Nigel Harris Archive | ETOL Main Page
China & World Revolution
From International Socialism (1st series), No.78, May 1975, pp.13-19.
THE PROSPECTS are not at all grim if we look at the world as a whole rather than just one relatively poor country. And the world is one economy, not a number of national economies added together. It is one dominating imperialist system with different components. On a world scale, there is no shortage of resources or savings at all. On the contrary, they are superabundant in the advanced capitalist countries. There they search for ‘labour-saving’ equipment and squander capital in trivialities, waste the accumulated wealth extracted from the labour of the world working class.
But it is an imperialist world. The poor are forced back onto their own resources, forced to make a virtue of their oppression by the rich. The rich ruling classes of the West keep their loot. Yet getting that loot is the precondition for ending the poverty. Without it, each poor nation is driven backwards. The struggle for survival, for national independence, where the standards of national power are laid down by the rich, has its own logic in a poor nation. It forces a new exploitative division of labour, a new class system. The ability of imperialism to isolate the challenge to its rule, to lock it up in a few poor countries, ultimately forces those countries into the mould of class rule.
Internationalism is thus not an optional extra for the anti-imperialist revolution. It is not just rhetoric or a gesture of idealism or of quixotic virtue. It is the condition of survival for a socialist revolution in one country. Lenin saw this quite clearly when he argued that the workers’ revolution in Tsarist Russia – where the peasantry were the overwhelming majority – could not survive unless it sparked off a revolution in Western Europe where the working class was a majority. Then the German proletariat, spurred to make a socialist revolution by the example of their Russian brothers, would bring to the aid of Russia their support. Then the great engine of German industry would propel forward the backward Russian economy, without the necessity to pillage the Russian peasantry and increase the scale of exploitation of Russian workers.
However, the core of Lenin’s internationalism was the alliance of workers, the unity of different national sections of a world working class. As all Marxists accepted in his time, no other class had an interest in internationalism of this kind. For the bourgeoisie, the national boundaries ring its power, its area of privilege. Its attitude to the countries beyond is, if it is strong, predatory; if it is weak, cowardly. But in either case, it is absolutely opposed to relinquishing any of its rights to an international order.
For some of the middle classes in the backward countries, the national boundaries are even more important than they ate for the bourgeoisie. They hope to replace the bourgeoisie, to become a new ruling class. So they defend national power even more fiercely, denouncing the willingness of the bourgeoisie to trade elements of national independence for imperialist bribes. Like the bourgeoisie, the middle class is absolutely opposed to any idea of an ‘international class’ or workers’ power, even where the middle class is in favour of nationalisation and planning.
To develop without increasing the exploitation of its own people, China needs at least one revolution in an industrialised country, as Lenin’s Russia needed a socialist Germany. Without it, the energies, enthusiasm and ingenuity of its people will be squandered in the desperate task of irrigating a vast desert with only one small watering can among millions of people. The means to achieve the revolution abroad is an alliance between Chinese workers and the workers of the rest of the world, including the industrialised countries. This was the central purpose of the Comintern when it was founded:
‘It is the aim of the Communist International to fight by all available means, including armed struggle, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet Republic as a transitional stage to the complete abolition of the State. The Communist International considers the dictatorship of the proletariat the only way to liberate mankind from the horrors of capitalism.’
This was the reason for the foundation of Communist Parties round the world, to embody the world revolutionary aims of a world working class. Of course, the Comintern then was not what it became under Stalin, a means to force foreign Communist Parties to carry out the foreign policy of the Soviet state.
This is not to say that there are not divisions within the world working class, just as there are divisions in each national working class. The workers of the imperialist countries are in general richer and stronger than those in the rest of the world. As a result, they are in general less revolutionary. They have enjoyed substantial advantages as well as high levels of exploitation. The legacy of suspicion is not overcome until the workers of advanced capitalism prove their willingness to fight not just for their fellow-workers in oppressed countries because they are workers, but also for their right of national self-determination. In present conditions, that means the unconditional defence of all oppressed countries against attacks from world imperialism, regardless of whether they are workers’ regimes or not.
There is then a means to break the stranglehold of imperialism – by aligning the struggle for the national liberation of oppressed countries, the struggle of workers in those countries against their class oppressors, and the struggle within the advanced capitalist countries. Can China’s leadership undertake this? Is such an aim consistent with the absolute defence of national power, the belief that socialism can be built in one country and maintained by ‘peaceful coexistence’ with other national ruling classes?
Under the guidance of Stalin in the 1920s and of Mao since then, the Chinese Communist Party has believed that the struggle for national independence against imperialism could be separated from the struggle against capitalism. The workers were asked to subordinate their anti-capitalist fight to the need to carry capitalists in a coalition of classes against foreign imperialism. In the 1920s, that meant that at various times the Party had to restrain workers striking against Chinese capitalists who supported the Kuomintang – in the interests of the Four Class Bloc. When the alliance collapsed, the Party was driven out of the cities, losing virtually all its working class membership. This catastrophe might have provided the opportunity to reject what was an essentially Menshevik policy and return to Leninism:
‘The workers must open the eyes of the people to the fraud of the bourgeois politicians, teach them not to place trust in promises and to rely on their OWN forces, on their OWN organisation, on their OWN weapon alone’. (Lenin emphasis)
Mao did indeed rely on his own organisation, but in complete isolation from the working class of China. Politically, he continued to pursue a coalition of different classes, the Four Class Bloc. In the mid-30s, the Stalinist Comintern adopted the same line, known now as the ‘Popular Front’ against fascism. Implicitly, the working class was nowhere in the world strong enough to take on imperialism or fascism on its own. Mao appealed continuously to the Kuomintang to unite with the Communist Party, despite 1927, subsequent persecution and indeed open warfare.
The Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang |
Mao’s Party organised uprooted peasants, claiming that the Party ‘represented’ the workers of China. Worker membership of the Party was less than one per cent of the total up to 1948. Most political attention was devoted to peasant questions, and the Party implied that this was the real source of the revolution. They did not discuss Lenin’s consistent opposition to the Bolsheviks representing peasant interests:
‘In our opinion, there should be no Social Democrat [i.e. Bolshevik – NH] Peasant Committees. If they are Social Democratic, that means that they are not purely peasant committees; if they are peasant committees, that means that they are not purely proletarian, nor Social Democratic committees.’
(Attitude of the Social Democrats to the Peasant Movement, Selected Works 3, 1936, p.147).
The distinction between worker and peasant disappeared in Stalin’s hold-all, the ‘toiling masses’. For Lenin, the difference was crucial:
‘We support the peasant movement in so far as it is revolutionary and democratic. We are making ready (making ready at once, immediately) to fight it insofar as it becomes reactionary and anti-proletarian. The whole essence of Marxism lies in that double task, which only those who do not understand Marxism can vulgarise or compress into one simple task.’
(ibid., p. 144)
Mao aimed to become the peasant movement, as we shall see shortly. Before the revolution, the Party under Mao made no attempt to organise or develop work among workers except on the basis of drawing support from any source for the military struggle against the Japanese.
There were no Communist unions, and the Party did not summon a meeting of its National Conference of Trade Unions between 1929 and 1948. It maintained no Party organisations in Kuomintang controlled areas during the crucial years, 1937 to 1945, since this might have jeopardised the attempt at an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek. Rarely did it publicly oppose the Kuomintang at all. For example, it did not fight the Kuomintang’s brutal labour policy, which included the threat of the death penalty for anyone proposing or undertaking strike action during the war. The Party had much to say on agrarian questions, but very little on labour questions. What it offered was never any semblance of workers’ power or even nationalisation of the means of production, but government mediation between workers and capitalists in dispute. So far as workers were concerned, the programme of the Communist Party up to the revolution offered considerably less in terms of their specific interests than the manifesto of the British Labour Party in 1945!
As the armies of the People’s Liberation Army closed in on the main industrial centres, there was no rising, no strikes, like the massive Shanghai General Strike had greeted Chiang’s Northern Expeditionary Army in 1927. There were few Party units in the cities, and what there were, saw no role for workers in the seizure of power. The invading generals issued instructions to all citizens alike, to stay at work as normally while the army won the revolution on their behalf:
‘The people are asked to maintain order and continue in their present occupations. Kuomintang officials or police personnel of provincial, city, county or other level of government institution; district, town, village or pa.ochia. Personnel ... are enjoined to remain at their posts.’ (General Lin Piao, instruction before the fall of Peking and Tientsin, New China News Agency, 11 January 1949; see the identical message from Chairman Mao and Chuh Teh on crossing the Yangtse, New China News Agency, 3 May 1949. Both cited Gluckstein, pp.212-3).
Power changed hands with scarcely an active involvement of the mass of the people except in the role of cheering bystanders. Even where workers did seize factories in preparation – as happened at the Leinch’ang Iron Works, Tientsin – the army restored the authority of the management as soon as it took the city.
Once the Party was in power it adopted in essence the Kuomintang’s 1928 Labour Code to regulate discipline in the workplace. Strikes were officially outlawed – although that did not stop them happening – and compulsory arbitration introduced. Thereafter, whenever workers attempted to defend their interests, they were denounced for ‘economism’, much as Western ‘public opinion’ denounces strikers for ‘selfishness’.
The Chinese Communist Party and the Workers |
In fact the conditions of workers were improved. With a stable political order, industry and employment began to recover. The government made sustained efforts to stimulate businessmen to invest, as well as beginning the process of slum clearance, improving medical help, cleaning up the city and rooting out the gangsters.
But it was not the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, Workers’ Power, but a Chinese version of Social Democracy, of say – the British Labour government of 1945. The workers’ proportion of Party membership was very low. In 1951, it was 6.3 per cent of the total membership. It rose in the following years to reach 14 per cent in 1956, before dropping slightly to 13.7 per cent in 1957. In 1957, the proportion of membership classified as ‘intellectuals’ (that is, those of former middle and upper class origin) was 14.8 per cent of the total (the figures are from Teng Hsiao-p’ing, Report on the Revision of the Constitution, 8th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Peking, 1956, and Report on the Rectification Campaign, Peking, 1957).
The re-establishment of stable order did not end the class struggle. The regime tried to step up production through lengthening the working day, formal wage contracts, penalties for absenteeism and ‘indiscipline’, and speed-up. There were experiments to keep the machines running flat out – for example, through four overlapping eight hour shifts in the mines to eliminate the drop in production during shift-changes. The accident rate and the rate of sickness arising from fatigue increased, particularly because the regime has always opposed annual holidays other than the two to five days permitted for the Chinese New Year. There were also strikes, absenteeism and go-slows, as in 1951 and 1954. The People’s Daily regularly denounced these spontaneous revolts as ‘counter-revolutionary’, and demanded the fiercest penalties for managers or trade union officials who seemed to tolerate or equivocate about such indiscipline. A similar movement flared up in 1957.
However, much the largest explosion of worker opposition occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in the autumn of 1966, the strike wave culminated in the great Shanghai General Strike in December. The strikes spread to Kangsu and Canton (electricity, water and transport workers), to the railways at Harbin in Manchuria (the north-eastern railways stopped for ten days), to Chekiang and Shansi, to Kweichow (factories, transport), to the coalfields of the east, and even to Peking itself in January 1967 (see Cliff, IS 29, p.15, and Harris, IS 35, pp.19-21). The issues in dispute concerned not only the endemic conflict between permanent city workers and temporary rural contract labour used in the cities (the so-called ‘worker-peasant’ system), but all the common issues of exploitation and bureaucratic mismanagement that afflict workers everywhere. Some workers even set about creating independent trade unions under worker control; they were duly denounced by the bureaucracy as attempts at ‘guild organisations’ to express the selfish materialism of workers.
The movement could not for long remain politically neutral when the government spent so much time denouncing it for political crimes – for being subversive, attempting to restore capitalism, provocation by the ‘capitalist road’ faction of the Party or even by the Kuomintang and the CIA. But some of the worker revolt fed into the spirit of organisations denounced as ‘ultra-left’ or ‘anarchist’ – the Kweichow Worker Militia, the General Organisation of Revolutionary Rebels in Shantung, the Harbin Red Flag. One of the sharpest statements of uncompromising Leninist opposition to the Red Capitalist Class came from Hunan’s Sheng-wu-lien.
Sheng-wu-lien (Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Great Alliance Committee) |
A regime that, on occasions, greets strikes in other countries as a ‘rising tide of revolution’, at home treats them as reactionary. The full power of the state is brought to bear on any worker who fails to recognise that his ‘contradiction’ with the management is ‘non-antagonistic’.
It might be argued that in any case the majority class of China and the origin of two-thirds of Party members is a different exploited class, the peasantry. For a Communist Party which by tradition and politics claims to be the voice of the revolutionary proletariat, it is peculiar to have a majority of members from the peasantry.
Mao explains the peculiarity in this way:
‘As China has no political party exclusively representing the peasantry, and the political parties of the national bourgeoisie have no thoroughgoing land programme, the Communist Party of China has become the leader of the peasants and all other revolutionary’democrats, being the only party that has formulated and carried out a thoroughgoing land programme, fought earnestly for peasant interests and therefore won the overwhelming majority of the peasants as its great ally.’
(On Coalition Government, Selected Works, p.298).
The reality is less clear than Mao suggests. The countryside had its own classes, ranging from landlords and gentry through the rich, middle and poor peasantry to the mass of landless labourers. Not only was each stratum not clearly distinct from those adjacent to it, each stratum in essence had different and not necessarily reconcilable interests. To give land to the landless – which is what, above all else, they wanted – means to take land from someone else, whether rich peasant or landlord. To accept the position of the rich peasant was to deny the interests of the poor. In practice, the Party changed its policy to suit its needs in different areas at different times, whether this meant encouraging the poor peasantry (so that, on the promise of land, they might join the People’s Liberation Army) or ensuring the supply of food to the army by backing those with the largest marketable surplus of grain, the rich peasantry. For much of the time, this meant opposing the demand for a serious land reform or land redistribution programme, and restricting the demands to reducing rent (by up to but not exceeding 25 per cent) and interest on loans. The Party’s approach was in essence the same as its attitude to workers and capitalists – it attempted to:
‘follow a policy of adjusting the interests of both sides. They should not take a one-sided stand, either for the landlord or for the peasant.’
(source: Brandt et al., p.279).
As the civil war intensified, more landlords were inclined to opt for the Kuomintang and the People’s Liberation Army desperately needed more troops. So the Party made its policy more radical, but with the effective seizure of power, it drew back again. In 1950, Mao Tse-tung in his report to the Third Plenary Session of the 7th Central Committee described this retreat as
‘a change in our policy towards the rich peasants, a change from the policy of requisitioning the surplus land and property of the rich peasants to one of preserving a rich peasant economy,’
The Agrarian Reform Law (1950) attempted to put the ‘agrarian class coalition’ policy into legal effect (cf. Gluckstein, pp.85-88). It preserved the element of sacrificing the interests of the poor and landless peasants to those of the richer, and continued to do so until the Party led the movement for co-operatives, mutual aid teams and finally communes (which actually tried to abolish land ownership and the peasantry rather than meet the interests of any particular stratum). But even then, at each stage, it was checked. First, by the absorption of rich peasants into the Party and the transformation of rural Party cadres into rich peasants. Second, by the refusal of the peasants to relinquish their crops to the State. As Mao put it, the peasants ‘eat yams during the day and rice at night’, and ‘stood on a high ridge and blew the whistle’ (to warn them of the approaching official; cf. Gray, p.38).
The Chinese Communist Party and the Peasantry |
Officially, the ‘rich peasant system’ was finally scrapped in July 1955. The Party set out to unify holdings. The peasants retaliated. Between July 1954 and July 1956, for example, the stocks of pigs in China dropped from 102 million to 84 million, as the peasants strove to keep their pork out of the hands of the State (Hsinhua, 1, 1957, p.88-90). The Party drew back, permitting free markets in agricultural goods and doubling the quota of land allowed for private cultivation. By late 1957, the pig stock had climbed to 146 million, but grain output on communal land had increased by only 1 per cent. At that time, while the private share of land was not more than 7 per cent, it produced nearly a fifth (and in some richer areas, over half) of the total value of output. By 1962, in Yunnan, the private grain harvest was reckoned to be larger than the communal, and private cultivation took half the total land area. In Kweichow and Szechuan, in 1964, there was more private than public cultivation (Wheelwright and McFarlane, p.70).
The ‘rich peasant system’ survives in the commune framework according to the needs of the Party, not the interests of any particular section of the peasantry. In the Cultural Revolution, the Big Character posters listed the complaints of peasants – over the interest charged on loans, over prices and the government’s compulsory procurement of grain, over wages paid on the communes (said to be between 10 and 20 Yuan per month, in contrast to city officials who received between 500 and 1,000). After the Cultural Revolution the government needed to relax the drive to accumulate to damp down opposition in the face of the Soviet threat. It allowed, therefore, the ‘rich peasant system’ to be revived. Once again the People’s Daily praised the peasants’ private plots, saying they were definitely not part of the ‘capitalist road’ (22 October 1972).
The Communist Party of China has never been consistently in favour of the interests of one or other stratum of the peasantry. As in the city, so in the countryside, the aim of the Party is to damp down class struggle, not to fight it.
The Party was not, however, the creature of any other class. It was not given the opportunity of winning much support among capitalists. Most Chinese capitalism was in the areas of Japanese occupation, and what was left, clustered around the Kuomintang in Chungking. But it did not prevent the Party making the effort to win them in its policy statements.
The decay of the Kuomintang and the disintegration of Japanese rule gave it the chance to make policy effective. Between 1937 and 1949, the Chinese hyperinflation increased commodity prices 8.5 billion times over. It ruined the mass of small businessmen and much of the middle class. The impoverishment of the mass of the people and the destruction of war wrecked any market much of business might have had. Many lost any hope of surviving under the corrupt and incompetent Kuomintang. They fled to Hong Kong and further afield. Nevertheless many others had reasons for optimism. In the interests of the national coalition of classes, the Communists offered a stable business environment in which ‘honest profits’ could be made and the relations between workers and capitalists firmly regulated by the state. Indeed, the Party offered the prospect of expansion for both domestic and foreign businessmen. Capitalists returned from abroad to open their factories, merchants reopened their offices, and a new mood of hope gripped the business class. Officially, the regime distinguished between ‘national’ and ‘compradore’ capitalism, but in practice anybody who accepted the new regime was ‘patriotic’ and ‘democratic’.
The Chinese Communist Party and the Capitalists |
The capitalists had no reason to complain. For, although later the state steadily encroached on their ownership in the interests of capital accumulation, it was always anxious to placate them. The government was particularly eager that the capitalists convert themselves into professional managers in the employment of the state. They could then not only continue to rule their enterprises, receiving a generous salary as employees of the state, they could also continue to receive interest and dividends on the capital invested in their former enterprise. By 1960, there were still some 300,000 merchants receiving interest on trading organisations, and an even larger number of capitalists in the same position. It is not clear whether they still do so today – they did so certainly up to the Cultural Revolution – for the government had guaranteed the payments in their lifetime, and for a short period, through the lifetime of their heirs. A whole stratum thereby was allowed to draw off the surplus of the labour of the Chinese working class through the good offices of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.
However, perhaps the concessions were all justifiable in the interests of the national struggle against imperialism? But there were also concessions to imperialism itself. The Party wooed the United States assiduously in the hope of securing its support against the Kuomintang (and with some success among the US officials in Chungking). It stated that it was not opposed to foreign capitalist operations in China, nor to economic aid from capitalist countries. Everything, from Mao’s viewpoint, was subordinate to the anti-Japanese war. Japan was the sole target, and other imperialist powers might be persuaded to assist the Communist Party in defeating it (including those arch-Far Eastern imperialists, the British and French). Mao put the point most clearly to Edgar Snow when he visited Yenan. Snow asked if the problem of foreign imperialism was finished once Japan was defeated, and Mao replied: ‘Yes, if the other imperialist countries do not act as Japan.’ If imperialism was just the Japanese occupation of China, all the Marxists were clearly wrong over the preceding thirty years, not least of all Lenin.
The Chinese working class had shown between 1925 and 1927 its capacity to lead both the class struggle in China and the struggle against imperialism. Despite its small size and relative newness, it demonstrated as much capacity to fight and provide a lead to the mass of the peasantry as had the Russian working class in 1905 and 1917. But the class struggle is unpredictable, it jeopardises the cosy stable relationships between established ruling classes. It brings to power forces no longer capable of manipulation in small rooms, forces that speak in tones and language offensive to those in the middle classes who expect by right to dominate the political scene.
The group which assumed and guided the fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party was neither worker nor peasant. It was roughly ‘middle class’ in origin – that is, its parents were from a number of different dominant classes (landlord, mandarin, merchant, intelligentsia), but the group was united as much as anything by having been students at the end of the First World War. The politics which guided it were those of Stalinism in the late 1920s. Stalin had destroyed the leadership of the Bolshevik Party in order to launch a pace of industralisation that required a savage increase in the exploitation of workers in Russia and the pillage of the peasantry. The leadership of the Chinese Party never acquired the traditions of Bolshevism that made it necessary for Stalin to purge the Russian Party in the Moscow trials to gain his ends. The Chinese used the inherited language as they wished, attaching it to whatever objects suited their purpose. The forces the Party mobilised were, in origin, from the peasantry, but that did not align Party and peasant interests. The soldiers were recruited after they had left the land, and were refashioned under military discipline; as Mao once put it, speaking of captured Kuomintang troops:
‘The Red Army is like a furnace in which all captured soldiers are melted down and transformed the moment they come over.’
(Selected Works, New York, 1, p.83).
Refining out of the pure patriot the dross of class interest was the key task in assuring the leadership of the Party, control of the army. The Party offered itself as patriotic leader, and mediator, manipulating what it defined as ‘non-antagonistic contradictions’ to the greater glory of the ‘nation’.
China & World Revolution
Nigel Harris Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 2.3.2008