bounds of

classical Chinese philosophy, in which contradictions (maodun) are

conceived of as simply a unity of opposites that mutually change one

another. For Mao, contradictions are composed of two discrete elements,

which may become more or less antagonistic, and which may alternate as

the dominant term within the overall unity. However, this relationship

is not as a process with its own internal momentum, and it does not

culminate in a negation in which the content of the terms themselves are

transformed. Instead, the contradiction is composed of a formal

opposition between two separate elements, which oscillate back and forth

even as their content remains constant, in a manner similar to a toggle

switch. Mao’s formulation of dialectics was not without heuristic power.

His distinctions between primary/secondary and

antagonistic/non-antagonistic contradictions allowed him to

conceptualize political relationships within Chinese society and outside

it. Was the relationship between the party and the national bourgeoisie

antagonistic, or nonantagonistic, under New Democracy? Was global

imperialism the primary contradiction in the world today, or the

contradiction between capitalism and socialism? Mao’s categories helped

him to develop effective strategies to address these questions, and as

such, they attest to his skill as a politico-military strategist.

However, there is little in his use of these concepts that warrants the

term “dialectic” or “contradiction.” For example, Mao fails to

distinguish a non-antagonistic contradiction from a simple conflict of

interest. Similarly, the manner in which he employs the distinction

between primary and secondary contradictions is little different from

the divide and rule strategies theorized by Machiavelli. Mao’s

formulations serve the same purposes as these concepts, while

jettisoning other qualities particular to the notion of a “dialectic”:

the necessary self-movement of phenomena generated by internal

contradictions, or the supersession of different forms of the phenomena

through negations. As Martin Glaberman has pointed out,[44] Mao’s

philosophy lends itself to an interpretation which views contradictions

as simple oppositions, without self-movement of their own, and which may

be easily manipulated through outside intervention. Throughout the

1950s, Mao himself wrote regularly of the party “resolving”

contradictions in Chinese society through policy. Contradictions thus

become, not active processes that continually generate change through

their own internal dynamics, but a switch that can be manipulated by

sovereign powers.

No philosophy can be directly equated with a single political line. By

definition, philosophies are abstract sets of ideas, which may be

interpreted in a variety of ways as they are brought to bear in

practice. However, depending on their formulations, philosophies may

incline those who take them up toward some interpretations of reality

and practice, and away from others. Historically, reductive materialism

and empiricism, which Maoism shares with Stalin’s “diamat,” has led

revolutionaries in many negative directions. In some cases,

revolutionaries using these philosophies have come to view individual

consciousness as a direct imprint of one’s class position: every

argument opposed to one’s own is denigrated as concealing a

“petit-bourgeois” outlook, and workers who take up popular ideas for

their own use are lambasted for displaying “false consciousness.” In

other cases, Marx’s dialectic is interpreted not as a philosophy

enabling social thought and action (whether as a dialectical method of

thinking and practice, or as a theory of actually-existing dialectical

processes in social and physical phenomena, which may yet be discovered

and enriched) but as a set of given objective laws, to which all

practice and creativity must conform, much like the laws of physics.[45]

Maoists today need not replicate the same applications of Mao’s

philosophy. However, today’s revolutionaries must evaluate Mao’s

writings in a critical manner, and compare his philosophy with other

competing conceptions, in order to arrive at a full appraisal of Maoist

philosophical categories. Many currents in Marxist philosophy, whether

emerging from the work of Lukacs, C.L.R. James or Gramsci, take

consciousness and creative action seriously. Mao, by contrast,

recapitulates an orthodox Stalinist philosophy. For Mao, the dialectic

is a universal law inscribed in all physical matter and social

phenomena, which has already been discovered. Rather than apply it as a

practical method, Mao embraces it as positivist scientific truth.

By the early 1940s, Mao and the CCP leadership in Yan’an had developed a

range of new work methods, strategies and theories: the mass line, the

united front, prolonged people’s war, New Democracy, and a particular

conception of the dialectic. At the same time, the party, army and mass

organizations had grown by huge leaps, expanding twentyfold since 1937.

Now, at the height of its renewal, the party began to suffer setbacks.

In 1940 the Second United Front eroded, as clashes between the Red Army

and the KMT escalated into a KMT blockade of the territory around

Yan’an. As a result, inflation began to spiral out of control in CCP

base areas. Undeterred, the Red Army launched the Hundred Regiments

Offensive against the Japanese in August 1940, and met with initial

success. However, the Japanese counterattacked with a brutal scorched

earth campaign, in which the Japanese military executed thousands,

burned down whole villages, and deported tens of thousands of refugees

to Manchuria. The party was set on its heels: by 1942 the population

under CCP control had been cut in half, and the Eighth Route Army had

lost 100,000 troops.[46]

In the face of this crisis, the CCP initiated its first major

rectification campaign in 1942. The rectification campaign sought to

standardize the ideology and discipline of party members, and

consolidate the sprawling organization. Cadres studied new educational

materials on Marxism-Leninism—including, for the first time, works by

Mao himself—and took part in collective self-criticism sessions, to root

out contrary political views and secure group discipline. The campaign

institutionalized forms of mass criticism used during the land reforms,

and solidified a style of public confession that would reappear in mass

mobilizations over the following years. In these campaigns, participants

would be encouraged to describe their life experiences in intimate

detail, and renounce conduct that deviated from the party’s line. In

this way, the party leadership secured not only political unity among

its cadres, but also affective bonds of personal devotion.

The rectification campaign included a set of mobilizations to increase

production and strengthen ties with the peasantry, and eventually veered

into a purge of cadres accused of spying for the KMT, which in some

cases involving beatings or killings. Mao also used the opportunity to

further criticize Soviet-oriented party leaders, and cement his wing as

the dominant tendency in the CCP. Shortly after the rectification was

completed, Mao rose to the chairmanship of the party. In December 1941,

the U.S. entered the Second World War, and the tide turned against

Japan.

10. Liberation: 1946–1949

By the time Japan surrendered in 1945, the CCP had become a powerful

force, on a far larger scale than what revolutionaries experience today.

The party controlled 19 base areas, mostly in northern of China, and

governed about 90 million people, the vast majority of them peasants.

Party membership stood at 1.2 million, with the Red Army numbering

900,000, and the militia numbering 2.2 million.[47] When World War II

drew to a close, this force shifted from fighting the Japanese to again

facing the KMT. In 1947, the Red Army took control of the whole of

northern China in a series of offensive operations. Then, in a lightning

campaign between late 1948 and 1949, it seized the whole of mainland

China. Over the course of the year, the KMT collapsed and masses of

people sided with the CCP’s forces. It was a stunning military victory.

The Red Army offered a strong contrast to the other military forces at

the time. The Japanese had engaged in a “three alls” scorched earth

policy (burn all, kill all, loot all), which drove masses of volunteers

into the ranks of the Red Army out of sheer self preservation. The KMT

fed its conscripts starvation rations, and exercised brutal control over

its troops in order to keep them from fleeing the battlefield. In one

case, 200 KMT conscripts burned to death in a train bombed by the

Japanese, because KMT officers refused to unlock the doors and risk them

deserting.[48] In contrast to both, the Red Army practiced Mao’s “Three

Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention”: red soldiers forced

local despots to obey laws, paid peasants for the goods its troops used,

largely refrained from abusing the population, and carried out agrarian

reform if not agrarian revolution. It was a remarkably humanitarian

peasant army. As it won military victories, the population rallied to

its side, and enemy units collapsed or defected in large numbers.

As the KMT collapsed and the Red Army swept toward the tropics, peasants

across China began to seize land en masse. They took over lands not only

from “traitors,” in line with the CCP’s moderate land reform policy, but

from all manner of landlords. The upsurge forced the party to reassert

control over mass self-activity again in 1948.

Mao repeatedly warned against “adventurist policies”: “The industrial

and commercial holdings of landlords and rich peasants should in general

be protected”[49] he argued, and cadres should avoid “the mistake of

applying in the cities the measures used in rural areas for struggling

against landlords and rich peasants.”[50] Even at the height of the

CCP’s victory, Mao was unwilling to sanction agrarian revolution—or for

that matter, forms of worker self-management—and risk frightening off

the bourgeois sectors he would need to develop the country.

Upon its arrival in southern China, the CCP found itself in control of

the very coastal cities from which it had been expelled after 1927. The

party returned as an organization of outsiders, inexperienced in running

an industrial economy or urban centers. Mao instructed the army to

administer the cities in 1949, but laterwas forced to call upon hostile

civil servants to remain in their positions, defeated soldiers to

re-enlist in the army, and capitalists from the “four great families”

that had dominated the Chinese economy under imperialism to continue

running their businesses.[51] By September 1949, the party had swelled

to 4.5 million members, of which 72% were poor and middle-poor peasants,

25% were rich peasants and members of the urban middle class, and a mere

2% were workers.[52] With this organization at its helm, the People’s

Republic of China was officially founded in October 1949.

Alongside its military prowess, the new ruling party had developed work

methods, theories and strategies that departed from the norms of

Stalinist dictatorships. It enjoyed a close relationship with the

Chinese peasantry, in contrast with the Bolsheviks’ separation from the

Russian countryside. And it stood poised to enact a revolutionary

strategy that, while more coherent than the confused Comintern lines of

the 1920s, nevertheless shared many of their fundamental assumptions,

including “socialism in one country,” state capitalist development, and

party substitutionism.

III. The CCP in State Power

The years after liberation were a time of steady economic development

and growing division in China. Drawing on the model of the Soviet Union,

the party pursued a strategy of heavy industrialization and agricultural

collectivization, greatly improving the standard of living in the

country. However, class divisions also appeared and deepened within

Chinese society, at the very moment the USSR encountered a global crisis

of legitimacy after Stalin’s death. Mao responded to these crises with

the Hundred Flowers campaign and the Great Leap Forward. The former

mobilization solicited mass critiques of Chinese society, only to prompt

panic among party leaders and a vicious antiRightist crackdown. The

latter sought to legitimize state socialist society through a dramatic

mobilization of labor and development, but led to a humanitarian

disaster and deep division among party leaders.

Mao’s prestige suffered in the course of these events, and he was

removed from some positions of power within the CCP. At the same time,

the Sino-Soviet split heightened tensions between the world’s two

largest state socialist regimes. All these developments forced Mao to

re-evaluate the Soviet model in depth, and develop his own conception of

socialist transition. While unwilling to consider the idea that China

was a class society, Mao came to view socialism as a transitional period

rent by contradictions, with class enemies present in the ranks of the

party itself. The resulting formulations remain a bedrock of Maoist

politics today.

11. Development and Bureaucratization: 1950–1956

In the early 1950s the USSR and China were closely linked. Almost

immediately after liberation, Chinese entry into the Korean War from

1950–1953 brought the two state socialist regimes together in a military

bloc against U.S. invasion. Afterward, the CCP’s

first Five Year Plan, from 1953–1957, was formulated along Soviet lines.

It prioritized the construction of heavy industry, energy and

transportation infrastructure, and employed the help of Soviet

technicians. The plan held the prices of agricultural products low, in

order to feed workers in the industrializing cities. It also offered

wage incentives to encourage people to work harder, while continually

raising production targets.[53] By 1956, 42% of Chinese workers were

assigned to some form of piecework.[54]

The CCP model placed industry under party control. An uptick in workers’

struggles broke out in 1950 shortly after liberation, but cadres

discouraged it in order to stabilize production, with the slogans “don’t

smash the old structure to pieces” and “preserve original positions,

salaries and systems.”[55] In May 1953, the All China Federation of

Trade Unions (ACFTU) reaffirmed that the federation’s main role was to

promote production, not worker demands. In nationalized factories,

representative bodies met rarely, and were often circumvented. As one

trade union cadre put it: “holding a meeting of cadres will solve the

problem just the same, so why do we have to hold [factory management

committee] meetings?...Workers only know what happens in one workshop,

so how can they participate in democratic management of a whole

factory?”[56] The alienation between rural cadres and urban workers

further strained labor relations. In 1957, one cadre in Guangzhou

rebuked employees at a machine works, who requested ventilation as

temperatures hit 110 degrees: “When the Red Army was on the Long March,

they managed to survive by eating tree bark, and you’re saying when it’s

a bit warm in the workshop you can’t work?”[57]

Mao and his allies in the CCP pushed for a speedy transition from “New

Democracy” to socialism. In 1955–1956, Mao moved to collectivize

agricultural lands despite hesitancy from the right wing of the party.

He first sought to establish “fully socialist” cooperatives in the

countryside, in which dozens of peasant households would pool their land

and tools, with donors receiving partial compensation, and members would

thereafter be paid according to work hours. The move was a huge success:

by late 1956 about 95% of peasant households were consolidated into such

cooperatives.[58] At the same time, Mao rapidly nationalized industries

owned by “patriotic” national capitalists. Rather than organizing worker

takeovers, the CCP offered capitalists dividends from the profits of

their enterprises, while slowly removing them from management roles.

Essentially, capitalists were bought out with pensions, and replaced by

CCP cadres. In some factories this led to dramatic bureaucratization:

the Ronghua Dye Company in Shanghai leapt from 2.5 full-time staff in

1949 to 52 after nationalization.[59]

Economic development produced contradictory results. On the one hand,

China saw substantial social improvements: living standards rose, and

feudal practices such as selling children into servitude were banned.

The most sustained feminist organizing of the Maoist era took place from

1950–1953, when a national Marriage Law legalized divorce and outlawed

compulsory marriage, and was popularized in a mass campaign. Though many

cadres and sections of Chinese society resisted the effort, women

brought thousands of domestic abuse and divorce cases to court: in

Shanghai in 1950, 77% of the city’s 13,349 divorce cases were filed by

women.[60] National infrastructure was also expanded. 5,000 kilometers

of rail lines and 14,000 kilometers of roads were constructed in the

1950s, while the number of university graduates rose by tens of

thousands, and primary school graduates rose by the millions.[61] By

1957, the vast majority of China’s arable land had been cooperativized,

and the vast majority of its industries were in the hands of the state.

To CCP leaders, these changes in the forms of property constituted the

transition from New Democracy to “socialism.”

On the other hand, this development rested on grinding exploitation, and

generated a bloated bureaucratic class. The number of state

functionaries employed by the government rose from 720,000 in 1949, to

3.3 million in 1952, to 8.09 million in 1957.[62] In Shanghai, the

number of workers of all kinds grew by 1.2% each year from 1949 and

1957, while government staff grew by 16%.[63] Peasant agriculture was

still not mechanized, and thus work in the cooperatives remained highly

labor intensive under the direction of cadres. In the factories, workers

were regularly subjected to compulsory overtime and extra shifts to meet

production quotas, and administrators often hoarded medical and welfare

subsidies.[64] In 1956, a wage reform emphasized production and the

division of labor: the policy standardized pay scales across industries,

fixed different pay grades to different skill levels, and abolished

traditional allowances and bonuses unrelated to productivity.[65] In

Shanghai, the changes lowered workers’ real wages by an average of 400

yuan per year.[66] The development model reached a breaking point later

that year—both in China and, simultaneously, in the Soviet bloc.

12. The Crisis of De-Stalinization

In February 1956, at the 20^(th) Congress of the Communist Party of the

Soviet Union (CPSU), Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary after Stalin’s

death, delivered a “secret speech” exposing Stalin’s crimes in Russia to

the communist movement. While news of Stalin’s show trials, executions,

mass incarceration and general authoritarianism would not a surprise

anarchists and left communists today, Khrushchev’s revelations sent

shockwaves through the world socialist movement at the time. In many

countries, communist parties split in two over their position on the

speech, and their relation to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. For Mao and his

allies in the CCP, the speech confirmed their doubts about the Soviet

path, and prompted a reassessment of the USSR’s political and economic

model.

In a flurry of new political writings, Mao assessed Stalin’s leadership

model, Soviet economic policy, and the CPSU’s approach to internal

dissent. In April 1956, Mao delivered a speech entitled “On the Ten

Major Relationships” to the CCP Politburo. He outlined a range of

conflicts at work within Chinese society, such as the relationship of

heavy industry to light industry and agriculture, the relation between

Han Chinese and national minorities, the relation between party cadre

and non-party people, and so on. Describing these as “non-antagonistic

contradictions,” Mao prescribed policy measures and work methods that

could address these differences in the service of a harmonious society.

By casting the dynamics he observed as “contradictions” in a dialectical

sense, Mao implicitly refuted the Soviet orthodoxy that all social

contradictions cease to exist with the triumph of state socialism.

Mao followed in May 1956 with a call to “let a hundred flowers bloom,

let a hundred schools of thought contend” at a CCP conference. Mao’s

“hundred flowers” speech was never published publicly, but the slogan of

“blooming and contending” was taken up afterward by party cadres. Mao

called on the party to liberalize Chinese society, and offer venues for

the public to critique the CCP and social conditions. Soon party

officials began planning a new rectification campaign, modeled on the

rectification the CCP had undertaken in 1942, but this time open to

other political parties and all social classes. The effort, which would

become known as the Hundred Flowers campaign, was scheduled for 1957.

Before it could be implemented, however, global events intervened the

CCP’s plan.

In late 1956, Khrushchev’s political thaw exploded into an outright

revolt against the Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. In October, the

communist party in Poland refused to submit to control from CPSU in

Moscow, and demanded organizational independence. Khrushchev was

surprised by the move, and initially sanctioned the independence of the

Polish party. His misstep opened the floodgates. A few days later, mass

protests broke out in Hungary against Soviet rule, and by early November

the uprising had turned into a full-fledged overthrow of the

Soviet-backed state. Demonstrations rocked Hungarian cities, much of the

Hungarian military sided with the protests, and armed workers councils

soon began to supplant state authority.

When the Polish party sued for independence, the Mao initially supported

them. On November 1^(st) the CCP condemned the USSR’s “big nation

chauvinism,” and advocated for the right of all countries to direct

their own revolutions.[67] But by the time the statement was released,

the revolt in Eastern Europe had intensified: the workers seized power

in Hungary, and were met with Soviet military force. On November 4^(th),

the USSR sent columns of tanks into Hungary to re-establish Soviet rule.

Now the CCP reversed course, and supported Soviet intervention against

the revolution.[68] By midNovember the Hungarian uprising had been

crushed, with around 2,500 killed and thousands wounded, 13,000

imprisoned in the ensuing crackdown, and 200,000 driven from the

country.

The events of 1956 posed theoretical and practical problems that would

shape the rest of Mao’s tenure in state power. On one side, the

drawbacks of the Soviet model grew ever more apparent: cults of

personality, “commandism” from party cadres, a brutal prison regime, and

so on. On the other side, the Hungarian “incident” indicated that to

lift the lid on mass dissent risked the destruction of state socialism

at the hands of the proletariat. Could state socialist regimes cultivate

political freedoms and public criticism, thereby avoiding the

authoritarianism that hampered Stalin’s Russia, while at the same time

maintaining the stability of the state and its economy? Mao’s answer to

this question evolved over the ensuing years, as he built a critique of

the USSR while working to retain many of its Stalinist assumptions. His

first attempt came in 1957.

13. The Hundred Flowers Campaign: 1956–1957

Mao weighed how best to execute the planned rectification campaign, in

the wake of the Hungarian uprising. In February 1957, he delivered a

speech entitled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the

People” at a CCP conference. Mao used the distinction between

antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions to analyze the

conflicts at work in Chinese society. Antagonistic contradictions

“between ourselves and the enemy” required the “method of dictatorship”

to resolve, he insisted. But nonantagonistic contradictions “within the

ranks of the people” could be acknowledged, managed and resolved through

public “criticism and self-criticism,” in a manner beneficial to

socialist society. While social disturbances such as student and worker

demonstrations were to be avoided, Mao argued, they could also be

harnessed in a nonantagonistic manner, as a method to fix incorrect work

methods. In this way, social contradictions could be ameliorated before

they became antagonistic.

Mao’s argument in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the

People” implied a lenient approach to internal dissent, and much of the

CCP leadership disagreed with him. As a result, the text of his speech

remained unpublished for months, as high-level cadres argued over how to

carry out a public rectification campaign while avoiding a Hungarian

scenario. Throughout 1957, dueling editorials in the People’s Daily

debated over what limits that were to be placed on the impending tide of

“blooming and contending” opinions. The rectification campaign soon got

underway in the spring of 1957—now dubbed the “Hundred Flowers”

campaign—without a clear answer to this question.

The Hundred Flowers campaigned began as a trickle of criticism of the

party and Chinese society, but soon grew into a torrent that, in some

parts of the country, bordered on a mass movement. By June 1957, large

numbers of people were denouncing bureaucracy, corruption and favoritism

among cadres in public forums. Some decried excesses in the crackdown on

counter-revolutionary elements that had followed 1949, in which around

800,000 had been jailed or executed, including prominent intellectuals.

Students made use of big character posters to critique authoritarianism

and censorship, most notably at the “Democracy Wall” at Beijing

University. While students and intellectuals were the most active

demographic in the Hundred Flowers movement, criticisms also emerged in

the army against the professionalization of the officer corps, and from

workers demanding better wages and working conditions. A groundswell of

student protests and even industrial strikes soon emerged across the

country.

Criticisms emerged from a range of political quarters. Some

intellectuals wanted China to transition to Western-style bourgeois

democracy, while members of the overthrown bourgeoisie and landlord

class advocated for a return to private enterprise. But other currents

sought to deepen the revolution, in a manner that foreshadowed the

“ultra-left” politics that would appear in the Cultural Revolution a

decade later. The most renowned figure of the Hundred Flowers period, a

student leader named Lin Hsi-Ling, critiqued the Chinese state from a

Marxist perspective. Lin’s writings argued that “the present upper

strata of China does not correspond with the property system of common

ownership” because “the party and state apparatus has become a set of

bureaucratic organs ruling people without democracy.” She thus advocated

“not reform but a thoroughgoing change,” and quickly gained a cult

following.[69] A 1957 People’s Daily article criticized one of Lin’s

appearances at Beijing University:

She arranged certain phenomena in the life of our society—such as the

division of officials into grades for hearing reports and seeing

documents and the distribution of furniture by their offices—and called

them a class system, saying that it (i.e, class system) had already

entered all aspects of life....Moreover, quoting Engels’ theory that one

country cannot construct socialism and Lenin’s dictum that socialism is

the elimination of class, she arrived at the conclusion that present-day

China and Russia are not socialist. She loudly demanded a search for

‘true socialism’ and advocating using explosive measures to reform the

present social system.[70]

While intellectuals criticized the state, workers in some areas began

fighting for material gains. In Shanghai, 30,000 workers participated in

labor actions at 587 enterprises, and more than 700 other enterprises

experienced smaller incidents. One party publication estimated that

10,000 strikes erupted nationally over the whole Hundred Flowers

period.[71] An August 1957 article in the People’s Daily acknowledged

that the

ACFTU unions had come to be considered “tongues of the bureaucracy, and

the tails of the administration and the ‘workers control department’” by

many workers.[72] Thus strikes and protests spilled outside ACFTU

control, and forced trade union cadres to scramble to catch up. Worker

slogans boasted, “If you don’t learn from Hungary, you won’t get

anything” and “Let’s create another Hungarian Incident.”[73]

In Shanghai, most strikes occurred in recently nationalized enterprises,

where workers opposed wage “rationalizations” that had taken away their

traditional bonuses and food subsidies, while preserving those of state

bureaucrats. State-sector workers also decried the loss of control over

the production process that they had briefly enjoyed immediately after

the tumult of 1949. Shanghai workers held sit-ins and hunger strikes,

marched on cadre offices, attacked managers, and organized “united

command headquarters” to coordinate their struggles, as they would a

decade later during the Cultural Revolution. Eventually the ACFTU sided

with the workers, after Liu Shao-qi, then head of the federation, argued

that cadres should support the strikes in order to retain

legitimacy.[74] Peasants too participated in the upsurge: in many

agricultural cooperatives, cadre leaders were critiqued for

authoritarian behavior, and for failing to consult with peasants before

finalizing production plans with their party superiors.[75]

Party leaders were startled by the ferocity of the public criticism, and

many advocated for a crackdown. In June 1957, an edited version of Mao’s

“On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” speech was

finally released to the public. Driven by his fear of a Hungarian-style

uprising against the CCP, Mao revised his document to include more

limitations on public criticism. If non-antagonistic contradictions “are

not handled properly, or if we relax our vigilance and lower our guard,”

Mao argued, “antagonism may arise,” especially under the influence of

counterrevolutionary elements. In Mao’s view, this was what occurred in

Hungary: “deceived by domestic and foreign counter-revolutionaries, a

section of the people in Hungary made the mistake of resorting to

violence against the people’s government.” To avoid this outcome, Mao

added a set of criteria to his speech that placed limits on mass

criticism:

Words and deeds should help to unite, and not divide, the people of

all our nationalities.

They should be beneficial, and not harmful, to socialist

transformation and socialist construction.

They should help to consolidate, and not undermine or weaken, the

people’s democratic dictatorship.

They should help to consolidate, and not undermine or weaken,

democratic centralism.

They should help to strengthen, and not shake off or weaken, the

leadership of the Communist Party.

With the final publication of Mao’s speech, the official limits to

dissent were clear: mass criticism and even public disturbances were

acceptable, so long as they didn’t threaten state power or party control

over the movement. With this shift, the CCP abruptly transformed the

Hundred Flowers movement into an “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” and began

persecuting its critics. The ensuing Anti-Rightist movement targeted

around 550,000 people with public criticisms, imprisonment, and in some

cases execution. The crackdown mainly focused on intellectuals, but

cadres in the CCP who had too enthusiastically supported the

rectification movement were also targeted. Lin Hsi-Ling was purged from

the party youth organization, and the period of open critical forums was

brought to a close. Only after the crackdown did Mao’s wing of the party

institute some reforms. In many industries, one-man management was

replaced with “administrative committees” made up of managers,

technicians and workers.[76] In late 1958, a set of reforms implemented

a system of “two participations” (cadres participating in manual labor

and workers in management) “one reform” (changes to stringent factory

rules) and the “triple union” (unity of workers, cadres and

technicians).[77]

Mao’s conduct in 1957 established a pattern he would repeat on a far

larger scale during the Cultural Revolution. Seeking to ameliorate the

bureaucracy and authoritarianism engendered by state capitalism, Mao

called forth a movement to rectify the party. However, the movement soon

began to overflow the bounds he had decided for it at the outset, and

develop its own definitions of the problems in Chinese society. Once the

ferment threatened to undermine the effectiveness of party control, Mao

reversed himself, and used state power to quash the very popular

energies he claimed to support. Only then did he institute a limited

version of the reforms for which the movement advocated. This was Mao’s

practical answer to the questions posed in 1956. He sought to ameliorate

the worst aspects of the Soviet model, while retaining his commitment to

state capitalism, party rule as a stand-in for proletarian power, and

“socialism in one country.” It amounted to a Stalinist critique of

Stalinism.

Now Mao was pressed on several fronts. The Hundred Flowers campaign had

revealed the depth of dissatisfaction in Chinese society, and state

officials felt growing pressure to improve living standards, in order to

demonstrate the legitimacy of state socialism. Only four years out from

the Korean War, other party leaders advocated for an expansion of heavy

industry, in order to strengthen the Chinese military and deter Western

aggression. Still other party leaders insisted that the development of

industry and infrastructure required raising agricultural productivity,

because too much labor was locked up in labor-intensive agriculture, and

too little food was produced to feed urban workers and for export.

Finally, the Anti-Rightist crackdown had alienated the party from some

of its social base, requiring a new political project to unify Chinese

society. Mao found a solution to all these problems by returning to the

peasantry, and launching a mass mobilization to develop the economy: the

Great Leap Forward.

14. The Great Leap Forward: 1958–1962

Along with the political consequences of Soviet-style development, China

in the late 1950s still faced challenges of economic development. In

essence, the CCP confronted the same conditions as Russia after 1917:

how could the new state abolish feudal relations, develop industry, and

raise industrial and agricultural productivity—the historical tasks of

capitalist development—while moving toward “socialism in one country”?

The first Five Year Plan had successfully expanded Chinese industry. But

industry itself was now increasingly limited by the low productivity of

agriculture, which demanded too much labor for too little output, as

well as a lack of infrastructure such as transportation, irrigation and

electricity. Mao sought to address this situation through a rural mass

campaign that would draw millions of people into the workforce, and

rapidly raise agricultural output. He believed this effort would produce

labor surpluses (which could then be redirected toward industrial and

infrastructure projects) and food surpluses (which could feed industrial

workers, or be sold for export to raise funds for industrial

development). He called this effort the Great Leap Forward (GLF).

The GLF remains a controversial topic. Scholars and revolutionaries

disagree over its costs and accomplishments, and many of their arguments

rest on what little information has been secreted out of sealed state

archives that documented the campaign. I deal with the GLF here at

length, in order to highlight two points. First, the parallels between

the GLF and Soviet collectivization. Second, the authoritarian

requirements and human costs of the model itself.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union addressed its underdevelopment problems

through “socialist primitive accumulation,” a term coined by party

economist Yevgeni Preobrazhinsky (who was eventually tried and executed

by Stalin in 1937). Under Preobrazhinsky’s scheme, peasants in the

countryside were forced into collective farms, in hopes of raising

agricultural output through more efficient social organization in the

absence of farming technology. Any rise in grain was then used to feed

the growing industrial cities, and was also exported to other countries,

to generate state profits and further finance industrialization. When

the CPSU put this policy into action, it prompted extensive resistance

from the peasantry. Stalin responded by labeling resistors khulaks (rich

peasants) and imprisoning and executing them en masse. Heavy procurement

of foodstuffs from the peasantry eventually contributed to outbreaks of

famine across the Soviet breadbasket. Soviet collectivization and

industrialization was thus accomplished at great human cost. By 1940,

over 90% of peasant lands in the USSR had been collectivized, and the

state had expanded its industrial base even though agricultural

productivity continued to lag. Around 10–12 million peasants were dead,

and tens of thousands imprisoned.

The Soviet experience indicates the structural forces constraining state

capitalist development. Had a revolution taken place in Europe in the

1920s in tandem with the Russian Revolution, workers in the advanced

capitalist zones might have freely shared agricultural and industrial

technology, or food surpluses, with a developing Russian federation of

communes. As it was, states like the USSR were left to pursue “socialism

in one country” starting from a low level of development, and with

limited ability to participate in global markets. In this context,

industrial development could only take place through hyper-exploitation

of the country’s non-capitalist social classes, thus accumulating

corpses alongside fixed capital. State capital, no less than capital in

its other forms, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from

every pore, with blood and dirt” as Marx described.

Mao faced similar material constraints in China and pursued similar

goals, but but hoped to accomplish them without the Soviet shortcomings.

The essential difference between Mao’s approach and Stalin’s was that

the CCP was firmly embedded in the peasant classes. With the work

methods and mass organizations established in the countryside in the

Yan’an period, the CCP had a far closer connection to the peasantry than

the CPSU. Thus the CCP could transform agriculture and initiate

development projects through mass mobilization led by rural cadres,

rather than at gunpoint.

On the heels of the Anti-Rightist movement, Mao’s wing of the party

pushed for a “rash advance” to develop the country. Rural cadres were

instructed to establish “people’s communes” across the countryside in

1958, administrative units that were much larger than the cooperatives

established in 1955–56. While cooperatives had contained an average of

164 families, the communes held 5,000 households each on average, and

sometimes as many as 20,000. They covered large geographical

territories, and centralized many of the governmental functions of the

area in a single unit, including education, healthcare, and overseeing

agricultural and industrial production. The results were dramatic: by

the end of 1958, 99% of the peasant population had been concentrated

into 26,578 communes across the country.[78]

The communes gave party cadres a high degree of control over the

reproduction of the rural population. Communes commandeered the property

of individual peasant households: usually seed stores, farm tools and

animals—and in some cases cooking implements and even furniture—were

moved to a central location as communal property. In some cases

individual plots of land were expropriated as well, thus abolishing

individual subsistence farming. Sometimes houses were destroyed to make

way for communal infrastructure: in Ningxiang County in Hunan, 700,000

dwellings were reduced to 450,000.[79] Large communal kitchens were

established to replace the household as the main site of peasant

reproduction. Masses of peasants ate collectively in the kitchens,

before being dispatched in large work teams to tend fields, or work on

irrigation projects, steel production, or other industrial and

infrastructural projects.

Party control over reproduction could be used punitively. The state had

already imposed a monopoly on foods in 1953, requisitioning grain to

sell back to different sectors of the population according to its

development priorities. In 1955, the state established the hukou system,

under which Chinese citizens were given work assignments in particular

territories, with access to food and public benefits restricted to their

designated areas. Now party cadres assumed direct control over the daily

reproduction of 110 million peasant households. In some cases, peasants

who criticized the GLF or failed to meet production goals were denied

access to food. As one cadre from Gucheng commune in Anhui province put

it, “holding the communal kitchen’s ladle and scale in my hand, I decide

who lives and who dies.”[80]

The communes were not primarily coercive institutions, however. Drawing

on the Yan’an heritage, the CCP employed mass forums and mobilizations

as its primary method of statecraft, rather than outright force. Cadres

and peasant leaders sat together on management bodies that were

partially subject to elections, and held mass discussions of how best to

implement production goals set by the party leadership. At the same

time, the GLF was powerfully directed from above. Workers and peasants

rarely took decisions themselves, but rather considered and adjusted

initiatives coming from the party hierarchy. As a Western scholar noted

at the time,

mass decision-making does not mean that the workers make managerial

decisions for a plant or mine or commune production team, but rather

that they discuss basic management alternatives, under Party

guidance...The CCP expected that ‘when the workers felt that their

demands and suggestions’ on production practices ‘were duly considered,

supported and assisted by the leaders, their feeling of being the master

was strengthened.’[81]

This substitution of mass mobilization for mass decisionmaking has been

a feature of state socialist projects since the first days of the Soviet

Union,[82] but it was perfected under Mao. By strengthening peasants’

“feeling” of being masters, the CCP guaranteed a degree of consent

during the GLF that had been impossible for Stalin in the 1930s.

This mix of consent and coercion allowed the CCP to mobilize low-tech

labor power at an incredible level. Peasant work teams not only raised

agricultural production, but also smelted steel, and built dams,

irrigation systems and factories, often using crude technical

implements. Once communal kitchens had replaced the peasant household,

women were moved out of their homes to commune work teams. Officials

lauded this as a step forward for women’s liberation, but the shift

ultimately conformed to the pattern of Third World developmental leaps,

wherein women serve as a temporary reserve army of labor. At the height

of the GLF, millions of women were mobilized, working an average of 250

days in 1959 as compared with 166 in 1957.[83] In some work brigades, up

to 80 percent of the peasant population was assigned to nonagricultural

work, with the remaining labor in the fields left to women peasants.[84]

Afterward, the vast majority of women would be returned to work in the

domestic sphere. The army was also temporarily mobilized: in 1956 the

army had logged 4 million workdays, but in 1957 the number rose to 20

million, and by 1958 officials claimed 59 million workdays had been

carried out.[85]

Production boomed, prompting elation from CCP leaders, and initiating a

vicious cycle of rising expectations. In 1958, rural cadres began to

overestimate the yields that their mass production campaigns would

produce. Each level of the CCP bureaucracy, keen to prove its enthusiasm

about the campaign to its superiors, tended to inflate statistics on

their way to Beijing. With these skewed numbers, party leaders then set

production goals even higher, necessitating further exploitation at the

base and generating more false claims that these goals had been met.

Many cadres were afraid to revise production targets downward so soon

after the Anti-Rightist campaign, for fear of being labeled “rightist,”

and potentially purged, imprisoned or executed. The ensuing cycle of

soaring expectations and deepening exploitation became known as the

“exaggeration wind.” In 1958, the state doubled its steel quotas from

the previous year, and targets continued to rise over the following

months as Mao emphasized the importance of steel production in public

statements.[86] In some Yunnan province, some local officials claimed a

new factory was opened every 1.05 minutes, while officials in Jingning

county in Gansu province reported that more than ten thousand factories

had been built in fifteen days.[87]

Party leaders believed the Chinese economy was making a dramatic leap

from semi-colonial underdevelopment to communist abundance in a short

period of time. In July 1958, Liu Shao-qi boasted that China would

overtake the U.K.’s industrial capacity in two to three years.[88] In

August 1958, Mao predicted China would surpass socialism and reach

communism in three to four, or possibly five to six, years.[89] The

People’s Daily and other party publications regularly spoke of the China

making a transition to a communism, where society would be guided by the

principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Communes overestimated the national food surplus based on inflated

statistics, and communal kitchens soon allowed people to eat for free,

prompting a consumption boom in late 1958. For a brief window, peasant

work hours spiked in tandem with consumption. But the boom couldn’t

last.

15. The Great Famine

Food supplies began to drop in 1959, and peasants soon reached their

physical limits. A December 1958 party directive had instructed cadres

to curb peasant “enthusiasm” and remind people to sleep eight hours per

night.[90] Now starvation began to hit the provinces. In Qiaogou Commune

in Huaibin County, 26.7% of members one work brigade eventually died

from starvation, as compared with only 8.8% of cadres. [91] Xinyang

prefecture in Henan experienced some of the most acute famine deaths,

with one out of eight residents—about 1 million people—dying of

starvation. In the most extreme cases, residents resorted to eating tree

bark and agricultural waste, or engaging in cannibalism.[92]

At a CCP conference in Lushan in July 1959, many party leaders called

for an end to the GLF in the face of the growing crisis. Defense

Minister Peng Te-Huai led the charge by criticizing Mao in an open

letter. Mao made a brief self-criticism before the party, but soon

doubled back, and attacked Peng and his supporters for “right

deviationism.” Peng was removed, and Lin Biao, one of Mao’s close

allies, was installed in his place as head of the army. A campaign

against right deviationism was then executed throughout the party over

the following months, purging critics of the GLF, and pushing the

campaign ahead even as famines deepened. The situation was then worsened

by a series of natural disasters: in July 1959 the Yellow River flooded

croplands, and in 1960 droughts affected around half of China’s

agricultural areas. (Notably, however, the flood cycle in 1959 was less

pronounced than in 1954 or 1973, and drought conditions in 1960 were

less severe than cyclical droughts in 1955, 1963 and 1966.[93] Natural

calamities contributed to famines during the GLF, but were not their

main cause.)

Well into 1960, state procurement of grain continued to rise based on

exaggerated numbers, even as agricultural production plummeted and the

peasantry neared exhaustion. State grain supplies were directed toward

the cities and exports: while grain output fell in China by 25 million

tons between 1957 and 1959, exports doubled in the same period to 4.2

million tons, and sales of grain to the cities remained higher per

capita than the countryside.[94] When state grain procurement was

finally forced down in 1960–61 due to a growing production crisis, the

state nonetheless reduced grain sales to the countryside by 8 billion

kilos, and more than doubled its exports.[95] In 1960, the USSR withdrew

its technical advisors from China amid growing Sino-Soviet tensions.

While most of the advisors were related to China’s nascent nuclear

weapons program, a handful was related to agriculture.[96] Nonetheless,

Mao pushed forward. In March 1960, Mao lauded the communes in Guizhou

province, claiming they would “make a great leap forward in the

transition from socialism to communism in the next five to ten years.”

Guizhou eventually suffered the most reported starvation deaths per

capita of all Chinese provinces, with about 5.3% of its 17 million

residents dying.[97]

Soon peasants began to rebel, straining the hegemony of the CCP in the

countryside. Multiple provinces reported spikes in looting and theft in

1960, particularly of grain depots and train shipments of food. In the

winter of 1960–1961, Liping county in Guizhou saw over 4,000 lootings of

state storehouses. Other peasants fled their homes: around 60,000

refugees flooded from the southwest provinces into Hong Kong from

1960–61.[98] With their base disintegrating, rural cadres were

increasingly forced to disband commune organizations, and send peasants

back to household plots to organize their own subsistence. The party

soon chose to retreat from the GLF, rather than risk mass repression of

its peasant base. At a party conference in 1961, Mao made a more

profound self-criticism than two years earlier. Premier Zhou En-Lai

drafted “Twelve Agricultural Provisions” that encouraged peasants to

cultivate private plots of land, and allowed them to establish local

markets for their produce. The communal kitchens were disbanded, and

“people’s communes” were preserved in name only.

The human cost of the GLF was enormous. Estimates range from 18 to 45

million dead, with 35 million the most likely number according to three

different studies.[99] Proportional to the population, the GLF thus had

roughly the same human cost as Stalin’s collectivization.[100] For this

price paid in corpses, the GLF accomplished a burst in agricultural and

industrial production that could not be sustained in the long term.

Heavy industry did leap 230% between 1958 and 1960, and steel output

grew from 5.35 million tons in 1957, to 18 million tons in 1960.[101]

But many of the materials and industrial projects produced during the

leap were of low quality, and had to be scrapped afterward. The CCP’s

second Five Year Plan, introduced after the GLF, saw 100,000 enterprises

closed, steel production drop back to 7 million tons, and labor

productivity fall by 5.4 percent.[102] Agricultural production plummeted

below 1952 levels, and wouldn’t recover until the late 1960s.[103] 16

million people had to be sent back to their hokou assignments in the

countryside over the following years, having fled to the cities during

the famine.

The disaster of the GLF was a structural requirement of “socialism in

one country.” To raise living standards in an isolated and

underdeveloped nation, the CCP had no option but to rely on internal

exploitation of the country’s non-capitalist classes. At the same time,

the particular form this exploitation took in China resulted from the

party’s deep embeddedness in the countryside. The CCP was intimately

connected with the peasantry going back to the Yan’an period, allowing

it to mediate and limit the peasantry’s class interests through an

extensive rural organizational apparatus. With this system in place, the

party could carry out the GLF through mass mobilization, and only face

resistance and the question of armed force once starvation was well

underway.

The end of the GLF was a major blow to Mao’s prestige. Not only had the

campaign pushed the party’s hegemony in the countryside to its limits

and resulted in mass deaths, but the effort had disappointed according

to developmentalist standards. Deep fissures now appeared in the party

leadership over how to address the party’s failures. For the first since

the 1930s, Mao’s wing of the party found itself removed from positions

of influence. In 1959, Mao was ousted as State Chairman, and replaced by

Liu Shao-qi. In 1962, party officials who had been purged for critiquing

the GLF were rehabilitated, and a party conference denounced the “cult

of personality” surrounding Mao. Led by Liu Shao-qi, the party’s

“pragmatic” wing took control of the state. Yet Mao continued to search

for a Chinese path distinct from that of the USSR while out of the

public eye. He would develop new ideas during the Sino-Soviet split.

16. The Sino-Soviet Split and the Critique of Stalinism: 1960–1963

As the party retreated from the GLF, a full diplomatic break between

China and the Soviet Union emerged in the international arena. The

“Sino-Soviet split” was expressed geopolitically through a breakdown in

political and military relations between the two nations and their

allies. It was also ideologically in repeated polemics written between

the CCP and the CPSU.

Geopolitically, the CCP grew disenchanted with the USSR as it became

clear the Soviets were acting out of narrow self-interest as an

imperialist state. At the 20^(th) Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev

established a policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, and three

years later met with Eisenhower to defuse Cold War tensions—two moves

regarded as heresy by the CCP leadership. In 1959, the USSR began

pulling its nuclear advisors out of China, delaying China’s first test

of nuclear weapons for several years. In 1962, the USSR then refused to

side with China during a brief Sino-Indian war sparked over a border

conflict in Tibet, even as it engaged in its own nuclear brinksmanship

in Cuba. Finally in 1963, Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty

with the U.S. and Britain, opposing new entrants into the “nuclear club”

just as China’s own weapons program was nearing its first bomb test.

These developments demonstrated to Mao and the CCP that the Soviets were

looking out for their own interests as a superpower, not for the world

socialist movement. Thus Mao increasingly began to refer to the USSR as

a “social imperialist” state in speeches and writings. The geopolitical

split was elaborated ideologically in a series of documents authored by

Mao and the CCP leadership, which broke with Soviet orthodoxy. The texts

hammered out a new conception of the revolutionary process: socialism,

Mao concluded, is an extended transitional phase, whose outcome is not

assured, and in which social conflicts must be addressed by ongoing mass

campaigns in order to avoid capitalist restoration.

The CCP had already published On the Historical Experience of the

Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and More on the Historical Experience

of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in 1957. The documents criticized

the CPSU’s rigid application of Marxist doctrine, and offered their own

synthesis of Stalinist theory. They argued that contradictions continue

to exist in socialist societies, as implied by Mao’s speech “On the Ten

Major Relationships.” At the same time, they affirmed “socialism in one

country” as a universal model: the goal for communist movements

worldwide was to forge an alliance between the working class and the

peasantry, lead a revolution and seize power through a Marxist-Leninist

party, nationalize industry, and gradually raise the productive forces

of the country while opposing imperialism internationally. The documents

also offered a non-Khrushchevite balance sheet of Stalin’s legacy,

criticizing the cult of personality and Stalin’s foreign policy, but

viewing him positively overall. A common formulation used by Mao was

that Stalin was “30% wrong and 70% right.”

These formulations rebuked the most obviously revisionist aspects of

Stalinist orthodoxy, but at the same time, retained its commitment to

building the kind of society that would necessitate a ruling class

ideology akin to Stalinism. Mao and other CCP leaders eventually

published a collection of polemics against the CPSU in 1963, under the

title The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist

Movement. In articles such as “On The Question of Stalin” and “On

Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World,”

the CCP reaffirmed its criticisms of the USSR. At the same time, Mao

continued his introspection on the Soviet model in his own writings. In

1961–1962, Mao compiled an extensive set of “Reading Notes on the Soviet

Text Political Economy,” and synthesized his conclusions in several

public articles. Mao’s “Reading Notes” include detailed critiques of

Soviet economic, industrial and agricultural policy, as well as larger

strategic questions over the nature of socialist transition. They shed

light on Mao’s evolving critique of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

In his “Reading Notes,” Mao first criticizes the Soviets for denying the

“universal significance” of state capitalism as a developmental method

for semi-colonial countries.[104] He then argues against using “material

incentives” to spur production,[105] such as piece-work and production

bonuses, and instead insists that parties should put “politics in

command,” increasing production by convincing workers of a political

line that requires higher productivity to achieve its goals.[106] Only

when “politics is weakened” is there “no choice but to talk about

material incentive.”[107] Mao admits that continued wage labor under

state capitalism will generate “value” in the capitalist sense, but

insists that this value can be used “as an instrument of planning”

without constituting “the main basis of planning.”[108] At the same

time, however, he admits that “only if increases and the percentages of

accumulation go up a bit can people’s livelihoods be finally improved.”

Therefore the party must “practice economies and...accumulate large

amounts of materials and wealth.”[109]

Focusing in on the transition from socialism to communism, Mao refuses

the Soviet notion that socialism comprises a “fully consolidated” mode

of production. He instead interprets socialism an extended transitional

phase, in which communist and capitalist social relations vie for

dominance.[110] “Contradictions are the motive forces” of changes in

socialist society, Mao insists, while “criticism and self-criticism are

the methods for resolving” them.[111] Although “the transition to

communism certainly is not a matter of one class overthrowing another”

since classes have ceased to exist in the realm of production, “there

are bound to be certain problems with ‘vested interest groups’ which

have grown content with existing institutions.”[112] Criticism and

self-criticism must therefore be employed, to accomplish a “social

revolution in which new production relations and social institutions

supersede old ones” in a peaceful manner.[113]

This formulation in turn forces Mao to address where contradictions in

socialist society come from, if not from class relations. At first, Mao

admits that “contradictions to be resolved remain in the production

relations under people’s ownership.”[114] However, he fails to describe

what these contradictions consist of. At various points he mentions

“vested interest groups” who resist social transformation,[115] or

“‘master-of-the-house’ attitudes” that “make the workers reluctant to

observe labor discipline.”[116] Nowhere, however, does Mao consider the

idea that exploitation and alienated labor under state socialism may

comprise a class relation in itself. Instead, Mao simply describes bad

attitudes that stoke conflict at the point of production—that is,

symptoms of class relations. In other cases, he blames social conflicts

on the clash between “collective ownership” relations in cooperatives

and “ownership by the whole people” in nationalized industries, rather

than interrogating production relations in the nationalized sector

itself.[117]

In his “Reading Notes,” Mao elaborates the bedrock of contemporary

Maoist conceptions of socialist transition. He conceives of socialism as

an extended transitional period, operating on the basis of a state

capitalist economy, but directed by ideological commitment rather than

profit motives. He believes the transition period will involve a

continual “revolution” in the relations of production, but without class

conflict per se. Social contradictions will continue to exist under

socialism—whether due to bad work habits by cadres and workers, the

opportunism of vested interests groups, or conflicts between the

nationalized sectors of the economy and other forms of production.

However, these problems can be resolved through a broad application of

criticism and self-criticism in work methods and mass mobilizations.

This formulation would lead Mao into the crucible of the Cultural

Revolution.

17. An Explosion Waiting to Happen

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mao embraced a new problematic: how

to ameliorate the effects of Stalinism, while still maintaining its

underlying assumptions? He declared openly that social contradictions

existed in state socialist societies, and proposed that these conflicts

would determine the trajectory of socialist transition, thus breaking

with Soviet orthodoxy. At the same time, like Stalin, he clung to state

capitalism as a developmental model, the plausibility—indeed, the

goal—of “socialism in one country,” and the belief that the party is

always the transparent representative of the proletariat. Mao reconciled

these seemingly contradictory positions by seeking the source of social

contradictions under state socialism in every location except the

relations of production. Not alienated labor, money, the law of value,

or capital accumulation were to blame, but rather sociological interest

groups from former deposed classes, small-scale production at the

margins of the economy, and “bad ideas” floating around in mass culture.

To maintain his Stalinist commitments, Mao had to willfully abandon

Marx’s critical focus on social relations of production.

Despite these shortcomings, Mao’s reconception of socialist transition

did lead him to question the nature of the Chinese state. By the early

1960s Mao had grown convinced that the contradictions in Chinese society

might cause the party to lapse into revisionism, as he believed the CPSU

had done under Khrushchev. Slowly Mao worked his way into a vexed

theoretical position: “class struggle” continued to exist under Chinese

socialism, but this was not primarily due to the existence of classes.

China was not a class society: its economic base was now essentially

“socialist” in nature, despite a few vaguely-defined “imperfections.”

Instead, class struggle was expressed as a “two-line struggle” of ideas,

which took place within the party itself. On one side was a political

line that would continue China on the path to communism, and on the

other was a political line that would lead toward capitalist

restoration. Production relations could be continually reformed in order

to deepen socialism, and prevent social divisions from taking root. But

a struggle in the political sphere was required in order to guarantee

these reforms success. “If Marxist-Leninists are in control” of society,

Mao posited in his Reading Notes, “the rights of the vast majority will

be guaranteed.” But “if rightists or right opportunists are in control,

these organs and enterprises [i.e. the state and production] may change

qualitatively.”[118]

Mao had come to believe the character of Chinese society, socialist or

capitalist, would be decided by what political line held sway in state

power. His first attempt to put this perspective into practice came in

1963, with the Socialist Education Movement. The mobilization sent

students and intellectuals to the countryside to labor alongside

peasants, and encouraged workers and peasants to critique party

bureaucratism. Carried out through the party apparatus, however, the

effort was quickly blunted. Liu Shao-qi revised Mao’s initial mandate

for the mobilization, narrowing its scope and giving party “work teams”

tight control over mass activity. From his position of decreased

influence, Mao seemed incapable of halting a slow slide into capitalist

“restoration.” Thus he launched a mass campaign in the late 1960s that

would shake Chinese society to its foundations: the Cultural Revolution.

IV. The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution (CR) was initiated by Mao and his wing of the

CCP, in part to oust bureaucratic opponents and return themselves to

power, but also as an earnest attempt to prevent what they saw as the

creeping bureaucratization of the Chinese state, which would lead toward

capitalist restoration. Mao’s wing of the party understood this process

in the manner formulated by Mao’s writings throughout the late 1950s: an

aspect of the continuing class struggle under socialism, which was

caused by leftover bad ideas in the superstructure of society that

aggravated vaguely-defined “imperfections” in its socialist economic

base. Mao crafted the CR as a mass mobilization that, unlike the

Socialist Education Movement, would circumvent much of the established

CCP leadership.

But while Mao’s wing of the party only intended a cultural revolution to

address these problems, they unwittingly stumbled upon another reality:

the explosive class contradictions generated by exploitation under state

capitalism. Resentment at the suffering of the GLF, exploitation in the

workplace, and the authoritarianism and privileges of party cadres,

exploded in mass activity. Through an extended process of

factionalization, cooptation and conflict with the party, these

movements gradually developed their own autonomous perspectives on the

situation in China, and in some cases, on the need for a new revolution.

CR groups threatened to break outside the bounds imposed by Mao’s

leadership, and posed challenges to the Chinese social and economic

order. They brought the country to the brink of civil war.

At the height of the unrest, Mao was forced to crush the very movement

he had brought into being, just as he had a decade prior. For several

years afterward, Mao’s wing of the party continued advocating CR

mobilizations amid diminishing popular enthusiasm. But Mao’s death in

1976 created an opening for the “pragmatic” wing of the CCP to once

again take control of the state, and lead China toward the authoritarian

capitalist system we see today. In its spectacular demise, the CR

represented a culmination of the dynamic that first appeared in the

Hundred Flowers period, and the fruit of Mao’s contradictory Stalinist

critique of Stalinism.

18. Revolution Inaugurated: 1965–1966

The Cultural Revolution began in late 1965, in response to the

publication of Ra Hui Dismissed from Office, a play which many believed

was a veiled critique of Mao’s dismissal of Peng Dehuai during the Great

Leap Forward.[119] A party committee was commissioned critique the play

in early 1966, but when its efforts proved unsatisfactory to Mao, the

group was replaced with a “Cultural Revolution group” (CRG) positioned

under the party Politburo. The CRG included top leaders from Mao’s wing

of the party, such as Zhang Chunqiao, Chen Boda, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing,

and others. In May 1966, the group was tasked with leading a “cultural

revolution” to “criticize and repudiate those representatives of the

bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army,

and all spheres of culture.” This new movement was seen as an effort to

defeat capitalist restoration:

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie...are a bunch of

counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will

seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into

a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen

through, others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being

trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev, for example, who are

still nestling beside us.[120]

Students in Beijing were the first to respond to Mao’s call. “Red Guard”

groups formed in June 1966 at Tsinghua Middle School and Beijing

University, conducting big poster campaigns to critique educational

policies. Unlike in 1957, however, the majority of students were now

devoted to the Maoist wing of the party. This was primarily due to the

education policies of the preceding decade. During Mao’s reforms in the

early 1960s, children from “black” political backgrounds (with parents

from the former ruling classes) had been restricted from accessing

higher education in large numbers, while those from “red” political

backgrounds (children of cadres, and to a lesser extent of the

proletariat and peasantry) were favored. Tension gradually built between

the two student factions, as “red” students grew to become the majority

of the student population, but were still outperformed and leapfrogged

by the children from formerly elite classes.

Mao’s call for a “cultural revolution” unleashed the conflict within the

educational system. The first mobilizations tended to pit the children

of cadres against those of the educated former elite.[121] “Red”

background students demanded more exclusion of “black” students from

educational institutions, and more favorable policies toward workers and

peasants—the classes in whose name their parents claimed to govern.

School administrators were attacked for insufficiently favoring “red”

students, and thereby supporting the reproduction of class privilege. As

the movement grew, classes were suspended in many schools across

Beijing, and local education officials were subjected to harsh public

criticism.

Even this was too much for CCP pragmatists. In June 1966, Liu Shao-qi

sent party “work teams” onto the campuses in Beijing, to more tightly

control public criticisms emanating from students. Struggle sessions

were to be limited to pre-planned gatherings, and cadres would ratify

targets chosen by the students Having learned from the experience of the

Socialist Education Movement, Mao sided strongly with the rebellious

students. In August 1966, Mao published a call to “Bombard the

Headquarters” in the People’s Daily, officially sanctioning the Red

Guard movement and castigating the “white wind” that had attempted to

contain it. In a letter to Red Guards at a Beijing middle school, he

affirmed that it was “right to rebel against reactionaries.” Mao then

oversaw a mass parade of Red Guard groups in Tiananmen Square, and

called on police to avoid hampering Red Guard activities in any way.

The same month, a set of Sixteen Articles on the CR were released by the

CCP Central Committee. The Articles specified the method through which

the movement would be carried out, and effectively opened the floodgates

to mass participation across the country. In itself, the Articles were

not particularly radical. As in previous mobilizations, cadres were to

stimulate mass activity and manage contradictions among the people. The

target of the CR was to be a “handful” of “anti-Party, anti-socialist

rightists” within the bureaucracy, rather than the party-state itself.

The Articles insisted “the great majority” of party cadres were “good”

or “comparatively good,” and thus the movement would ultimately unify

“more than 95 per cent of the cadres” behind a revolutionary political

line. Furthermore, the campaign was in no way to interfere with the

proletariat’s ability to work: “Any idea of counterposing the Great

Cultural

Revolution to the development of production,” the document insisted, “is

incorrect.”

The Sixteen Articles conceived of the CR mainly as an effort to wipe

ideological cobwebs from the superstructure of Chinese society, and

oppose a small number of cadres who had fallen under the sway of the

reactionary ideas propagated by the overthrown ruling classes. “Although

the bourgeoisie has been overthrown,” the Articles argue, “it is still

trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the

exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and

endeavour to stage a comeback.”

The objective of the CR was thus

to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are

taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate...the ideology of

the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform

education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure

not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to

facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist

system.[122]

Despite its limited scope, the Sixteen Articles went further than party

pragmatists would have preferred, and provided official sanction and

guidance to the CR as a mass movement. With this intervention from

above, Red Guard groups surged in size and activity. Red Guards

mobilized outside Beijing universities on the streets of the city, and

similar groups formed in most major Chinese cities. At the same time,

Mao’s wing reasserted control over the party. Liu Shaoqi and Deng

Xiaopeng were quickly targeted as the main revisionists in the CCP: Deng

was removed from office, and Liu was replaced as Party Deputy Chairman

by Lin Piao.[123] The party leadership was soon immobilized by criticism

from below and the threat of persecution by Mao and his allies, and the

Politburo ceased to function. The CRG became the de facto political

authority in China, directing the CR from Beijing. The movement had

become a national phenomenon.

19. Red Guards in Beijing: 1966–1967

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1966, the epicenter of the CR

remained in Beijing. Mao called on Red Guards to attack the “four olds”:

old customs, culture, habits and ideas. In response, Red Guards posted

big character posters on public streets, distributed propaganda

extolling revolutionary virtues, performed street theater castigating

revisionism, and criticized educational officials. Some Red Guard groups

also destroyed historical artworks and cultural or religious sites.

Others carried the mobilization to an extreme, targeting members of the

deposed bourgeoisie and petitbourgeoisie, or those related to them.

Attacks on “black” categories soon became a salient feature of the Red

Guard movement.

The targets of Red Guard groups were subjected to extended criticisms

before mass audiences, forced to wear placards and dunce caps announcing

their crimes, held before crowds in “jet” poses, with their arms pulled

behind them and their heads held low, and were sometimes beaten if they

resisted. According to police statistics, from midAugust to the end of

September, Red Guards searched 33,600 homes in Beijing, resulting in at

least 1,772 beating deaths.[124] Mao eventually called on the Red Guards

to show restraint in their criticisms, while also maneuvering to

insulate the party and the economy from disruption: in September 1966,

he forbid Red Guards from raiding party offices, and reminded workers

and peasants to refrain from taking action and remain on the job.[125]

At first, the Red Guards thrived on a reified notion of class known as

“bloodline” theory. This theory held that one’s class position was

ultimately determined by the class position of one’s parent. If you were

the child of a war hero or prominent cadre, you were “red” and

“revolutionary.” If you were the child of the former ruling classes or a

cadre criticized in any previous period, you were “black.” As a popular

saying put it: “The father’s a hero, the son’s a brave lad; the father’s

a reactionary, the son’s a bastard.”[126] The theory essentially equated

membership in a revolutionary class with one’s hereditary loyalty to the

party. At first, prominent party leaders such as Guang Feng and Jiang

Qing sanctioned the bloodline theory with reservations. Chen Boda from

the CRG would not denounce the theory until October 1966.

Over time, the Red Guard movement struck out at portions of the party

bureaucracy as well. But this development threatened to divide the

movement: First, because some groups limited their targets to disgraced

“black” categories, and refused to attack the party at all. Second,

because those willing to attack the party did so for different reasons,

and to different extents. Red Guards included the children of elite

party cadres, workers and peasants, and declassed former intellectuals.

These different class bases implied different orientations toward the

party-state, and laid the basis for splits as the focus turned toward

the party hierarchy. Of course, all groups in the CR claimed to adhere

to the CR, and justified their actions using boiled-down slogans from

Mao’s “little red book.” But behind this veneer, different Red Guard

groups, and members in the same groups, pursued divergent interests and

goals. Some simply aimed to persecute “black” categories and secure

their “red” prestige and privileges. Others worked to oust officials who

were seen as prejudiced toward students from worker and peasant

backgrounds. Still others formed to defend portions of the existing

party apparatus.

As the movement grew in Beijing and across the country, an initial

configuration of forces emerged. In many cities, Red Guards polarized

between “radical” and “conservative” blocs, the former willing to

critique the local party apparatus in some way, and the latter defending

it. Mao and the CRG generally backed the former bloc, which had the

potential to unseat individual “capitalist roaders” in the party. Yet at

the same time, tensions remained within this “radical” camp. Many

students from worker and peasant backgrounds, and in some cases

declassed intellectuals, were resentful of cadre

privileges in general, and thus inclined to wage broad attacks on the

party bureaucracy, and not merely a “handful” of officials. Amid the

tumult, young intellectuals and workers, many of whom had grown up under

CCP rule, began to question the nature of Chinese society and how to

revolutionize it. Some developed new ideas distinct from those of Mao

and the CRG.

Yu Luoke, a 24-year old factory apprentice, helped initiate this trend

by publishing On Class Origins in January 1967. The piece offered a

thoughtful critique of bloodline theory, and it circulated widely on a

national level. Yu highlighted the logical fallacies of the bloodline

conception: one’s class position was determined by a variety of factors

beyond one’s family background, and clearly couldn’t be reduced to the

status of one’s father. He also cast the bloodline system as a caste

order, questioning whether there was a difference “between those with

bad family backgrounds” in China, and groups like “ blacks in America,

untouchables in India, and Burakumin in Japan.” Yu even went on to

propose that the children of cadres were becoming “a new aristocratic

stratum” in Chinese society, and that bloodline theories of class

legitimized their ascent.[127]

While Yu failed to define the party as a ruling class based on its

relationship to the means of production, his intervention nevertheless

marked an important shift in the movement. Red Guards could no longer

claim “red” status simply because they were the children of party

members in good standing. In fact, this relationship itself could be

seen as a form of caste privilege. Yu’s position threatened to broaden

the scope of the CR, from a mobilization targeting a “handful” of bad

officials, to one questioning the place of the party in Chinese society

itself. Yu was eventually denounced by the CRG for holding this

position, arrested in January 1968, and executed in March 1970.[128] But

by then, the shift he inaugurated in theory was already being expressed

in practice. For example, Jinggangshan, a Red Guard group formed at

Tsinghua University in late 1966, studied and criticized Yu’s analysis,

but soon began critiquing party officials in addition to “black” groups.

In December 1966, Jinggangshan would seize control of Tsinghua campus,

criticizing the “hierarchical system, cadre privileges, the slave

mentality, the overlord style of work, and the bloated

bureaucracy.”[129]

Throughout 1966 and much of 1967, most CR groups remained mired in proxy

wars between one party-allied faction or another, either defending the

local party apparatus, or attacking it in tandem with Mao and the CRG.

The CR movement in Nanjing, for example, never broke out of clientelist

factional disputes, or formed independent groupings opposed to the party

as a whole.[130] But in the industrial stronghold of Shanghai, the story

was different. There the working class emerged as a powerful independent

force, with the potential to overturn the party-state itself.

20. Dual Power in Shanghai: January 1967

In late 1966, the CR leapt beyond its initial student base and found a

new center in Shanghai. Already that autumn, student Red Guard groups

had formed in Shanghai, growing to nearly 150,000 members in high

schools and universities. Now in November 1966, workers from seventeen

Shanghai factories moved to form their own Workers General Headquarters

(WGH).[131] The trajectory of the worker’s movement in Shanghai

encapsulates of the pattern of CR as a whole: the initial polarization

into “conservative” and “radical” wings generated a series of clashes

and splits splits, out of which crystallized worker groups increasingly

conscious of their own interests, strategies and goals independent of

those of the party.

The WGH won recognition in Shanghai after 1,000 workers commandeered a

series of trains bound for Beijing. Zhang Chunqiao, a member of the CRG,

was forced to sanction the group as an official CR organization, and

provide it with material support. The WGH then established a series of

divisions across the city, and worker “brigades” flocked to the umbrella

organization. In factories, public utilities, and transport hubs,

workers launched big poster campaigns and public criticisms of party

officials under the auspices of the WGH.[132] By the following year the

organization boasted over 700,000 members, and their numbers continued

to grow.[133] Yet, as soon as workers began to criticize party

officials, a rival group of conservative workers formed the “Scarlet

Guards,” with the aim of defending the existing party apparatus.

Shanghai’s Scarlet Guards gained 400,000 members shortly after their

founding.[134]

A confrontation between the two worker blocs soon exploded, in the

“Kangping road” incident of December 1966. 30,000 Scarlet Guards

surrounded the mayor’s compound on Kangping road, demanding recognition

as an official CR group, only to be met by 100,000 workers from the WGH.

Street battles ensued, spreading to other parts of the city and

continuing over a full day. The clashes injured hundreds and led to over

90 hospitalizations, and delivered a decisive defeat to the

conservatives. The Scarlet Guards’ leaders were detained and handed over

to state security, and some were subjected to mass criticisms.[135]

Defeated on the streets and denied “official” CR status by the CRG, the

Scarlet Guards were forced to disband.

The conflict between the WGH and the Scarlet Guards, and others like it

around the country, was essentially a proxy battle between the party

factions with which the two groups were aligned. While both courted

sanction from Mao, the WGH was embraced by the CRG, and the Scarlet

Guards were aligned with the local Shanghai party committee. Many CR

factional conflicts were cast in this mold at first. However, with the

conservative wing decisively defeated in Shanghai, this initial struggle

quickly gave rise to new oppositions within the triumphant “radical”

camp itself. The process began when some workers began to mobilize for

their own interests, in growing antagonism with the party-state as a

whole. In Shanghai this shift took the form of the “wind of economism.”

Used as a pejorative label by Maoist cadres, the “wind of economism”

referred to the tendency for Shanghai workers to form issue-oriented CR

groups in the winter of 1966–1967. These groups shifted from critiquing

individual party officials, to making demands on the state for legal

recognitions, wages and benefits. Of the 354 Shanghai Red Guard groups

later labeled “economistic,” most consisted of workers from highly

exploited sectors of Chinese society: low-wage workers; rural workers

who had been sent to the countryside after the GLF, who now demanded

hukou status in Shanghai; and many temporary and contract workers from

the countryside (a cheap labor pool in

China’s cities then as now) who demanded status, protections and

wages.[136] In December 1966, Shanghai’s embattled mayor granted a

series of wage reforms and job reclassifications to these groups. Within

a few months, workers had extorted over 1 million yuan from the state in

the form of increased wages, insurance and welfare benefits, and

subsidies for travel and food. They also seized housing: over five days

from December 1966 to January 1967, “all the housing in the city that

had been awaiting allocation was forcibly occupied.”[137]

The movement in Shanghai soon moved from winning wages and benefits to

taking over the city as a whole. As in many such cases throughout

history, the social turmoil generated by the movement compelled workers

to begin managing daily life themselves. Transport, water and

electricity had been hampered for weeks as a result of “economistic”

strikes. Production had been disrupted in many factories. The city

government was crippled, and disorganization began to appear in rail

yards and public transportation. The WGH thus began coordinating

citywide production and transportation of goods, as well as public

transit, through its own mass formations. In many factories, managers

and party committees were supplanted by committees elected by

workers.[138] It was a moment of dual power: the existing state

apparatus had been partially replaced by a new form of proletarian

organization.

The transformation was at first sanctioned by the CRG, at a mass rally

in January 1967. Thousands gathered in central Shanghai to criticize and

officially remove the existing Shanghai Party Committee, and replace it

with a “Shanghai People’s Commune” made up of worker groups.[139] The

power shift became known across China as the “January revolution.” It

sparked a wave of rebellions throughout 1967: major strikes exploded

Chekiang, Sichuan, Kiangsi, Kweichow and Heilongjiang provinces, among

others. Innumerable revolts unfolded in local areas and individual

factories, leading to the establishment of worker committees. Full power

seizures eventually took place in 29 provinces and municipalities.[140]

But in Shanghai, the commune wasn’t permitted to last.

21. The First Thermidor: February 1967

In urgent meetings with the CRG, Mao opposed the formation of the

Shanghai commune. At a meeting with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in

mid-February, Mao opposed this seizure on practical grounds. “If he

whole of China sets up people’s communes,” Mao asked,

should the People’s Republic of China change its name to “People’s

Commune of China”? Would others recognize us? Maybe the Soviet Union

would not recognize us whereas Britain and France would. And what would

we do about our ambassadors in various countries?

Secondly, Mao asserted that communes were “weak when it comes to

suppressing counter-revolution. People have come and complained to me

that when the Bureau of Public Security arrest people, they go in the

front door and out the back.”[141] Thus, in the interest of maintaining

China’s stability within the inter-state system, and guaranteeing the

state’s effective monopoly on force domestically, Mao called for the

Shanghai commune to be reconfigured. Zhang Chunqiao carried this message

back to Shanghai, and imposed it with the collaboration of the WGH

leadership.

In late February 1967, the WGH and Zhang held another mass rally, this

time announcing the dissolution of the Shanghai People’s Commune, and

the formation of a “Shanghai Revolutionary Committee.” The new committee

was built along a “three-inone” model, which combined representatives

from worker organizations, the army, and party cadres. This form of

organization, an editorial in Red Flag declared, would be the

“provisional organ of power” of the CR. By contrast, “the concept of

excluding and overthrowing all cadres is absolutely wrong.” Such a view

was a “poisonous influence” that had been “advocated by those several

people who put forth the bourgeois reactionary line,” and which was

unwittingly parroted by well-intentioned sectors of the movement.[142]

After February 1967, the three-in-one model became the primary form

through which Mao institutionalized movements across China. The

committees allowed the party to admit insurgent forces into the

governing apparatus, while outweighing them with cadres and military

officials loyal to the party center. In many cases, officials who had

just been criticized and ousted months before were rehabilitated to

serve on them. Over the following months three-in-one committees were

established in provinces, cities, and individual factories and schools.

In some cases they were a preemptive response to blunt mobilization from

below. In other cases, party officials themselves initiated power

seizures from above: in Nanjing, local rebel groups declined to seize

power at an official’s request, insisting that they weren’t prepared to

run the province. Assured that “power seizure” would only involve them

supervising incumbent officials, the rebels replied, “if that’s what

power seizure means, we can do it.”[143]

In Shanghai, the various three-in-one committees governing the city

contained large numbers of workers. But as one worker complained,

workers were “put in charge of secondary matters and administrative

details...few handled political work.” The majority of leadership posts

were often reserved for party cadres, or workers who were party members.

In some cases, emergent worker leaders were quickly recruited into the

party. At the Shanghai Bureau of Light Industry, worker representation

was far less than a third: only 9.6.% of leadership posts were filled by

rebel workers, and in some committees the figure was as low as

4.1%.[144]

With this structure in place, Mao’s wing of the party moved against the

“wind of economism.” Mao believed “economistic” groups were not the

product of workers fighting for their self-interest, but rather the

creation of capitalist roaders in the party, who hoped to “buy off” the

movement with material gains. The CRG thus initiated a crackdown on

“economistic” groups, which forced many of the single-issue rebel groups

in Shanghai to disband to avoid imprisonment. The WGH leadership

followed suit: a WGH flyer insisted “we are rebelling against a small

handful of authorities taking the capitalist road, rebelling against the

reactionary bourgeois line, and not primarily over ‘money.’”[145] City

agencies demanded workers return the money disbursed to them, and

recouped 488,000 yuan back into the hands of the state.[146]

The February crackdown led to a new round of divisions in the rebel

ranks. Now the rebel faction split between those already included in the

new three-in-one committees, and those excluded from it. Within the

latter camp, tensions remained between those who hoped to win inclusion

in the new political order, and others who now sought to overthrow it.

Similar splits occurred across the country: in Tsinghua University in

Beijing, the Jinggangshan group split over whether to accept

rehabilitated cadres in the new threein-one committees. The highly

radical faction, most of whose leaders and membership was from peasant

and worker backgrounds, opposed the rehabilitated cadres and called for

“mass supervision” of the committees instead.[147] In Shanghai, a

similar tendency cohered around a group known as Lian Si.

Lian Si was a group of 3,000 young factory workers, who had been

persecuted in the mid-1960s as a “counterrevolutionary clique” for

writing counterrevolutionary slogans such as “Let’s hold dance parties

at once!” and “Long live women!” on factory walls. With blighted

records, the Lian Si workers found themselves excluded from the

three-in-one system. The group responded by arguing that “Shanghai’s

leadership authority is not in the hands of the proletariat,” and

calling for “an alliance of all revolutionary rebels in the city who

were suppressed after February 5, 1967.” The group established liaison

posts across the city, and soon attracted all the forces that had been

left out of the new political order, or whose “economistic” demands had

been sidelined by it.[148] The group called for the overthrow of the

Shanghai Revolutionary Committee itself.

WGH-affiliated groups soon challenged Lian Si-affiliated groups in the

streets. April 1967 saw 156 armed battles in Shanghai, and 140 clashes

in the first week of May alone, in tandem with an uptick of violent

clashes across the country.[149] In August 1967, the WGH sent thousands

of combatants to attack the Lian Si headquarters at the Shanghai Deisel

Engine Factory, sparking a major confrontation in which workers battled

with iron bars, bricks and molotov cocktails. By the end of the

conflict, 983 were injured and 1,000 Lian Si members were taken

prisoner.[150] While a year prior it was the conservative Scarlet Guards

that had been defeated in battle, now it was the movement’s radical

wing. Lian Si effectively ceased to exist, and there were no further

challenges to the three-inone power structure in Shanghai.

The rise and fall of dual power in Shanghai demonstrates the arduous

learning process endured by the Chinese proletariat during the CR. Rebel

groups came to understand their interests, distinct from those of Mao

and the CRG, only gradually. At first the movement split along “rebel”

and “conservative” lines, aligned with Mao’s wing of the party and

established local party officials, respectively. After the “rebel”

factions were embraced and institutionalized in 1967, rebel groups then

split according to who was included in, and excluded from, the new

order. Excluded groups in turn disagreed over whether they should try to

gain entry into the system, or overthrow it. At each successive stage,

the most radical wings of the movement grew more antagonistic with the

party-state, but hesitated to break decisively with the CRG and Mao.

Thus radical CR groups repeatedly failed to build organizations capable

of acting independently of the party, or develop independent analyses of

Chinese society and the movement’s tasks. When forced to do so by the

course of events, it was often too late. These shortcomings would play

out tragically with the emergence and defeat of the “ultra left”

tendency in 1967–1968.

22. The “Wuhan incident” and Armed Struggle: 1967

The cycle of protest, cooptation, splits and clashes seen in Shanghai

reappeared across the country in 1967. The result was a slew of

factional battles in the streets of Chinese cities, out of which

crystallized a distinct “ultra left” wing of the movement. The “ultra

left” of the CR was a diverse milieu of local rebel groups, publications

and journals, which called variously for organizational separation from

the CCP, a revolutionary split in the army, and a new revolution in

China. These developments were centered in Hunan province.

The Hunan movement developed in late 1966, as local groups connected on

a province-wide scale in a practice referred to as the” revolutionary

link-up.” Xiang River Storm, a province-wide coalition of CR groups, was

formed in October 1966 by Hunanese groups who had traveled to Beijing to

lodge complaints. Its base included students, workers from cooperative

enterprises, temporary urban workers, youth returning from the

countryside to demand placement in cities, and the urban unemployed.

When the January revolution spread across China in early 1967, its

membership ballooned to some one million members.[151] The Red Flag

Army, a 470,000-strong group of disgruntled PLA veterans in Hunan, also

formed at this time, storming the provincial military command

headquarters to demand better veterans benefits. Both groups were

condemned by the CRG: the Red Flag Army was deemed “reactionary” in

January 1967, and Xiang River Storm was declared illegal and driven

underground in February, with over 100,000 of its members arrested.[152]

The CRG’s crackdown and cooptation was briefly halted, however, in

response to what became known as the “Wuhan incident.”[153] In July

1967, conservative rebel groups backed by local military officials laid

siege to rebel groups in Wuhan, who had tried to seize power in the

city. Xie Fuzhi and Wang Li traveled to Wuhan from the CRG in Beijing,

intending to mediate the dispute in favor of the rebel forces. But when

they arrived, they were promptly arrested by the local military. The

allegiances of military commanders in Wuhan now appeared unclear. Mao

himself was in Wuhan at the time for an inspection tour, and had to be

hastily flown to Shanghai with an escort of fighter jets. Zhou Enlai

then flew to Wuhan to address the situation, but local military forces

surrounded the airstrip and prevented his plane from landing. For a

moment, it looked as if conservative elements in the army had reached

their limit with the CR, and were inching toward an outright coup.

The Wuhan mutiny was quickly put down by Lin Piao, head of the military

and Mao’s close ally. Infantry divisions, navy gunboats and air force

units descended on the city, and forced a speedy surrender. Yet even

after the incident was resolved, Mao had to address the danger of

conservative forces in the army. He thus appealed to the very leftwing

base he had just repressed. Mao now publicly advocated “arming the left”

and expanding the CR to target “capitalist roaders in the army” as well

as the party. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing openly called for the movement to

start seizing arms. The rebel groups took Mao at his word. To many

across the country, it seemed Mao’s call for an armed campaign against

the right wing amounted to an official reversal of the February

counterrevolution. Over the following weeks, both left- and right-wing

CR groups expropriated guns from armories. In some provinces

revolutionaries seized trainloads of armaments bound for Vietnam. “The

lesson of the Wuhan Incident,” wrote one young rebel,

is that a prerequisite for seizing power...is to take over the military

power usurped by the handful of bourgeois representatives in the army.

Otherwise, the power seizure is nothing but empty talk.[154]

Shooting wars quickly broke out on the streets of Chinese cities, as

rebel groups engaged in armed clashes with both the military, and

conservative groups. In Changsha, rebel groups retained control of the

major factories in the city, after engaging in fierce battles with

conservative factions that had seized control of a gun manufacturing

factory in neighboring Xiangtan.[155] In Beijing, rebels went so far as

to seize the Foreign Ministry, and call on Chinese diplomatic posts

across the globe to spread the revolution (thus answering in practice

Mao’s earlier concern about a commune’s place in the international state

system). In August 1967 there were between twenty and thirty armed

clashes every day across China.[156] Three years later, Mao would

comment on this period: “Everywhere people were fighting, dividing into

two factions. There were two factions in every factory, in every school,

in every province, and in every county....There was massive upheaval

throughout the country.”[157]

The breaking point came in September 1967, when Mao’s wing of the party

again stifled the revolutionary wave it had called into being. That

month, Mao authorized the army to use armed force to defend itself while

restoring order. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing reversed her call for the left to

seize arms, and denounced a group that had done so in Beijing—the small

May 16 Group—as an “ultra-left” conspiracy bent on conducting a coup. In

Hunan the military collected arms that had been seized, gathering “5,510

guns (including 280 machine guns), 28 artillery pieces, 11,853 hand

grenades, 1,077,026 rounds of bullet, 621 rounds of artillery shell, and

5,573 kilograms of explosives” in one week.[158] Party directives

instructed Red Guard students across the country to cease the

“revolutionary link-up” and return to classes, and for rural youths to

return to the countryside. Others called for the dissolution of

“mountain strongholds”: mass organizations that extended across large

regions, or which spanned students, workers and soldiers, and were thus

semi-autonomous from party control.

As in Shanghai, not all rebel groups accepted the crackdown. By late

1967, the young militants in Hunan had experienced a year of power

seizures, armed conflicts, and betrayals from party leaders. They began

to develop their own analysis of their friends and enemies.

23. “Whither China?” and the Ultra-Left: 1968

In October 1967, the excluded groups of Xiang River Storm held a

conference in Changsha to establish a new, province-wide revolutionary

coalition to push beyond the existing three-in-one system. The coalition

included over twenty groups across the province, composed of students,

youth returning from the countryside, army veterans, temporary

workers—essentially, all the groups excluded from the new political

order backed by the CRG. The new coalition chose the name Shengwulian

(an acronym for Hunan Provisional Proletarian Revolutionary Great

Alliance Committee). It numbered around 300,000 members.[159] Most of

Shengwulian’s constituent groups did not aim to overthrow the state, but

rather hoped to gain inclusion within it, whether limiting their demands

to particular reforms, or fighting to be rehabilitated by the party. So

dependent was Shengwulian on sanction from above, that the coalition

cancelled its founding celebration after Zhou Enlai denounced the new

group as “ultra left” immediately after its founding. Many groups

abandoned Shengwulian at this point, before the alliance even got off

the ground.

But other portions of the coalition began to reflect on their situation,

and reach profoundly new conclusions. “Our Program,” written by Zhang

Yugang, a student at the South-Central College of Mining, in December

1967, argued that the CR should not limit itself to removing a “handful”

of revisionist cadres inside the CCP. Instead it should target the

“newly born corrupted bourgeois privileged stratum” and “smash the old

state apparatus that is in the service of bourgeois privilege.”[160]

Similar ideas were crystallizing across the country, as newborn

“ultra-left” groups circulated their perspectives in local newspapers,

posters and leaflets. The “ultra-left” current included groups as far

afield as “Communist Group” in Beijing, the “October Revolution Group”

in Shandong, the “Oriental Society” in Shanghai, the “August 5 Commune”

in Guangzhou, and the “Plough Society” in Wuhan.[161]

The most concise “ultra left” position was synthesized in the

Shengwulian statement Whither China?, also released in December

1967.[162] Whither China? was written by Yang Xiguang, an 18-year old

Hunanese student imprisoned for 40 days for his support of Xiang River

Storm. Yang wrote the document as a discussion piece, offering an

appraisal of the events since January 1967. The piece argues that the

movement should aim to establish a “People’s Commune of China” modeled

roughly on the Paris Commune of 1871—a possibility Yang believed had

been proven possible by the January Revolution, and in arms seizures of

August 1967.

In January, government and means of production briefly passed “from the

hands of the bureaucrats into the hands of the enthusiastic working

class,” and “for the first time, the workers had the feeling that ‘it is

not the state which manages us; but we who manage the state.’” Later,

“in the gun-seizing movement, the masses, instead of receiving arms like

favors from above, for the first time seized arms from the hands of the

bureaucrats by relying on the violent force of the revolutionary people

themselves.” This move allowed “the emergence of an armed force”

organized by the people, which became “the actual force of the

proletarian dictatorship...They and the people are in accord, and fight

together to overthrow the ‘Red’ capitalist class.”

For Yang, the events of 1967 had proven the Chinese proletariat had the

ability to depose the existing rulers, and run society itself on an

egalitarian basis. He clearly identifies the state capitalist ruling

class as the enemy. In contrast to the party’s claim in 1966 that only a

“handful” of party cadres were reactionary, Yang insists that “90

percent of the senior cadres...already formed a privileged class.” Yang

uses the term “‘Red’ capitalist” to describe the party, and argues that

since 1949, the relation between the party and the masses has “changed

from relations between leaders and the led, to those between rulers and

the ruled and between exploiters and the exploited.” Now a “Red

capitalist class” rules a social order “built upon the foundation of

oppression and exploitation of the broad masses of people.” “In order to

realize the ‘People’s Commune of China,’” Yang argues, it is now

“necessary to overthrow this class.”

Yang refuses using the three-in-one committees as a path to proletarian

power, because they “will inevitably be a type of regime for the

bourgeoisie to usurp power, in which the army and local bureaucrats will

play a leading role.” Furthermore, Yang notes that “some of the armed

forces...have even become tools for suppressing the revolution,” and

thus the only option for the movement is to foment a split in the army,

and launch a new armed struggle. “A revolutionary war in the country is

necessary,” he argues, “before the revolutionary people can overcome the

armed Red capitalist class.” Revolutionaries must build on the “ultra

left” groupings scattered across the country, and form a new “Mao

Tse-tung-ism party” separate from the existing CCP.

Whither China? displays confusions about Mao’s role in the CR. Yang

repeatedly interprets Mao’s efforts to contain proletarian movement as

sensible tactical retreats, and selects the most revolutionary of Mao’s

vacillating positions to justify his “ultra-left” stance. Nevertheless,

Yang’s document represents the intellectual fruit of two years of

massive class struggle on the part of the Chinese proletariat, and the

clearest expression of the liberatory possibilities of the Chinese

revolutionary experience. From targeting a “handful” of party officials,

to Yu Luoke’s critique of the party as a privileged “caste,” the

“ultra-left” now viewed the party-state as a ruling class exploiting the

proletariat. In the course of mass protests, armed clashes and power

seizures, the mass movement had forged a new level of clarity as to the

configuration of class forces in Chinese society, and produced a new

generation of revolutionaries striving for independence from the CCP.

Reflecting on this arduous process, Yang writes:

This is the first time the revolutionary people have tried to overthrow

their powerful enemies. How shallow their knowledge of this revolution

was! Not only did they fail consciously to understand the necessity to

completely smash the old state machinery and to overhaul some of the

social systems, they also did not even recognize the fact that their

enemy formed a class.

After the publication of Whither China?, Yang and his milieu wrote

further documents on revolutionary organization, and conducted

investigations into the grievances and conditions of workers and

peasants in different parts of Hunan province.[163] But the

counterattack from the state capitalist ruling class came quickly.

In January 1968, CRG leaders Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan, Chen

Boda and Zhou Enlai unanimously condemned Shengwulian as

“counterrevolutionary,” and called for mass criticism of Whither

China?—ironically allowing the document to circulate widely. Li Yuan, a

general in Changsha, denounced Shengwulian as a “big hodge-podge of

social dregs” composed of “landlords, rich peasants,

counterrevolutionaries, rightists, unrepentant capitalist roaders, KMT

leftovers, and Trotskyist bandits.” Mao himself soon began using the

term “Shengwulian-style hodgepodge” as an epithet for the groups who had

emerged from the factional battles of 1967 seeking autonomy from the

state.[164]

Shengwulian’s young theoreticians fled into hiding: Yang went

underground, but was soon captured in Wuhan and arrested, while his

mother was captured and driven to suicide by repeated mass

criticisms.[165] Zhou Guohi, a contemporary of Yang’s, was captured,

beaten, and subjected to dozens of mass denunciations.[166] By February

1968 Shengwulian was effectively destroyed, and its constituent groups

disbanded. In April 1968, a Hunan provincial revolutionary committee,

built on the three-in-one model, was put in place without significant

resistance. Yet the “ultra left” was not entirely liquidated: the

Wuhan-based “Plow Society” continued to publish documents for a time,

reaffirming the class analysis put forth by Yang, calling for the

formation of a new revolutionary party, and analyzing the different

factions of the CR movement. The group’s “inaugural declaration” stated:

Political climbers are fighting each other to secure their seats…But

there are also a large number of revolutionary whippersnappers who have

been making unremitting efforts to prepare ‘weapons’ and ‘ammunition’

for battles in the future. Those who desire nothing but being part of

the officialdom…will eventually be abandoned by the people. The hope of

our country is placed in those who are willing to seek truth and study

hard to understand the current moment.[167]

In July 1968, Mao dispatched “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams” to

take control of Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of the epicenters of

the early Red Guard movement. The teams, composed of masses of workers

who were mostly party members, and supervised by military officers,

disbanded student groups and established a three-inone committee to run

the campus under their supervision.[168] Now Mao played the role of Liu

Shao-qi, suppressing the student movement from the party center. In

August 1968, the Hunanese “Plow Society” too was shut down, and its

leaders imprisoned.[169] Most of China was stabilized through

crackdowns, arrests, and the implementation of three-in-one committees

at various levels by the end of the year, though wildcat strikes

continued to disrupt production into 1970. These developments marked the

end of mass proletarian initiative under Mao’s rule.

24. The Shanghai Textbook and Socialist Transition: 1975

Mao and the CRG continued to carry out mass mobilizations under the

auspices of the CR after the movements of 1967 and 1968 had been

suppressed. At the same time, they moved to consolidate what they saw as

the gains of the period. One aspect of this effort was the publication

of materials to make Mao’s conception of socialist transition broadly

accessible to party cadres and the Chinese populace. In 1974, the party

published a textbook entitled Fundamentals of Political Economy as part

of a Youth Self-Education series. Selections from Fundamentals of

Political Economy have been republished in the U.S. under the title

Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Socialism: The Shanghai

Textbook, and are often referred to simply as the Shanghai Textbook.

The book offers a concise portrait of the zenith of Mao’s politics, and

today serves as a reference point for many U.S. Maoists. A close reading

of the entire Fundamentals of Political Economy isn’t possible here, as

the book spans over 400 pages, covering topics as diverse as the nature

of capitalist exploitation and imperialism, and methods of state

socialist planning and accounting. However, it is possible to highlight

one of the salient features of the book in its Textbook form: it builds

upon Stalinist assumptions to embrace capitalist value categories and

techniques, and thus marks the consolidation of Mao’s thought as a state

capitalist ruling ideology.

The Textbook opens by offering a schematic model of a revolutionary

process. First, a revolutionary upsurge demolishes the bourgeois

superstructure of a given society, establishes a socialist economic

base, and inaugurates the period of socialism or “lower” communism as

delineated in Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme and later

systematized by Lenin. In the Maoist interpretation, class struggle

continues in this period, jeopardizing the continuation to full

communism and threatening a return to capitalism. “Nonsocialist

relations of production” must be “transformed step by step”: First,

capitalists at the head of joint state-private enterprises must be

phased out, and industries must be nationalized. This “establishment of

the system of socialist public ownership” constitutes a “fundamental

negation of the system of private ownership” (24), at which point “all

laborers become masters of enterprises.”[170] The textbook doesn’t

describe this mastery in qualitative terms, but rather asserts and

assumes it.

The process of socialist transition doesn’t stop with nationalization,

however. Following nationalization, the new “socialist relations of

production” must also “undergo a process of development” and

improvement.[171] Along the way, the now-socialist state encounters

contradictions “between the superstructure and the economic base under

socialism”: bad habits and ideas left over from the old society linger

in mass consciousness; members of the overthrown classes maneuver to

re-enter positions of power; and bureaucratic work methods and other

“imperfections” hinder state production. All of these factors prevent

the socialist character of production from maturing fully. Because of

them, “the consolidation, improvement, and further development of the

socialist economic base are hindered and undermined.”

Therefore, the Textbook argues, the party must find ways to “make the

socialist superstructure better serve the socialist economic base.”[172]

This can be accomplished “only by continually resolving” the

contradictions listed above. Such a process does not amount to class

struggle as occurred under capitalist society, however. This is because,

according to the Textbook, conflicts under socialism result from the

incongruity between a fundamentally socialist economic base and an

outdated superstructure—not from irreconcilable contradictions in the

economic base of society itself. Such conflicts therefore need not be

resolved through a revolutionary overthrow of class society. Instead,

contradictions under socialism are “not antagonistic and can be resolved

one after another by the socialist system itself.”[173] The Textbook

thus sketches in theoretical shorthand the actual course of the Chinese

revolution, as theorized by Mao.

The Textbook narrative rests on the same Stalinist assumptions shared by

Mao, including party substitutionism. For the Textbook’s authors, the

party in state power is synonymous with the proletariat’s mastery over

society. “Ultimately it should be the laborers themselves” who organize

the production process, the Textbook admits. But “naturally, this does

not mean that all the laborers directly organize and manage production.

The broad masses of laborers appoint representatives through the state

and the collective, or they elect representatives to organize

production,”[174] and these appointed and elected managers then in turn

“rely on the masses.”[175] Rather than specify the material relations

that guarantee this “reliance,” the Textbook reduces the question to one

of political line: “when the leadership of the socialist economy is in

the hands of genuine Marxists, they can represent the interests of the

workers...in owning and dominating the means of production.”[176] “The

crux of judging who controls the leadership of the socialist economy”

thus “lies in what line is being implemented by the departments of the

enterprise in charge of production operation or economic

management.”[177]

With this formulation, Maoist theory comes full-circle, from a Marxist

conception in which the social relations of production and reproduction

determine the character of a society, to a bourgeois conception in which

the good ideas, intentions, and subjective aspirations of those in power

do so. This distortion has led to absurd results in the Maoist

tradition. For example, the 1995 Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

statement of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement[178] insisted

that “the correctness of the ideological and political line determines

whether the proletariat actually owns the means of production.”[179] The

notion that state managers “rely on the masses” in composing these

political lines is, of course, mere rhetoric. In every historical

example of state socialism, ruling parties have relied not on the

masses, but on their power over the reproduction of society guaranteed

through their control of production, and on their use of specialized

armed groups to maintain this arrangement.

With its substitutionist assumptions firmly in place, however, the

Textbook can go on to assume the fundamentally socialist character of

Chinese society, no matter what its relations of production. Nowhere is

this clearer than in Chapter 5, entitled “Develop Socialist Production

with Greater, Faster, Better, and More Economical Results.” This chapter

instructs party cadres in how to carry out production and accumulation

in socialist society. Under socialism, the Textbook admits, “the

commodity still has use value and value, that is, a dual nature” and

“the economic law of commodity production is still the law of

value.”[180] Just as was the case in capitalist society, socialist

production too “is a unity of this direct social labor process and the

value-creation process.”[181] How, then, is state socialist production

any different from capitalist production? The difference, the Textbook

argues, is that under state socialist regimes the law of value can be

carefully applied and controlled:

Under conditions of socialist public ownership, the law of value has a

two-fold effect on socialist production: on the one hand, if utilized

correctly, it can have the effect of actively promoting the development

of production; on the other hand, as the law of of commodity production,

it is, in the final analysis, a remnant of private economy.[182]

Interestingly, the quote above never specifies the second “two-fold

effect” of the law of value. What are the effects of this “remnant of

private economy”? The Textbook doesn’t say. Instead, it merely advises

caution when utilizing the law of value: cadres must “make use of its

positive effects on socialist production, while at the same time we

restrict its negative, destructive effects.”[183]

Vague cautionary statements aside, the Textbook assures its readers that

commodity production under state socialism “is fundamentally different

from capitalist private production”[184] because it is “conducted to

directly meet social needs” and carried out “in a planned manner,” and

because commodity circulation is greatly reduced in scope.[185] Under

this system of production

the labor of the laborer, as concrete labor, transfers and preserves the

value of the means of production used up in the production process. As

abstract labor, it creates new value. Should this new value created by

the producer belong entirely to the producer himself? No. To realize

socialist expanded reproduction and to satisfy the diverse common needs

of the laborers, society must control various social funds. …Therefore,

in socialist society, the new value created by the producer must be

divided into two parts. One part is at the disposal of the producer

himself. It constitutes the personal consumption fund of the producer

and is used to satisfy the personal living requirements of the producer.

Another party constitutes various social funds: this social net income

is at the disposal of society and is used to further develop socialist

production and to satisfy the various common needs of the masses of

laboring people.[186]

For the Textbook’s authors, “socialism” refers to a system in which

state leaders coordinate the production of capitalist value, and then

apportion out this value to the workers who produced it, to the general

population of society, and to the further expansion of production and

the accumulation of such value. In essence, they describe the same

capitalist system with state intervention, more or less social

democratic, which exists in the rest of the world. Yet the Textbook

insists this state of affairs is qualitatively different from

capitalism.

The same arguments reappear in Chapter 8 of the Textbook, “Frugality Is

an Important Principle in the Socialist Economy.” After detailing how

party managers should conduct accounting in state run enterprises, the

authors struggle to distinguish capitalist accounting categories from

socialist ones. “Capital funds, production costs, profits, and other

value categories in the system of socialist economic accounting” may

sound like the same categories used by capitalist firms, but “they

reflect specific relations of production and are different from...value

categories in the system of capitalist economic accounting.”[187] What

does this difference consist of? The Textbook offers a distinction:

“Under capitalism, capital is value that generates surplus value, and

the value category reflects the exploitative relations of capital over

hired labor.” By contrast, under socialism

Capital funds...are that part of the accumulated state wealth used for

production and operation. The use of these funds by the enterprise in

production and operational activities follows the requirements of the

fundamental socialist economic law of the satisfaction of the

ever-increasing needs of the state and the people and serves expanded

reproduction.[188]

Contrary to the unsupported assertions of the Textbook’s authors, the

use of production to satisfy public and state needs, while also

accumulating capitalist value, is exactly what capitalism does. This

“dual nature” of the production process, and of commodities themselves,

is not an aspect of socialism, but rather reflects the fundamentally

exploitative relations of production predominant in society. Like a

social democratic prime minister who seeks to balance “productivity”

with human needs, or a “progressive” CEO balancing ethics with profits,

the state capitalist managers envisioned by the Textbook must also

grapple with this duality. This tension hardly makes them socialist.

Rather, it makes them quintessentially capitalist.

Simply factoring human needs into the prerogative to accumulate does not

abolish capitalism. Even instituting central planning, dramatically

constricting the flow of commodity circulation, or limiting the ability

of money to act as the wellspring of accumulation, will not accomplish a

transformation in the relations of production and reproduction of

society. So long as the relations of production in a given society

remain based on alienation and exploitation, carrying out production to

meet the “ever-increasing needs of the state” and population will also

require the “ever-expanded production of abstract labor in mass and in

rate,” as observed by C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee

Boggs in 1950.[189] These processes can take a variety of forms under

systems of state ownership, as the Aufheben group has excellently

analyzed. For example, accumulation in the USSR centered the industrial

circuit of capital, leading to the production of masses of ultimately

defective use-values as bearers of accumulation.[190] Regardless of the

particular forms such distortions take on, however, the society in which

they occur remains fundamentally capitalist in nature.

The Shanghai Textbook, quite simply, describes state capitalist

exploitation. This is the economic system upon which the Chinese state

was based, and which Mao and other party intellectuals strove to justify

in Marxist terms. It is also the altar on which a generation of

militants, steeled in the CR and sincere in their aspiration for a free

society, were sacrificed.

25. Twilight of Possibility

A range of bureaucratic intrigues and small-scale conflicts took place

in China after the 1967–68 Thermidor, which cannot be explored here in

depth. In April 1969, the party rebuilt itself at its Ninth Congress and

moved to establish order in China. The army gradually gained a greater

role in national affairs, partly under pressure of border skirmishes

with the USSR that threatened to plunge the region into war. While Mao

responded by inviting Nixon to China and opening relations with the West

to ward off Soviet hostility, others in his party faction preferred to a

military orientation. This ultimately led to a failed coup attempt by

Mao’s close ally Lin Piao, head of the military, in 1971. Lin died in a

plane crash fleeing the aftermath of the coup, and Mao was left with no

clear successor. In the meantime, Mao’s health began to deteriorate:

already weakened by Lou Gehrig’s disease, he suffered a stroke in 1972

and was increasingly removed from the public eye.

Party-led campaigns were conducted in the 1970s (for example, against

Confucianism) but none were allowed to threaten the party apparatus as

had the upsurge of 1967. At the same time, the gains won by the

proletariat during the CR were gradually institutionalized and

de-fanged. In 1973, the WGH in Shanghai was incorporated into the

preexisting ACFTU, and party membership surged dramatically in the

following years as the CCP inducted a generation of worker leaders into

its ranks.[191] Production too was reorganized. In 1971, French academic

Charles Bettelheim toured several Chinese factories, observing the

transformations wrought by the CR. At the time of his visit, the General

Knitwear Factory in Beijing was run by a party committee subject to

elections. The party committee had been abolished in 1966, Bettelheim

observed, but was reinstated in 1969 after the ultra-left had been

crushed. Below the party committee lay a revolutionary committee built

along the three-in-one model, which “implement[ed] the revolutionary

line as defined by the party committee.” The two leadership groups were

closely entwined, with “the leading members of the party committee” also

serving as “the leading members of the revolutionary committee.”[192]

Aside these bodies stood an assortment of “worker management teams,” the

only groups in the factory composed entirely of workers and elected by

the workers. The teams had been formed in February 1969 as a way for

workers to critique “unreasonable rules,”[193] and were intended to “act

as a control” on the other bodies. However, Bettelheim was informed,

“the viability of the workers’ management teams” was “still under

discussion” at the time of his visit.[194] In contrast to Bettelheim’s

warm assessment of production relations in China, his own evidence

points in a negative direction. By 1971, the party had re-established

control over production. Party committees had been reinstated in

factories across China, superseding the three-in-one committees that had

themselves coopted worker insurgency just a few years before.[195] All

worker management teams were placed under the control of the ACFTU in

1973.[196]

In the international arena, the CCP began to act more and more like a

selfinterested capitalist state. After Mao established regular

diplomatic relations with the U.S. to ward off Soviet military threats,

he came to view Soviet “social imperialism” as the main threat to world

socialism, and embraced a “Three Worlds” theory that considered the

unaligned Third World the main revolutionary force on the planet. With

this orientation the CCP pursued a disastrous foreign policy. In 1971,

the Chinese government lent military support to the Sri Lankan state

against a Trotskyist uprising, killing thousands. The same year, it

opposed the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, in order to avoid

the formation of a Soviet-oriented state to its west. In 1973, the

Chinese government rushed to recognize the new Pinochet regime, after

the Soviet- and Cuban- oriented Allende government was overthrown in a

coup. In 1975 it supported UNITA, an Angolan political party also backed

by the U.S. and the apartheid regime in South Africa, in order to

prevent Soviet-oriented MPLA guerillas from gaining power in the Angolan

civil war. Even as the Chinese state drifted toward its own brand of

“social imperialism,” Mao never launched a campaign to criticize the

party’s foreign policy.

Domestically, mass enthusiasm for CR mobilizations waned. Mass

dissatisfaction culminated in the “April Fifth Movement” of 1976, when

crowds mourning the death of Zhou Enlai in cities across the country

transformed their marches into demonstrations against the CRG.[197] It

is a measure of the failure of the CR “ultra left” that the 1976

protests were not channeled in a revolutionary direction. Instead, when

Mao died in September 1976, his successor Hua Guofeng easily arrested

the central leadership of the CRG (Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, Zhang

Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, referred to as the “Gang of

Four”) as the Chinese working class sat on the sidelines. Two years

later, a newly-rehabilitated Deng Xiaopeng rose to power, and instituted

a sweeping series of capitalist reforms. The Maoist era was over.

The CR demonstrated the internal incoherence of the politics Mao had

developed from the Yan’an period through the Sino-Soviet split. Unclear

as to the source of class conflicts in state capitalist society, Mao

posed the movement in terms of “rebels” against a “handful” of

capitalist roaders and their allies. These terms ultimately proved

incoherent, and led to waves of factionalization as each “side” in the

CR proved internally contradictory, and the class content of the

movements emerged. Though he was committed in theory to revolutionizing

Chinese society through mass mobilization, Mao nonetheless prevented

movements from developing their own autonomous capacity to govern

society and overthrow the state. Mao’s in 1968 was just as vacillating

in 1957. Once again, his actions culminated in a handover of power to

the right.

The left wing groups of the CR, on the other hand, were hampered by

their close relationship to state power. CR groups were launched to

prominence with material support from above, and lacked the ability to

maintain momentum and organization in antagonism with the state. CR

groups took the majority of their theoretical categories and frames of

reference from Mao and the party leadership, and only haltingly

developed their own independent analysis of the situation. Lacking

theoretical clarity as to who their friends and enemies were, most

groups had only a vague idea of the tasks ahead, and were ill-prepared

for the state to turn against them. Many groups thus fragmented and

dissolved in the face of repression, in an opportunistic scramble for

support from the CRG. Despite the visionary achievements of the young

militants of the “ultra left,” the movement they championed was crushed.

The end of the CR was the breaking point of Maoist politics. Carried to

their extreme, Mao’s simultaneous commitments to Stalinist assumptions

and mass mobilization against capitalist restoration led to a dead end.

The price of this failure was thousands injured and killed, thousands

more confused and demoralized, and capitalist exploitation for decades

to come.

Conclusion

Between the founding of the CCP in 1921, and the death of Mao in 1976,

lay five decades of struggle and politics that shaped the 20^(th)

century. Today’s revolutionaries have much to learn—positive and

negative—from the struggles of the Chinese proletariat and peasantry,

CCP party cadres and military units, and the actions of the CCP

leadership. This piece has merely scratched the surface of such an

investigation. However, it’s now possible to make a few generalizations

about the conditions that generated Mao’s theory, strategy and politics,

and the applicability of that theory, strategy and politics today.

26. Where Did Maoism Come From?

A distinctly “Maoist” politics first emerged in the 1930s, as a

theoretical and practical critique of the Soviet Union. In this period

Mao and his allies established a method of rural “people’s war,” and

developed their own revolutionary strategy for semi-colonial context

such as China.

Mao’s philosophy and strategy rested upon Stalinist assumptions:

“Socialism in one country” was not a tragic necessity imposed by the

failure of the world revolution, but was assumed as a goal to be prized

and pursued. Nationalization and state capitalism were considered

unproblematic methods with which to develop peripheral countries, after

first winning leadership in the nationalist struggle through the use of

a united front, carrying out a “New Democratic” revolution in tandem

with the national bourgeoisie, and gradually replacing the latter at the

head of the economy. Because the party was viewed as the container of

the historical experience and ultimate interests of the proletariat, its

right and ability to constrain the demands of women, arbitrate between

the proletariat and its class enemies, muzzle autonomous class movement,

and direct an exploitative economic structure, was assumed without

question. Work methods such as the mass line, while departing from the

usual practice of Stalinist parties, did not challenge these fundamental

assumptions.

Mao synthesized his understanding of the philosophy of dialectical

materialism in the 1930s, and added his own contributions. Here too, Mao

retained a fundamentally Stalinist set of assumptions. Mao drew heavily

from Soviet philosophical orthodoxy, adopting a view of dialectics that

under-emphasizes the active role of thought in practice, and embraces a

form of reductive materialism that equates revolutionary politics with

natural science. His additions to his system of dialectics, while not

particularly dialectical, provided useful tools for developing political

strategies over the coming years.

As Mao carried out this strategy in the 1950s, he faced new practical

and theoretical challenges, prompting him to develop ever more

contradictory ideas. On the one hand, Mao grew increasingly critical of

the Soviet Union: Khrushchev’s transparent imperialist hubris, and his

accommodation of the West, flew in the face of the most basic tenets of

revolutionary Marxism. Disturbing revelations over the abuses of Stalin,

and backlash in the form of Polish dissidence and the Hungarian

Revolution, further drew into question the nature of the Soviet state,

economy and society. Mao thus embraced the strategy of mass

mobilizations and public criticisms developed in Yan’an, as a way to

liberalize Chinese society, avoid Soviet “commandism,” and place

“politics in command” of Chinese society and production.

Yet on the other hand, Mao remained committed to the very Stalinist

assumptions that generated the ills he sought to avoid. He still

believed socialism was attainable within the bounds of a single nation

state; that an economic system based on nationalization, waged work and

accumulation was the appropriate method to achieve this goal; and that

the stability of the Chinese state and the rule of the communist party

were sacrosanct. Mao therefore supported Soviet repression in Hungary,

enacted the Anti-Rightist crackdown at the zenith of the Hundred Flowers

campaign, and doggedly pursued the Great Leap Forward even as the

project collapsed, at great cost to human life. The failures of these

initiatives sent Mao into a period of political isolation, during which

he further developed his theories and critiques.

Amid the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, Mao came to view social

conflicts under socialism as a battle between the “communist road” and

capitalist restoration. While Mao still could not accept that state

socialist regimes constituted class societies, he did believe class

struggles continued under socialism in some form. In Mao’s view,

socialist society had to contend for an extended period with members of

the old ruling classes that had been overthrown, and leftover ideas from

the old society, both of which would lead to the degeneration of

socialism if left unchecked. This had been the fate of the USSR, Mao

reasoned, and it was the ultimate destiny of his opposition within the

CCP. Thus Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, to

defend China against what he considered an impending bourgeois

restoration, and to return himself and his allies to full control of the

state.

The ensuing rupture unleashed a class struggle Mao was ill-prepared to

confront. Over the course of grueling factional conflicts and

cooptation, the Chinese proletariat grew ever more aware of its

capacities and tasks, and came to challenge the party itself for control

of society. Mao responded by crushing the autonomous proletarian

movement he had unloosed, just as he had in 1957 during the Hundred

Flowers campaign. The young militants of the Cultural Revolution,

visionary though they were, were no match for the state. The “ultra

left” groups lacked a shared, coherent understanding of their class

position, goals and strategies, as well as a set of viable independent

organizations, and were thus easily intimidated and dispersed. With

their defeat, the insurrectionary period of the Cultural Revolution was

brought to a close. Mao’s wing of the party continued the Cultural

Revolution through the mid-1970s, but their efforts faced growing

popular abstention. With Mao’s death, the right wing of the CCP was free

to take control of the country, and institute a range of openly

capitalist reforms.

Mao’s politics thus proved as incoherent in practice as in theory. The

CCP purported to represent the proletarian leadership of the Chinese

revolution, yet for most of its formative years had almost no base among

Chinese workers. From the beginning, the party placed itself outside and

above the oppressed and exploited: first, by acting as an arbiter

between the proletariat and peasantry and their class enemies, then by

joining with these enemies as a co-manager of production, and finally by

assuming the mantle of the new ruling class in a state capitalist

economy. Though it aimed to overcome the USSR’s shortcomings through

mass movements of criticism and self-criticism, the party methodically

coopted autonomous self-activity, and repressed any challenges to the

organization of Chinese society. Mao aimed to prevent capitalist

restoration, but ultimately strengthened the forces of capitalist

exploitation, and prevented the emergence from within Chinese society of

any force capable of challenging it.

Mao’s theory of capitalist degeneration in the USSR was built from a

theoretical patchwork, which aimed to prop up Stalin’s fundamental

assumptions while grappling with Soviet failures and mass resistance to

the Soviet regime. During the Cultural Revolution this theory failed to

provide the proletariat with a clear assessment of its position, goals

and strategies—of its friends and enemies. Instead it led to confusion,

weakness, demoralization and defeat. However sincere Mao may have been

as an individual, he failed at crucial moments to carry out the tasks of

those who call themselves revolutionaries. He did not defend movements

that criticized the party from a revolutionary perspective. He did not

split with his party when it turned against the proletariat, whether in

1927, the 1940s, 1957, or 1967. He did not offer to the masses in motion

a clear analysis of the forces with which they were contending, of the

transformative tasks that lay before them, and of how these tasks could

be accomplished. He did not fortify and push forward class struggle from

within the ranks of the exploited and oppressed.

Mao’s Stalinist critique of Stalinism wallowed in incoherence, and could

only

lead to a handover of power to the more openly capitalist wing of the

party. Just as Khrushchev’s policies represented a fundamental

continuation of Stalin’s class politics in a more self-aware form, so

the capitalist reforms of Deng Xiaopeng represented a fundamental

continuation of Mao’s.

27. What Is Useful in Mao’s Politics Today?

Given this history, what use can revolutionaries make of Maoist politics

today? A full assessment of how Mao’s ideas have been taken up outside

China is beyond the scope of this piece. An anarchist communist analysis

of the New Communist Movement in the U.S, the Shining Path in Peru, the

Naxalites in India, the CPN-M in Nepal, the TKP/M-L in Turkey, and the

Communist Party of the Philippines—not to mention the scattered Maoist

groupings that dot Europe and North America today—must be written by

other militants. Nonetheless, here too it’s possible to offer a few

preliminary assessments.

When one applies a critical understanding of the Chinese experience to

Mao’s politics, his ideas are cast in a new light. “Maoism” now appears

unable to address its own tendency toward authoritarian state

capitalism, such that it ceases to provide a unitary body of

revolutionary theory and practice to those of us who desire a free

world. What remains is an assortment of strategies and work methods,

each of which, taken in isolation, possesses its own strengths,

weaknesses and blind spots, and each of which may be evaluated in turn.

Some of Mao’s formulations so clearly presuppose a Stalinist model that

they are of little use to us today. For concepts such as “New Democracy”

to have any meaning in practice, for example, they require us to assume

a set of conditions and strategic priorities that are antithetical to

the goal of a free anarchist and communist society. Other concepts are

more innocuous, as they have been applied in a variety of different ways

and contexts within the Maoist tradition itself. Below is a brief

“balance sheet” of some of the central concepts of Mao’s thought.

United Front: Mao conceives of the united front as an alliance with

progressive sections of the bourgeoisie. While the terms of the united

front are enforced by the party upon its base, the party nonetheless

retains its own organizational autonomy, and takes a leading role in the

alliance itself. Mao’s is just one of many united front concepts in the

communist tradition, all of which provide a wealth of frameworks to

conceive of alliances with different class forces. However, Mao’s

conception leaves unanswered two vital questions: First, what kind of

temporary alliances are possible with classes whose interests are not

only different from those of the proletariat, but are based on a

relationship of exploitation with it? Second, what are the costs and

benefits of enforcing the terms of a tactical alliance, struck by a

revolutionary organization, on that organization’s class base?

For Mao, both questions were foregone conclusions, because he viewed the

party as the representative of the proletariat’s ultimate interests,

which could thus enter into all manner of alliances, and constrain class

struggle, without error. These positions guaranteed victory over Japan

and later the KMT, but also compelled the party to contain agrarian

revolution in its own territories, and turn itself into a force

dominating over the classes it purported to represent. Today’s

revolutionaries cannot afford to make the same mistakes.

New Democracy: The notion of “New Democracy” presupposes an effort to

win state power in an underdeveloped context, and gradually supplant the

national bourgeoisie at the head of a state capitalist economy. This

strategy has been proven disastrous, by inevitably generating a “red

bourgeoisie” from the exploitative relations of production it seeks to

implement. On this basis alone, New Democracy must be rejected. Yet it’s

also unclear whether the categories upon which the strategy is

constructed are even applicable to contemporary conditions. In the first

place, the Soviet Union no longer exists, thus denying the theory of

“New Democracy” the world-historic force it believed enabled the

transition from a “bourgeois democratic” revolution to socialism. But

more importantly, the very notion that a national bourgeoisie will side

with a nationalist struggle, and develop the nation’s economy before

being replaced, presupposes that national bourgeoisies will behave today

in the same manner they were said to behave in the 1920s by Stalin and

the Comintern.

Today the configuration of finance capital, monopoly trusts, global

production chains, and state military power is dramatically different

from the exclusionary colonial empires of the early 20^(th) century.

Former colonial zones are now formally independent, with access to a far

more integrated global financial market than the protectionist

imperialist blocs of a century ago. Under these conditions, the

bourgeoisies of underdeveloped countries are more inclined to affiliate

as “junior partners” in a global production regime—as those of the Asian

“tigers,” India, Brazil, and many others have done—than to pursue a

program of protectionist state development. A “national bourgeoisie” of

the sort presupposed by Mao, sympathetic to nationalist struggles led by

socialist forces, may no longer exist.

Dialectics: Philosophically, the same reductive materialism and

empiricism present in the Stalinist tradition is at least partially

duplicated in Maoist philosophy. This feature need not lead to the exact

same outcomes as it did in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, one can

identify these elements at work in contemporary Maoist groups. For

example, many Maoist groups claim that Maoism represents an advance in

the “objective science” of Marxism. If the dialectic is a law of

physical matter, then every revolutionary theory “tested” and “proven”

in practice constitutes an objective and irrefutable advance in

scientific knowledge: just as Newtonian physics subsumed its

predecessors, so Maoism constitutes an absolute advance of Marxism. From

this perspective, it is no longer possible to be a Marxist without being

a Maoist. Such an application of Mao’s philosophy imposes abstract

schemas on the complexity and contingency of human history and social

practice, and tends toward dogmatism. This tendency cannot be fully

overcome without abandoning Mao’s conception of consciousness, and the

relation of the dialectic to mental, social, and physical phenomena.

Prolonged people’s war: Mao’s military strategies have not been

discussed in this piece. However, it is worth reaffirming that any

application of military theory must take place through grappling with

the concrete conditions at hand. Today many Maoist groups assert that,

as with other aspects of Maoist dogma, “prolonged people’s war” is a

universally applicable method through which revolutionary struggles must

be waged, in advanced capitalist countries as well as underdeveloped

ones. This approach duplicates the positivism of Stalinist philosophy,

and flies in the face of Mao’s own investigations in pieces such as Why

Is it that Red Political Power Can Exist in China?. By reifying one

historically specific form of politico-military strategy, this approach

can only deepen the uneven historical experience of the Maoist

tradition, so well versed in rural guerrilla warfare, and so

inexperienced in urban worker struggles.

Mass line: As a general approach to engaging masses of people,

soliciting ideas and offering them in turn, the mass line is laudable.

Though the concept was sometimes used as a way to impose a political

line from above, it fundamentally aims to allow a mass base of workers

to pose problems, questions and ideas to a revolutionary organization.

However, the concept fails to describe how revolutionaries should

“concentrate” proletarian ideas once they have been collected. Here the

mass line concept falls back on a fundamentally empiricist practice,

instructing revolutionaries to simply judge mass ideas “correct” or

“incorrect,” and bring to the masses a “correct” line. Revolutionaries

today must make use of a more nuanced understanding of consciousness,

viewing it as an internally contradictory interpretation of a

contradictory social reality. This latter approach—present in the

writings of Marxists from Gramsci to C.L.R. James—must be added to any

application of the mass line, in order to avoid its Stalinist pitfalls.

Different types of contradictions: Mao’s distinctions between primary

and secondary contradictions, and between antagonistic and

non-antagonistic contradictions, have been usefully applied by many

militants in analyzing relationships between classes or movements in a

given political terrain. Huey P. Newton, for example, employed the

concept to advocate for a “non-antagonistic” relationship with the

women’s liberation and gay liberation movements in 1970.[198] As tools

to help revolutionaries conceptualize the different kinds of

relationships possible between classes and power blocs, or the differing

importance of various social conflicts, Mao’s categories may be

similarly useful to revolutionaries today. Nonetheless, little in these

concepts need be considered “dialectical” in the philosophical sense of

the term. As “dialectics,” they lack an understanding of the necessary

self-movement of contradictions, and the negation of one term of a

contradiction by another. Rather than taking Mao’s terms as

philosophical concepts, they might more fruitfully compared, contrasted

and combined with elements of military strategy, political science or

game theory.

Class struggle under socialism: The notion of “class struggle under

socialism” is beset by the problems of Mao’s thinking in the 1950s and

1960s. At first glance, the concept boldly asserts that “class struggle”

continues under state socialist regimes. Yet at the same time, it

refuses to recognize state socialist regimes as class societies built

upon exploitative class relations, and it considers party rule under

state socialism synonymous with a “dictatorship” of the proletariat

itself. As a result, “class struggle under socialism” in the Maoist

tradition merely refers to an ongoing struggle after a state socialist

revolution, against leftover reactionary ideas and particular groups of

people (such as members of deposed classes, or handfuls of corrupt

officials). It does not aim to transform the relations of production or

smash the state, because it assumes these tasks have already been

largely accomplished. It presupposes that party rule is the sole

guarantor of continued socialist development, rather than a measure of

the proletariat’s failure to govern itself. Thus, it assumes party rule

must be defended even while engaging in “class struggle.” This

perspective is useless to revolutionaries who wish to learn from the

tragedies of the 20^(th) century.

If “class struggle under socialism” means simply that social conflicts

continue after a revolution, including struggles against deposed ruling

groups and prejudices or inequalities, then it merely recapitulates a

well-accepted platitude, while ignoring the problem of the class

relations generated by state socialist regimes throughout history. If,

on the contrary, the concept proposes to address the existence of

classes in what have been called socialist societies, then it does so

while denying the existence of these very classes, and offering no tools

to analyze the basis of their reproduction. The concept of “class

struggle under socialism,” a central part of the Maoist conception of

socialist transition, must be jettisoned by today’s revolutionaries as

an incoherent and unhelpful formulation. In its place, revolutionaries

can employ the concept of class struggle itself. Two-line struggle: Mao

developed the notion of “two line struggle” to explain how bourgeois

interests were being expressed within the CCP. Yet the Maoist tradition

refuses to recognize that this phenomenon was ultimately a result of the

party’s position at the head of a capitalist society. As a result, the

tradition has little idea what causes bourgeois politics to emerge in a

given group, believing it to be a universal phenomenon in all

revolutionary organizations, of whatever size, in whatever relation to

the state. This slippage casts all internal debates in revolutionary

groups as a battle between fundamentally opposed class positions, and

tends to degrade democratic discussion. In contrast with most other

conceptions of revolutionary democracy, Mao’s concept implies that some

perspectives within a given organization must not only be incorrect or

incomplete, but reactionary. Maoist militants thus often read

crypto-revisionism into each other’s arguments, and denounce each

other’s positions as a “bourgeois line.” To avoid these sectarian

outcomes, revolutionaries today must abandon the two-line struggle

concept as an approach to internal debates. It might still be fruitfully

applied, however, as a means to analyze debates occurring in formerly

revolutionary groups that find themselves in command of unions,

nonprofits, or political parties.

Politics in command: Mao instructed party cadres to put “politics in

command” when engaging with workers, overriding their narrow sectional

interests in the broader interest of revolution. This conception is

beneficial inasmuch as it challenges revolutionaries to avoid “tailing”

white supremacist, patriarchal or homophobic groups of workers. However,

the concept may equally be used to legitimate an organization’s

dominance over the proletariat. Mao used the concept during the Cultural

Revolution to denigrate “economistic” workers, while affirming the

authority of the CCP’s political line over worker struggles. In this

way, “politics in command” threatens to duplicate the authoritarian

aspects of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, substituting party authority in

place of a method that can draw upon with the contradictory content of

worker consciousness, demands and struggles. Revolutionaries today must

refuse the reactionary aspects of “politics in command,” and develop a

praxis that grasps the revolutionary horizons present within the

proletariat’s own contradictory thoughts and actions.

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For revolutionaries who aim at a free anarchist and communist society,

Maoism as a whole must be rejected. It may be possible to extract

particular strategic concepts, work methods, or slogans from the Chinese

experience, after subjecting it to a rigorous critique. However, these

elements must then be embedded in a set of revolutionary politics far

different from those developed by Mao from the 1920s to the 1970s.

A revolutionary movement today must pursue revolution on a world scale,

over and above the consolidation of a new social system in any

individual state. The spread of global production chains makes any

attempt to create a revolutionary society within the bounds of a single

state increasingly incoherent. Submerged in a capitalist world market,

and intimately reliant on commodity production from all corners of the

globe, no state will be able to develop a qualitatively new society

within its borders alone. The disastrous experience of “socialism in one

country” demonstrates that a global revolutionary transformation can

only unfold starting from a large world region, and encompassing some

portion of advanced capitalist production. Today’s revolutionaries must

certainly work to maintain and expand rebel territories that allow for

revolutionary activity, on whatever scale. But we must also cast aside

the illusion of building “socialism” within these enclaves, and maintain

unwavering and critical analysis of the relations of production and

reproduction operating within them. Our strategy must begin on the level

of trade blocs and hemispheres.

A revolutionary organization today must develop work methods that

recognize, grapple with, support and galvanize the self-activity of the

proletariat. This requires analyzing mass consciousness as a

contradictory interpretation of reality with real effects and

potentials, from which revolutionaries stand to learn even as they

contribute to it. This perspective stands fundamentally opposed to party

substitutionism and Stalinist philosophy. While revolutionary groups

draw upon the history of class struggle, and employ specialized methods

in the course of their work, they are but one arena in which the

experience, lessons, and consciousness of the oppressed and exploited

are crystallized and sustained. The potential for revolutionary

consciousness is carried in “good sense,” traditional community

organizations, subcultures and autonomous movements outside the

established left, and is not reducible to any one revolutionary

organization. Revolutionaries must develop a praxis that allows them to

contribute to mass struggles the ideas, methods and historical lessons

they carry, while seeking out, highlighting and building upon the

self-activity that the oppressed and exploited themselves display, and

which alone prefigures the new society.

Today’s revolutionary movements may find themselves waging struggles

with the sanction of sympathetic leaders in positions of state power,

whether socialist, nationalist or otherwise. Such situations are

unavoidable, and taking advantage of them is strategically necessary.

However, revolutionaries must always clearly identify to mass

organizations their class allies and class enemies, while developing

their capacity to operate autonomously from state power, defending this

capacity, and preparing them for the overthrow of the state itself. To

fail in this task is to stunt the development of independent theory and

organization among mass movements, and guarantee they will be unprepared

when their “friends” in state power turn on them. This lesson is of

particular salience to revolutionaries working under new left-wing

governments in Latin America, such as Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia

and Venezuela.

Today as in the past, a revolutionary movement must pursue a world in

which everyone enjoys control over the means of production. However,

this society cannot be brought about simply by transferring juridical

ownership of capitalist enterprises to a ruling party or state, which

then purports to represent the proletariat through a correct political

line. Such arrangements preserve capitalist relations of exploitation,

thus generating daily and hourly the capitalist value and social power

used to strangle revolutionary social transformation itself. A

revolution can only be affected by a farreaching transformation the

social relationships through which masses of people produce and

reproduce human life, day after day. This must be the goal at which

revolutionaries aim, and the standard by which we judge the changes

wrought by mass movements and ruptures.

Today’s revolutionary movements must prepare for the challenges that

follow on the heels every revolutionary rupture. As has been the case in

every modern revolution, a new society in emergence will be forced to

defend itself from internal enemies among the overthrown classes,

external enemies and hostile states, and from the ideological detritus

of capitalist society. However, the methods used to address these

problems must not contribute to the reproduction of class relations.

They must rather actively undermine class relations, and defend and

deepen the communist social relations struggling to reproduce themselves

on expanded scales. To the extent that capitalist relations of

production still exist in a given context, the presence of a specialized

repressive apparatus is a sufficient condition for their reproduction.

Revolutionaries must therefore oppose the development of any armed body

that may be directed to reproduce exploitation, and instead encourage

forms of mass, federated, armed organization capable of acting in

concert as well as autonomously. There is no alternative to the

anarchist thesis: the state must be smashed.

This path offers as many questions as it does answers. The revolutions

that burned brightly throughout human history now illuminate the

contours of a possible future society. By critically evaluating these

experiences, we can identify the dead ends that each uncovered in

practice, and guess at the possibilities that await us in the darkness

ahead. This task is replete with ambiguities and questions. If we are to

avoid duplicating the needless sacrifices of the 20^(th) century—those

of Maoism included—we have no choice but to pursue this task.