MAOISM

50 YEARS AGO – THE PASSING OF MAO

The death of Mao Tse-Tung has been anticipated for many years in speculations over who would be his successor. Now it has happened and drawn worldwide attention to China. Ostensibly the interest is in the passing of a celebrated national leader; practically, it is in whether there will be changes of policy and how they will affect China’s relationship with the rest of the world.

The history of China since 1949 closely resembles that of Russia thirty years before. The Communist revolutions in both countries were the taking of political power so that capitalism could develop and try to enter the modern world. Like Lenin, Mao provided a figurehead, and as with Lenin, a version of Marxism was put out in his name to create a social vision to gain mass support for modernisation. The projection of Mao’s personality has been carried much further than Lenin’s; but behind this cultivated charisma has stood a ruling class strongly conscious of its economic aims.

The phrase for China in these conditions is ‘Mao’s China’, implying that his personal and political qualities have been the chief factor. The effect of this ‘great man’ view of history is to make it dependent on the emergence of outstanding individuals; but the opposite is true. Individuals are given opportunities by crises and the pressure of new developments, and these make them ‘great’. But for the 1939-45 war, Churchill would have remained an unpopular minor statesman. Napoleon was the product of post-revolution conditions in France. The rise of Mussolini and Hitler was primarily the result of the failure of social democracy in Europe and the effects of the 1929 depression on Germany. In some circumstances history appears almost to go looking for some nonentity or a lunatic to elevate into a ‘great man’.

Of course the day-to-day behaviour of individuals, once they have political power, produces effects of its own. But what makes them ‘great’ is precisely that their ambitions and whims are not incompatible with the wider requirements of the time. The shifts and innovations in Chinese policy under Mao have had a plain coherence in aiming at the achievement of world power status as quickly as possible.

CONTRADICTING MAO

On 10 October 1911, a revolt broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan which led to the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty, the Manchus. The Republic of China was established on 1 January 1912, with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president. When Sun was forced to step down, China fragmented into a number of regional units governed by rival warlords, but the party he created, the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang. remained the dominant political force.

Sun Yat-sen himself was basically a nationalist and republican with few concrete ideas as to the sort of society he envisaged in place of Manchu rule. He did have some vague notions, derived from Henry George, of taxing land values so as to promote economic progress. But quite apart from the fact that Sun was never in a position to implement his ideas, there was no possibility of such a policy winning support among the Kuomintang’s landlord backers. Sun’s successors in the party leadership, especially Chiang Kai-shek, surrounded themselves with at least the trappings of dictatorship. They evolved no true economic or social policy at all beyond general support for the status quo. This didn’t stop individual members of the party from becoming fantastically wealthy capitalists, ts but it did mean that industrial development was confined to coastal cities like Shanghai. In the countryside, where ninety per cent of the population lived, conditions tended to worsen under the Republic, with a growth of absentee landlordism and the partial ruin of home industries. The capitalist nature of the Kuomintang was seen in its vicious attacks on the workers, especially in Shanghai. Nevertheless. it was a landlord party too, and was thus unable to disturb class relationships in the countryside.

The Chinese ‘Communist’ Party was established in 1921. Its leaders claimed to be socialists and used much of the phraseology of Marxism, but when they spoke of socialism they had no conception at all of the working class emancipating itself by the establishment of a classless society. Instead, their ideas were stridently nationalist, with ‘the Chinese people’ (everyone but the largest landowners and those industrialists linked to overseas capital) seen as oppressed by imperialism and alien domination. Their political tactics were subservient to the aim of ending this oppression so that ‘the people’ could rule themselves and develop their own economy. Such development could not be anything other than capitalist, no matter how much pseudo socialist rhetoric was employed.

Errors
At first, following the instructions of advisors sent from Russia, the CCP concentrated on organising the small (in relative terms) urban working class, but with a distinct lack of success. One leader after another was forced humbly to admit his errors (though never the main one, which was that of following Stalin too slavishly). Meanwhile, at least one CCP member had come to realise that the way to power lay not via the cities but in the countryside. Mao Tse-tung had been present at the party’s founding meeting. By 1927 he was proclaiming the ‘revolutionary ’ potentiality of the peasantry, having seen that the way to disturb the rural status quo was not by ineffectual laws reducing rents but by getting the peasants themselves, under the party’s watchful eye, to dispossess the landlords. Mao’s policies received official sanction at the Sixth CCP Congress held in Moscow in the summer of 1928. The experience of the Chinese Soviet Republic in parts of Kiangsi Province from 1931 to 1934 showed that large areas could be brought under the party’s control provided that these were in the countryside and some land redistribution was practised. The Kiangsi era was ended by a Kuomintang blockade; the Red Army broke through the encircling troops and embarked on the six-thousand-mile Long March. They reached the northwest of China in late 1935, eventually making their capital at Yan’an. It was on the Long March, at a conference at Tsunyi, that Mao Tse-tung at last prevailed over his various rivals and opponents. He was elected Chairman of the CCP, a post he held for over thirty years until his death.

In Yan’an, the party declared war on Japan. Since the end of the nineteenth century. Japan had gradually been occupying parts of China. After taking over the important industrial base of Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese invaded the rest of China in 1937. successfully conquered the main cities and communication lines in the north of the country. Their aim was quite simple: to make China and its inhabitants serve the needs of expansionist Japanese capitalism by providing grain and raw materials. Requisition of food from the already poverty-stricken peasants was carried out with a quite ruthless efficiency and did much to drive the peasants into support for the CCP (Mao Tse-tung said as much himself). The CCP were able to control vast rural areas of northern China where the Japanese could rarely penetrate: by 1945 they had charge of an area of a quarter of a million square miles.

Civil war
After the Japanese surrender, there was a short-lived United States attempt at mediation, followed by a full-scale civil war between CCP and Kuomintang forces. The Red Army found little difficulty in defeating the demoralised Nationalist troops. Chung Kai-shek and his cohorts retreated to the island of Taiwan, having first removed there three million US dollars’ worth of gold and foreign currencies. Thirty years ago this month, on 1 October 1949. The founding of the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed in Peking by Mao Tse-tung.

The CCP had been brought to power by peasant armies, with a policy in the many areas already under its control of confiscating land from the rich peasants and landlords and distributing it to poorer peasants. Its attitude to private rural industry was one of protection and encouragement. Its support among the urban working class was small, while plenty of capitalists were prepared to stay behind rather than join in the flight to Taiwan; as it turned out, their interests were to be pretty well looked after.

The first three years or so of CCP rule were partly devoted to reconstructing the war-ravaged economy. The power of the landlords and of the lineages (kinship-based organisations especially strong in the south) was broken. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1950 paved the way for redistribution of land in favour of the poorer peasants throughout the country. The aim, however, was not simply to reduce inequality in the countryside: Lin Shao-chi said at the time:

“The basic aim of agrarian reform is not merely one of relieving the poor peasants. It is designed to free the rural productive forces from the shackles of the feudal land ownership system of the landlord class, to develop agricultural production and thus pave the way for New China’s industrialisation.”

The immediate follow-up to land reform was collectivisation, which was implemented in stages from 1952. First, resources were pooled in mutual aid teams, then forty or so households were grouped in a co-operative, and then from 1958 the communes were established as the rural economic and political units. Agriculture was now subservient to national economic policy. Under the Manchu and earlier dynasties, the landlords had used the surplus extracted from the peasants for conspicuous consumption or for the purchase of education for their sons, with very little being devoted to agricultural improvements such as irrigation works, and even less to commercial enterprise of any kind. Under the communes, the agricultural producers are proletarians rather than peasants, and the surplus is still there (forty per cent of production, according to some accounts), but it is now appropriated by the state by way of capital accumulation.

Enterprises
In industry, in contrast, there were no major changes in the early years. Most enterprises were left in the hands of private capitalists (though Kuomintang-owned concerns were nationalised). From the mid-fifties,s private companies were brought into joint state-private ownership, and then became wholly state-owned. The capitalists received fixed interest payments and often continued to work in their old factories as managers. The subject position of the factory’s workers was not affected; under the new state capitalism, sm they were still wage slaves.

And what of the results after the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolutions and the Gang of Four? Foreign capitalist firms are now allowed to invest in projects in China and take out the profits. The former private capitalists still constitute a wealthy elite. Unemployment is now admitted to be a huge problem. A bellicose foreign policy has led to the invasion of Vietnam. Truly, the aims of the CCP’s founders have been realised; China is no longer the plaything of other nations and has become an established member of the club of capitalist states. Much has altered in China in the last thirty years, but it remains a class society, with rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed.

50 YEARS AGO – WHO IS MAO TSE-TUNG?

It is the purpose of this article to show what Mao really stands for by examining The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (‘The Little Red Book’). This Chinese Bible contains extracts from Mao’s voluminous writings. There are quotes from his early works written when, as a guerrilla leader, Mao (and his Red Army) were such a thorn in the side of the Chiang-Kai-Shek regime, right through to the 1960s. Now Mao’s ideas are so influential in China that they actually do serve as the equivalent of religious dogma. (…)

Mao’s own words show that he is in favour of keeping the Chinese workers in poverty. In 1958 (nine years after the revolution!) he wrote:

‘Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank’. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing ’ (p. 36 — our emphasis).

It must be such a comfort for the poverty-stricken Chinese to know their leader thinks it is good for them to be poor. Mao does not make it clear that he thinks it is good for the leaders to be poor! (…)

To ensure that the workers are kept down, Mao can’t resist urging on them abstinence and sacrifice:

‘To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste ie, the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality’ (p.186).

If those words had been spoken by Wilson or Heath in crisis-ridden Britain, you would not have been surprised.

The similarity between Mao and other capitalist politicians is so striking as to make one rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the sight of people in the West waving banners with Mao’s picture on them and proudly calling themselves ‘Maoists’. Mao is just as much an anti-Socialist as his one-time hero Stalin was. They both have in common the fact that they successfully exercised a dictatorship over the proletariat in their own country. When workers throughout the world learn to examine the contents of the packet and refuse just to accept the label, the fraud of Mao Tse-Tung will also be a ‘Museum piece’.

WHO IS MAO TSE-TUNG?

It is the purpose of this article to show what Mao really stands for by examining The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (“The Little Red Book”). This Chinese Bible contains extracts from Mao’s voluminous writings. There are quotes from his early works written when,n as a guerrilla leader, Mao (and his Red Army) were such a thorn in the side of the Chiang-Kai-Shek regime, right through to the 1960’s. Now Mao’s ideas are so influential in China that they actually do serve as the equivalent of religious dogma. Perhaps when Mao does die, he will be made the first communist saint. His position after the Cultural Revolution was so secure that he was able to bump off his supposed successor, Lin Piao (not to mention poor old Confucius). When the veneer of rhetoric is stripped away, what has Mao done and said?

The first point to make is that Mao Tse-Tung has led a backward economy along the harsh road of advanced capitalism. He has also led the Chinese development into a military power to be reckoned with. We are not saying that there is not less famine now than before 1949, or that Mao’s regime is more (or less) oppressive than the previous one, or that technical advances have not been made. But at what cost in terms of human suffering?. As Marx graphically put in Volume 1 of Capital:

  “Capital is dead labour that vampire-like only lives by sucking living labour and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” (p.233, Lawrence and Wishart edition.)

It is not that the Chinese hero necessarily wants to be inhumane, destructive and oppressive to the Chinese people — it is that the development of capitalism inevitably results in poverty, shortages and deprivation for the majority. If Mao pursues the development of capitalism, he must also pursue the miseries inextricably associated with that development.

Mao’s own words show that he is in favour of keeping the Chinese workers in poverty. In 1958 (nine years after the revolution!) he wrote:

  Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank”. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing (p. 36 — our emphasis).

It must be such a comfort for the poverty-stricken Chinese to know their leader thinks it is good for them to be poor. Mao does not make it clear that he thinks it is good for the leaders to be poor!

So far as one can tell, the Little Red Book is compulsory learning in China. Indeed, the introduction in the edition still being circulated over here (ironically by the disgraced Lin Piao) makes it clear that the workers should commit the book to memory in order that Mao’s guidance can help them in their daily problems. The book proves beyond doubt our contention that nothing but capitalism is being developed in China:

  The spontaneous forces of capitalism have been steadily growing in the countryside in recent years, with new rich peasants springing up everywhere and many well-to-do middle peasants striving to become rich peasants. On the other hand, many poor peasants are still living in poverty (p.33—a passage written in 1955)

Mind you, even based on trying to develop capitalism, Mao’s book is full of meaningless twaddle. What sort of guidance do you think the production teams on the Chinese factory floor get from the following:

  “Grasp firmly.” That is to say, the Party committee must not merely “grasp”, but must “grasp firmly”, its main task. One can get a grip on something only when it is grasped firmly, without the slightest slackening. Not to grasp firmly is not to grasp at all. Naturally, one cannot get a grip on something with an open hand. When the hand is clenched as if grasping something but is not clenched tightly, there is still no grip . . . It will not do to have no grasp at all, nor will it do if the grasp is not firm (p.111)

Secondly, Mao has been largely responsible for the giant confidence trick that has been so successfully played on the Chinese workers. By using phrases referring to common ownership, “Marxism”, and that contradiction “Marxism-Leninism”, he has duped large sections of the working class, both in and out of China, into thinking that Socialism is being established there. The merest glance at the Little Red Book will suffice to show how far Mao is from an understanding of either Marx or Socialism.

For example, Mao thinks that capitalism in Russia has been overthrown. He says that in Russia capitalism is a “museum piece” (p.23). One can only wonder how this “Marxist” reconciles the existence of a wage system in Russia with Marx’s revolutionary call in Wages, Prices and Profit for the “abolition of the wage system.” He has even got the cheek to repeat that wretched reformist call for women to be paid equal wages to men (see page 197). He implicitly admits that women are not paid the same as men in China (and see also Socialist Standard November 1974). Women’s Lib fans of Mao, please note.

The whole principle of leadership is abhorrent to the Socialist. Socialism cannot be brought about by leaders but only by the democratic conscious actions of the workers themselves. Mao is firmly wedded to the idea of leadership and, one must assume, the benefits that go with it. He has, after all,l been the chief leader since 19,49 and the Little Red Book is riddled with statements about the importance of leadership (see, for example, p.106 with his talk of “squad leaders”). Incidentally, the book also points out that in 1958 only 10 million out of a population of 600 million were members of the Chinese Communist Party. Is it that the other 590 million don’t want to join or that they are not allowed to join?

In order to ensure that the workers are kept down. Mao can’t resist urging on them abstinence and sacrifice:

  To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste, i.e. the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality, (p.186)

If those words had been spoken by Wilson or Heath in crisis-ridden Britain, you would not have been surprised.

The similarity between Mao and other capitalist politicians is so striking as to make one rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the sight of people in the West waving banners with Mao’s picture on them and proudly calling themselves “Maoists”. Mao is just as much an anti-Socialist as his one-time hero Stalin was. They both have in common the fact that they successfully exercised a dictatorship over the proletariat in their own country. When workers throughout the world learn to examine the contents of the packet and refuse just to accept the label, the fraud of Mao Tse-Tung will also be a “Museum piece”.

 DOES MAO PROVIDE THE ANSWER?

Freedom and Necessity: An Introduction to the Study of Society. Joan Robinson. (Allen and Unwin. 128 pages. 12/-.)

This rather expensive little book by Economics Professor Joan Robinson certainly comes up to her disarming claim that it is “intended to provoke inquiry rather than to give information”, but as its conclusion is to hold China as a model for the future of mankind,d that is not good enough. Professor Robinson sees Mao’s China through rose-tinted spectacles but does not attempt to back up her claims with solid information or to answer the many criticisms of whose existence she cannot be unaware.

She covers an enormous range of subjects, starting with social groups in the animal kingdom and sweeping through tribal society, feudalism and capitalism, the Russian Revolution and finally Maoist China. Her particular claim is that “Chinese socialism is something new in the world.”

She writes:

The Czech reformers claimed to establish socialism with a human face. The Chinese have set out on the more ambitious course of establishing economic development with a human sense of values.

She then tells us that we shall have to wait twenty years to see “Whether or not humanity is capable of carrying out such a programme.” Professor Robinson is well aware that the same claims about human values were made by the capitalists who overthrew feudalism, by the Russian Communist Party in 1917, and by Labour governments with their so-called “welfare state”. Socialists did not have to wait twenty years to know that these were bound to be empty claims; socialists had the advantage of understanding the basic difference between capitalism and Socialism and of knowing that the state capitalism that Lenin proclaimed as the next step in Russia and that the Labour Party wants in Britain is not Socialism. Professor Robinson shows no such understanding: when she talks of Socialism, it is state capitalism she means. For her, Russia, as well as China, is “socialist”. She does not attempt to consider the proposition that the human values she seeks are unattainable except in socialist society as conceived by Marx and the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

She realises, however,r that she has to show China as being, in some way, different from Russia. She makes many references to the “mistakes” of the Russian government and its tyranny and cruelties, but how is China basically different? For example, in Chapter Eleven (“Another Way”) she describes how China has tried to solve its agricultural problems, but it reads exactly like a Communist Party description of Russia’s agricultural policies, including all the familiar features: state farms, collectives, and peasant holdings. In Russia these policies were imposed on the resisting peasants forcibly and brutally. Professor Robinson admits that the Chinese peasant outlook (as in Russia) “did not fit in with the ideals of socialism”, but she blandly tells us that the Chinese peasants “agree” with what the government does to them and accept it “with goodwill”. She gives no evidence for this. She might tell us if the Chinese government allows peasants (and workers) freely to make their own decisions and form their own political parties to further them, and if not,ot why not.

When the Conservative M.P., Sir Fitzroy McLean, went to China in 1963, he said that he found there the same kind of inequalities and privilege that he found when he visited Russia. He wrote:

   In China, as elsewhere, how you live and what you buy depends on how much money you have. And who, it will be asked, has the money? The answer, as in the Soviet Union, is: the privileged classes, officials, high-ranking officers, scientists, technicians, skilled workers and so on. But there must be added a small and peculiarly Chinese category: the Chinese capitalists. These, surprisingly enough, are the former owners of, for example, factories, whose enterprises have been taken over by the State and who receive annually from the State as compensation a percentage of the capital value of the enterprise. As they are also very often employed as managers of the factories, some of them are extremely well off.
(Sunday Times, 9 Oct. 1963)

Colette Modiano, the French woman courier in charge of a group of Western visitors to China in 1969, gave a similar account and instanced a manager in whose house they stayed receiving £13,000 a year as interest on the capital value of his business taken over in 1956. (Sunday Express, 28 Sept. 1969.) Does Professor Robinson ask us to believe that lop-paid Chinese peasants and workers approved of these privileged incomes, or indeed, were ever consulted about them?

Professor Robinson does not offer to explain the “human values” of Chinese armaments, including those weapons of mass destruction, the hydrogen bombs which the Chinese government claims it is now perfecting.

Among a number of references to Marx is one concerned with population. Professor Robinson says that Marx was right to criticise Malthus about population, but “unfortunately he drew from this the conclusion that growing numbers are not a menace to well-being.” She holds Marx, at least partly, responsible for the Russian government’s “dogma that family planning is contrary to socialism”. She gives no evidence that Marx held such a view,w and it is in direct conflict with his own assertion that what he held to be the laws of population under capitalism had no application elsewhere: “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.” Capital, Vol. I, Chap. XXV, Section 3.) Incidentally, Engels, during Marx’s lifetime, expressed the view that socialist society might find itself “obliged to regulate the production of human beings” (Quoted by Professor Lewis S. Feuer in Marx & Engels. Fontana Classics. (P. 32).

Professor Robinson’s book opens with a not-at-all original saying of Chairman Mao. She and other Mao admirers can now add to their collection of his sayings the most recent of all: he sent greetings to Queen Elizabeth II on her birthday!

 MARXISM VERSUS MAOISM

 

Beliefs in Society: The Problems of Ideology by Nigel Harris (Watts, 15s.)

Once you’ve ploughed through the first three analytical chapters, written in the almost incomprehensible language that is associated more with New Left Review than International Socialism (which Harris edits), this is a very good book.

Harris starts his analysis from the materialist conception of history (“which identifies social classes as the product of a competitive struggle for scarce resources and a social division of labour: the most important beliefs within society are seen as related to this basic struggle, and thus to class”). Ideologies, or systems of beliefs, “relate to the arena of social conflict, to the purposes of groups competing for scarce resources”. They don’t come from nowhere and to no purpose. As examples, Harris takes British Conservatism. Russian Marxism-Leninism (so-called), and Asian, mainly Chinese, nationalism.

He shows how Marxism, originally a theory of the self-activity of the working class in the industrialised parts of the world, became “the conservative ideology of a new class society, a body of formalised doctrine designed to justify the existing nature of society and to leave complete freedom of action to its leaders”. The only criticism we would have of this chapter is that Harris plays down the difference between Marx’s views of the self-emancipation of the working class and Lenin’s advocacy of a vanguard party as a necessity even in advanced capitalist states. Indeed, Harris almost denies that this was a central part of Lenin’s political theory. But if it wasn’t, why did the Third International lay it down as an organisational must for all its affiliates? Despite Harris’ protests, Lenin did pave the way for Stalin.

Harris reiterates that for Marx, socialism was not “a tactic for forced economic development under State control” but a society in which the working class will have achieved its freedom:

  Now Marxists identified the industrial proletariat as the sole agency for achieving socialism (and therefore, socialism was only an appropriate aim in developed countries where the proletariat was a majority), not just because it was poor, but because of its role within the economy, because it sustained and developed the industrial economy by its own efforts, because it was concentrated and organised in the major cultural centres. It learned discipline and the advantages of interdependence, because by its experience it had the ability to run the economy.

Thus, to be used by people, such as the Chinese Communists, working in predominantly peasant countries, with no working class to speak of, Marx’s views would have to be revised. Inevitably, in a retrograde manner. In China the result was a theory, disguised in Marxist terms, very similar to the pre-Marxist Narodnik (or Populist) revolutionaries in Russia against whom Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin had argued.

  What would this “regression” entail? A belief that the intelligentsia plus peasants could produce a revolution: that revolution could create socialism; that ‘nationalism’ completely encompassed socialism, that the ‘people’ encompassed the proletariat, and that the local national struggle was the key to the progress of mankind; that the country concerned could industrialise without undergoing capitalism; that socialism was a peasant way of life rather than an emancipated developed society.

Li Ta-chao (see review of Meisner’s book in May Socialist Standard) began this revision,n and Mao finished it. It is interesting to note that for Maoists Marx’s “workers of the world, unite” has become “oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”

   Mao has revised Marxism to such a degree that it cannot really be considered to be merely a local “application”: the essence has disappeared. What constitutes revolution is not the most advanced urban masses securing their own emancipation by their own efforts, but guerrilla warfare by the least advanced rural groups, operating outside the ordinary social structure over many years, in order to seize power and begin industrialisation. A would-be ruling élite, dispossessed and alienated from the status quo within a decaying agrarian social structure, fits naturally into Maoism, although even more naturally into Castroism, which was not part of Marxism-Leninism in its revolutionary phase in Cuba. Activism and populism provide the dominant themes.

“Guerrilla warfare”, Harris points out, “takes us straight back to Narodnik thought, to the revolutionary minority seizing power in the name of the people—despite the people—to the traditional coup d’état rather than social revolution”.

This is exactly the analysis we in the Socialist Party have made, but we are more consistent. Such guerrillas are enemies of the international working class, to be denounced as such. Harris (though not in this book) gives them, e.g. the so-called National Liberation Front in Vietnam, “unconditional” support. Why? He’ll have to do better than say Marx supported some nationalist movements in the 19th century, for the simple reason that the 20th century is not the 19th century.

NORTH KOREA: CAPITALISM IN A MAO SUIT

The global system of capitalism takes various national forms, including the ‘state capitalism’ in North Korea that has been passed off as ‘socialism’.

North Korea presents an image to the world as a society existing in a sort of Stalinist time warp, embodied in the very appearance of its latest ‘supreme leader’, Kim Jong-un, who fills out his Mao suit with the same corpulence as his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, and even tops off the look by paying him a hairstyle homage.

The main development within the country that has gained the attention of the outside world is its nuclear weapons programme. But people’s everyday lives within the country are still shrouded in considerable mystery. A general lack of information about economic and social life in the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) makes it hard to know what is going on. And the government, which has not published a statistical yearbook since the early 1960s, is content with this situation.

Two important sources of information about the DPRK have been the approximately 30,000 North Korean refugees living in South Korea and the companies (mostly Chinese) doing business with North Korean firms. A book published this year, Unveiling the North Korean Economy by Kim Byung-yeon, draws on surveys from those two sources to uncover the state of the North Korean economy and ponder where it may be headed. The subtitle of the book, ‘Collapse and Transition’, refers to the period of extreme crisis the DPRK underwent after the end of the Soviet Union and to its current transition that the author views as a gradual shift from ‘socialism’ to capitalism.

Capitalism by another name

Before looking at some of the findings of the book, it’s necessary to say a word about the author’s belief that the DPRK is a ‘socialist’ country. For Kim, the state ownership of the key means of production, combined with the existence of central planning, is sufficient for an economic system to merit the label ‘socialism’.

However, as numerous Socialist Standard articles have pointed out, the nationalisation of certain means of production is simply a change in the form of ownership, not the negation of property rights to bring social wealth under the common control of all members of society. Ownership remains under restricted control, in the hands of state bureaucrats and the heads of firms. And since the aim is ‘economic growth’ (capital accumulation), not the direct satisfaction of human needs, as democratically determined by the members of society themselves, any ‘planning’ carried out under this system is geared toward that end.

The history of the twentieth century should make clear that nationalisation of industry and the existence of planning do not threaten capitalism in the least. What capitalism could not exist without, rather, are such economic forms as money, profit, wage labour, and commodities—all of which are present in the DPRK. So we cannot help but conclude that the DPRK is capitalist, not ‘socialist’ as Kim claims, although we refer to it more specifically as ‘state capitalist’ because of the predominance of state ownership.

Kim describes socialism as a ‘grand-scale experiment of an economic alternative to capitalism’ based on ‘human design’, unlike capitalism’s basis in the ‘natural evolution of society’. More specifically, he fingers Karl Marx as the culprit, who apparently ‘designed and initiated implementation of the ideal of socialism’, although Kim doesn’t specify where Marx presented his plan or in what country he began to implement it.

The editors at Cambridge University Press also let Kim get away with stating, without any reference, that Marx (who was anything but a moralist) ‘believed that capitalism was the “root of all evil”’ and ‘wrote’ that ‘central planning as the coordination mechanism can be designed to maximise both economic growth and social fairness’.

If Kim had read enough Marx to at least get his quotes right, he might have gained the basic understanding of capitalism needed to recognise its existence in the DPRK. Nevertheless, the facts on North Korea provided by the author confirm that fact.

A ‘plan-less’ planned economy

Even though the existence of ‘central planning’ is one of the reasons cited by Kim for defining the DPRK as ‘socialist,’ his book demonstrates that such planning has been limited and full of contradictions from the outset.

Kim argues that even after the DPRK, under Soviet tutelage, nationalised large enterprises and collectivised agriculture in the early 1950s, the leaders ‘lacked the requirements’ to establish a ‘fully working, centrally planned economy’ since they did not have reliable data on nationalised forms or the institutions and technocrats needed to direct the system. This situation grew even worse after the Soviet Union reduced its technical help and subsidies later in the 1950s due to worsening bilateral relations after Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin (denounced by the DPRK and China as ‘revisionism’).

Kim notes that the weaknesses in the DPRK’s planning capacity forced its government to rely on the mass mobilisation of the population to meet certain production goals. One example was the ‘Chullima Movement’ from 1958 to 1961 that sought to speed up production, much like China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’. Such mass mobilisations have been more common in the DPRK than in China, and the author views them as evidence that ‘the country is unable or unwilling to devise and implement coherent central planning’.

Adding to the confusion of planning is the existence alongside the central plans of the Juseok Fund and ‘on-the-spot guidance’. In the early 1970s, Kim Il-sung introduced the Juseok Fund to ‘ensure a sufficient supply of inputs for high-priority sectors’. The fund is administered by the top DPRK leadership and is used to ‘circumvent the bureaucracy associated with central planning’ and lessen its power. The fund is also related to the practice of ‘on-the-spot’ guidance, where the ‘supreme leader’ tours a production site and issues specific directives.

Kim points out how the arbitrary intervention by the supreme leader in the planning mechanism ‘actually disrupts the allocation of resources and production in accordance with the plans’ and is thus ‘incompatible with the centrally planned economy’. Firms prioritise the imperatives of the Juche Fund and on-the-spot guidance over the central plans.

The author uses the odd expression of a ‘plan-less planned economy’ to describe this situation, which suggests that the anarchy of capitalist production also reigns in North Korea.

State-owned, profit-driven

Just as ‘central planning’, upon closer scrutiny, turns out to have been chaotic, so do we find that the DPRK’s state-owned firms are by no means monolithic or exempt from the profit motive.

The author notes the many distinctions among the nationalised firms, which are ‘classified into several categories (i.e. Special, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) in terms of their size and their importance in the national economy’. There is also a distinction between ‘national’ firms that are ‘directly controlled and supported by the central planning body, and the lower priority ‘regional’ firms that belong to regional governments.

In addition to the various categories of firms, there are other distinctions regarding the state institutions to which firms are connected. As the DPRK gradually decentralised its enterprise sector, firms became connected to one of four state institutions: the army, the Workers’ Party, the cabinet, and the regional governments. The largest share of the resources produced in North Korea’ iscontrolled by either the Party or the army, which have their own affiliated trading companies. This disintegration of the economy into those four institutional sectors, the author argues, means that ‘central planning has been virtually destroyed in North Korea’—confined only to a few areas.

The decentralisation of state-owned firms was accelerated in the early 1990s as a response to the severe economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author lists four key changes that emerged out of the crisis: (1) ‘Implicitly’ allowing trading in markets, (2) Opening the DPRK economy to the outside world and creating Special Economic Zones, (3) Decentralising the planning process to the level of firms and districts, (4) Allowing firms to have more autonomy for decision-making.

Another aspect of decentralisation has been the liberalisation of foreign trade. Already in the late 1970s, the DPRK began to permit certain large firms to engage in trade with foreign companies. A second wave of foreign trade decentralisation in the early 1990s allowed trading firms to ‘plan and execute foreign trade for themselves based on their output capacity and economic conditions’. And the third wave of decentralisation, starting in 2002, made it possible for trading companies to directly sell imported goods to consumers.

According to the author, ‘the decentralisation of foreign trade meant the de facto destruction of the central planning system’ because the autonomy to engage in foreign trade ‘implied that central planning could no longer control all the activities of these bodies’. Apart from the firms in the Special category, which ‘are given inputs in accordance with central planning’, all the other firms ‘must seek their own means of survival’.

Existing alongside that ‘official economy’, wherein nationalised firms are scrambling for profits, is an enormous ‘informal economy’. The author claims that North Koreans earn 62.7 per cent of their ‘individual total income in the informal economy’ and obtain 59.7 per cent of their food and 67 per cent of their consumer goods through markets rather than the rationing system and official channels. Another remarkable characteristic of life in the DPRK is widespread bribery and corruption. The author writes that the ‘average spending on bribes in total household expenditures from 1996 to 2007 was 8.95 per cent, which translates into 6–7 per cent of GDP’.

In short, the closer one looks at the reality of state-owned firms, not to mention the huge informal economy, the clearer it becomes that profit is the driving force of production, as in every other capitalist country.

What was state capitalism?

The findings of Unveiling the North Korean Economy make it perfectly clear that the DPRK today is not ‘socialist’, probably even according to the author’s narrow view of that concept as centring on state ownership and central planning. But one still might wonder why industry was nationalised, and agriculture collectivised in the first place. Why, in other words, was state capitalism (or what the author calls ‘socialism’) adopted as an economic model in many countries?

It’s no accident that most of those countries were only at the outset of capitalist development, with huge peasant populations and little heavy industry. In other words, they were in a position not unlike that of Japan or Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. And just as the state in those two countries drove industrialisation, so was it a driving force of capital accumulation in China and North Korea in the mid-twentieth century.

The methods of the state-capitalist system were crude but effective in forging the material conditions and ‘human resources’ required by capitalism. But once state capitalism had swept aside the fetters to capitalist development and achieved rapid industrialisation, the system itself began to impede the ‘efficient’ (profitable) operation of individual capitalist firms.

In the Soviet Union, state capitalism was already reaching that impasse by the 1950s, as reflected in the economic reforms of Khrushchev. But the DPRK and China, still in the midst of their industrialisation, viewed the profitability of individual firms as less important than the pace of overall capital accumulation. Kim Jong-il and Mao Tse-tung denounced the Soviet leaders as ‘revisionists’ or ‘capitalist-roaders’ not merely to save their own skins as dictators but also because the contradictions of state capitalism had not yet become apparent in their countries.

Later, of course, the DPRK and China followed the same path as the Soviet Union, introducing similar economic reforms to give state-owned firms greater autonomy to pursue profit. Marx once wrote, in looking at the development of capitalism in his time, that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’. And this was the pattern in the twentieth century as well, with every state-capitalist country obliged to eventually implement Soviet-style reforms.

The DPRK leadership is walking the same tightrope, with even less room to manoeuvre because of its rigid political dictatorship. The ‘supreme leader’ and his cohorts recognise that providing too much autonomy to firms could undermine their own political legitimacy. And yet, in the end, even the dictator must follow the dictates of capital.

MICHAEL SCHAUERTE

COOKING THE BOOKS: OSBORNE, MAO, SAME STRUGGLE

It was a good idea to tweet George Osborne about his newfound love for the dictatorship in China to make the point that, when it comes to finding markets and investment outlets, ideology doesn’t matter. What does matter instead is the material, economic interest of the capitalist class, and that Osborne, as one of their governmental representatives, served this interest on his recent visit to China, despite it being a dictatorship and, to boot, one that (falsely) claims to be socialist.

But, in his response to Osborne’s 25 November Autumn Statement, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, fluffed it by choosing to quote from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and offering ‘Comrade Osborne’ a copy. What was he thinking of? He must have known that this would have been misinterpreted by a hostile media to paint him as a supporter of Mao, as one ‘Marxist’ quoting another. Of course neither Mao nor McDonnell are Marxists, and if anything McDonnell has been more of a fellow traveller of Trotskyism than Maoism.

The passage he quoted wasn’t very appropriate either. It was something Mao said in 1949, just after his party had won the civil war in China and assumed power there, about the need to learn how to run industries from those who had been running them under the previous regime (echoing what Lenin had said just after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia), ending with the trite punchline ‘we must not pretend to know what we do not know.’

Actually, the Little Red Book does contain some more appropriate sayings that could have been applied to the Tory government’s Five Year Austerity Plan. One section is headed ‘Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality’.

In 1955 Mao said:

‘Diligence and frugality should be practised in running factories and shops and all state-owned, co-operative and other enterprises. The principle of diligence and frugality should be observed in everything. This principle of economy is one of the basic principles of socialist economics. China is a big country, but it is still very poor. It will take several decades to make China prosperous. Even then we will still have to observe the principle of diligence and frugality. ‘

And again in 1957:

‘To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practice strict economy and combat waste, i.e., the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality.’

In those days there would have been billboards and compulsory workplace meetings shouting ‘Build Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality’, i.e. work hard and live on as little as possible. Maybe ‘frugality’ wasn’t the best translation of whatever the Chinese word was. A more appropriate one might have been …‘austerity’.

Hard work and austerity were what the workers and peasants of China got under Mao,o as their consumption was held down to build up state capitalist China’s industrial and military might. Since Mao died in 1976, China has evolved towards a more conventional kind of capitalism, with private capitalist firms, billionaires, a stock exchange and all the rest, but still under the dictatorship of the so-called ‘Communist’ Party. Not that that’s a problem for Osborne when it comes to doing trade and investment deals. Nor would it be for McDonnell if ever he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Labour governments too have known all about how to look after the interests of British Capitalism plc.

THE PASSING OF MAO

The death of Mao Tse-Tung has been anticipated for many years in speculations over who would be his successor. Now it has happened and drawn worldwide attention to China. Ostensibly the interest is in the passing of a celebrated national leader; practically, it is in whether there will be changes of policy and how they will affect China’s relationship with the rest of the world.

The history of China since 1949 closely resembles that of Russia thirty years before. The Communist revolutions in both countries were the taking of political power so that capitalism could develop and try to make the modern world. Like Lenin, Mao provided a figurehead, and as with Lenin, a version of Marxism was put out in his name to create a social vision to gain mass support for modernisation. The projection of Mao’s personality has been carried much further than Lenin’s; but behind this cultivated charisma has stood a ruling class strongly conscious of its economic aims.

The phrase for China in these conditions is “Mao’s China”, implying that his personal and political qualities have been the chief factor. The effect of this “great man” view of history is to make it dependent on the emergence of outstanding individuals; but the opposite is true. Individuals are given opportunities by crises and the pressure of new developments, and these make them “great”. But for the 1939-45 war, Churchill would have remained an unpopular minor statesman. Napoleon was the product of post-revolution conditions in France. The rise of Mussolini and Hitler was primarily the result of the failure of social democracy in Europe and the effects of the 1929 depression on Germany. In some circumstances history appears almost to go looking for some nonentity or a lunatic to elevate into a “great man”.

Of course the day-to-day behaviour of individuals, once they have political power, produces effects of its own. But what makes them “great” is precisely that their ambitions and whims are not incompatible with the wider requirements of the time. The shifts and innovations in Chinese policy under Mao have had a plain coherence in aiming at the achievement of world power status as quickly as possible. Like Russia in the nineteen-twenties, China in the ‘sixties had to put every effort into increasing agricultural production and speeding up capital accumulation. The slogans and mystical dicta of Mao provided a sanctified image of the methods necessary to reach these goals.

The “power struggle” expected after Mao’s death is a feature of one-party states. In nations with the traditional structure of parliamentary democracy, the struggles for political power are among parties with electoral programmes. Where this does not exist, the conflicts are among small groups and the individuals they nominate. This reinforces the idea of personalities triumphing through strength, though in practice they may be only puppets. In both cases, what are they struggling for? Political power means control of the state machinery which administers capitalism.

We know that whoever wins the American election is charged with doing his best for capitalism in the United States. The same is true of whatever political change takes place in China. The new figureheads, and whoever may depose them, will inevitably claim that they are the true heirs and interpreters of Mao. However, if Mao’s doctrines do not suit the future development of China, they can be revised and even rejected. The Chinese leadership twenty-five years ago were wholehearted Stalinists. The split was not simply a political one, but a realisation that Stalin’s own bending of Marx’s theories and Lenin’s viewpoints were not applicable to the situation in China.

As was the case with Russia, the leaders of other countries have realised what they are dealing with in China—a capitalist state differing from their own only in scale. In a China Quarterly essay reproduced in  China Under Mao (1966), Benjamin Schwartz remarked: “Among many Americans there is in fact the latent assumption that a fully modernised society will look exactly like the United States with all its social and cultural specificities.” The reactions to Mao’s death were particularly interesting since in the last five years the Chinese government has become amiable to the West. Thus, on television in Britain Edward Heath spoke about his meeting with Mao: a Conservative leader singing the praises of a Communist one. The American President said Mao “had the vision and imagination to open the doors to the United States”. The obvious interest of the western nations is in whether Mao’s successors will carry on this policy with its economic and military potentialities; while the Russian leaders hope for a change advantageous in the same way to them.

It is, of course, a tragedy that these developments of capitalism have taken place in the name of Marxism. Marx’s vision of “human society” has provided an attractive wrapping for power-seekers, and his unique analysis of the capitalist system has been used in the so-called Communist countries as a guide to exploitation. However, workers all over the world have the opportunity to find out for themselves what Marx wrote and meant—most of all, that capitalism in whatever guise cannot be run in their interests.

THE MAOIST INSURGENCY IN INDIA

The Adivasis, the original people of India, are among the poorest people in the country. Infant mortality amongst Adivasis (from adi meaning from the earliest times or Scheduled Tribes – of which there are 635 distinct groups) is 57 per cent, and child malnutrition 73 per cent (the national average is the highest in the world at 48 per cent), and 42 per cent of under-fives are undernourished.

The objective of the ‘Communist Party of India (Maoist)’, also called the ‘Naxalites’, is the armed overthrow of the Indian state and the creation of a ‘socialist-communist’ government. The Maoist insurgents do not consider the Indian electoral system to be democratic, but rather a tool that benefits the landlord and capitalist classes. The Naxalite insurgency (numbering around 20,000 armed fighters with 50,000 supporters) has spread over 40 per cent of India’s land area, encompassing 20 of the country’s 28 states. The seven most affected Indian states in terms of fatalities are Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh, in that order. The Indian state’s response to the Maoist challenge has been to send 81,000 paramilitary troops. In addition to paramilitary troops, the state has also used death squads known as Salwa Judum (SJ), meaning Purification Hunt. (The Indian Supreme Court declared the SJ illegal in 2011 and ordered the Chhattisgarh government to disband it).

The state of Jharkhand in eastern India is a main focus of the insurgency. Deep within the Saranda forest in the state (where Adivasis make up a percentage of the population) lies the world’s largest deposit of iron ore. The Jharkhand government has signed 42 Memorandums of Understanding with various large iron and steel companies. The mining giants are firmly in residence in the north eastern state, which is now a fully militarised zone, and there are over a hundred bases with a total of 50,000 official paramilitary troops involved in military action, plus the mining corporations’ security forces.

Says Indigenous activist Gladson Dungdung, convener of the Jharkhand Indigenous Peoples’ Forum:

‘The government has been helping in securing land, water, and minerals for the corporate giants through military operations. In Saranda in June, July, and August 2011, there were three massive operations: Operation Monsoon, Operation Bravo Boy, and Operation Anaconda. The security forces killed two Adivasis, raped several women, and tortured more than 500 Adivasis. They also disrupted the Adivasis food grain supply, destroyed the harvest, ate livestock, and destroyed all official identification papers of the Adivasis (ration cards, voter ID, land titles). The Adivasis were forced to leave their villages, and they only returned after our intervention. The result is that the government gave mining leases to 19 mining companies in the region, including Tata, Mittal and others.’ Dungdung goes on, ‘Today, we live in the corporate Indian state, not in a welfare state. The government makes all the laws and policies in favour of the corporate houses… The state is simply not bothered about its people. See the example of the state of Chhattisgarh, where 644 villages were forcibly vacated by Salwa Judum and handed over to corporations.’

According to Xavier Dias, spokesperson for the Jharkhand Mines Area Coordination Committee, the insurgents also attack Adivasi villages, extort money from mining companies, and protect the ones that are grabbing land from Adivasis. He says:

‘No corporate boss has so far been killed by the Maoists. When the Maoists call a general strike, those companies that pay levies to them are allowed to function, and the rest are attacked. I do not believe that a mining company can function here without paying levies to the Maoists. Jharkhand is the place from where Maoists finance their operations in other states, too.’

Xavier Dias, however, admits that ‘there are places where the Maoists are providing some good services to the Adivasis, such as Bastar [a town] in the state of Chhattisgarh ’. According to Al Jazeera, in many of these places the insurgents have organised the Adivasis and taken up community projects to provide services the government doesn’t. One village leader told Al Jazeera that the Maoists frequently visited their villages, and ‘treated everyone equally.’ Dias does not think that the Maoists are corrupt, but considers them ‘misguided’ and disagrees that armed struggle is the way to solve India’s class and Adivasi problems.

Dungdung is also critical of the Maoists. As far as my knowledge and experience are concerned, they are not fighting for the Adivasis. Instead, they have created more problems for the democratic people’s movement. It’s very easy for the government to call these democratic struggles Maoist and suppress them. I think the Maoists are part of the problem, not the solution.’ As Dungdung points out, ‘The government claims that its troops are there to counter the Maoists, but in actuality it is the democratic movements such as people resisting land grabs or fighting police repression that are intimidated into silence. By creating this drastic panic among the people, the corporations are free to suck out the minerals and forest resources.’

Some Adivasi groups have now formed their own resistance movements – in Orissa, for example, several tribes came together to form the Chasi Mulia Sangh, a 5,000-strong tribal land movement unconnected to the Maoists (they assert). Armed with traditional weapons, they are fighting for human rights and collective tribal ownership of their ancestral lands. They ‘claim they are caught between the two fires of an escalating Maoists/Naxalite insurgency and the government’s paramilitary backlash’.

Marx described ‘primitive accumulation’ as ‘The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.’ It is still going on. Capitalism is an insatiable monster as far as profits are concerned. Human misery is of no concern where the profit motive reigns supreme.

Sources: Maoist Insurgency Spreads by Asad Ismi; Land Conflict And Injustice: Development In ‘New India’ By Graham Peebles

MAOISM AS A CLASS SOCIETY: ILLUSION AND REALITY

Both supporters and opponents saw China under Mao as an egalitarian society without hierarchy,y but this was an illusion.

The image of Maoist China conveyed in the poster art and other propaganda of the regime was that of a regimented and spartan but egalitarian society, without hierarchical class distinctions. Curiously enough, anti-Maoist propaganda conveyed a very similar image: several authors, for instance, dehumanised the Chinese under Mao as “blue ants.” In accordance with its egalitarian image, Maoism is commonly classified as a left-wing – indeed, “extreme left” or “ultra-left” – ideology. The blatant inequalities of post-Mao China have served only to enhance the image in retrospect.

And yet the image was always an illusion, a meticulously maintained lie. The rich memoir literature that has become available since the “thaw” of 1978 begins to dispel the illusions and portray the realities of Maoist China. And one of those realities turns out to be a class structure that differs in detail but not in broad outline from that of the “old China.”

The class geography of Chongqing

In her autobiographical Daughter of the River, Hong Ying gives us a moving account of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a working-class family in the provincial city of Chongqing. She maps the local landscape into three sharply divided domains.

First, the hilly slum district on the south bank of the Yangtze River, where the author used to live – “the city’s garbage dump,” its “rotting appendix,” crowded with ramshackle wooden sheds and with hardly any sewers. The residents are mostly “coolies” – unskilled labourers; it is very rare for a youngster to pass the college entrance exams. So it was before “liberation”; so it was in her time; so, judging by the photos in the book, it remains today.

Second, on the north bank, the city proper. “The centre of the city,” she observes with bitter irony, “might as well be in another world, with red flags everywhere you look and rousing political songs filling the air [and] youngsters reading revolutionary books to prepare themselves for the life of a revolutionary cadre” – like the cadres (officials) who ridicule and humiliate her when she tries to get her father the pension to which, as a disabled sailor,r he is entitled.

And third, though she has never set eye on them, “the summer houses of the rich and powerful, hidden amid the lush green hillsides surrounding the city.” Here, it must be admitted, a minor change has occurred: “Once occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s closest aides and his US advisers [Chongqing was the Kuomintang capital in 1937-45], they now accommodated high-ranking Communist Party officials.”

Decoding the official “class struggle”

So China under Mao was, like China before Mao and China after Mao, a class-divided society. And, as in any other class-divided society, class struggle existed in various forms. However, the real class struggle between the real classes that made up the society was obscured by unrelenting official propaganda about an illusory “class struggle” (“Never forget class struggle!”) that was actually something else entirely.

In Maoist China,na the authorities assigned every citizen an official “class” label or political “hat.” A great deal depended on this hat, from political influence and social respect to work assignments and access to medical care – not to mention the chance of ending up in a labour camp or on an execution ground. Most labels referred not to current social position but to the alleged former status of the person or of his or her parents and grandparents in the old society. Thus, “poor and lower middle peasants” (“red” categories), “upper middle peasants” (an intermediate category), and “rich peasants” and “landlords” (“black” categories) were currently all collective farmers. The harshest treatment (justified as “class struggle”) and most unpleasant jobs were reserved for “landlords,” who became a hereditary caste of pariahs like the Indian untouchables.

The real function of the labels was to measure the presumed degree of loyalty to the regime. Party leaders in good standing, irrespective of family background, belonged to the “red” category of “revolutionary cadre.” Both prime minister Zhou Enlai and secret police chief Kang Sheng were sons of big landlords and Mao’s own father was a small landlord, but that did not count against them. Conversely, worker or poor peasant origin provided very limited protection to those who challenged party policy: a “class” label could be arbitrarily changed,d or the malcontent could be dumped in the catch-all category of “bad element.”

So we must decode the official “class struggle” as a continuing campaign to crush all actual and potential dissent. In official discourse,urse “proletariat”(working class) was a codeword for the regime (or whichever faction controlled the regime at any given time). When workers went on strike in 1966-67, they were accused of falling under the influence of class enemies wielding the weapon of “economism.” In other words, they were tools of the capitalist class striking against themselves!

The Cultural Revolution: a campaign against bureaucracy?

Many sympathisers acknowledge that China under Mao was a highly unequal society, but put the blame on Mao’s opponents within the leadership – the notorious “capitalist roaders” supposedly headed by Liu Shaoqi. Mao himself and those who helped him launch the Cultural Revolution were, we are asked to believe, fighting against the party bureaucracy for a classless society.

This “anti-bureaucratic” interpretation of the so-called Cultural Revolution is at variance with the official definition of its purpose. It was basically a brutal witch-hunt, assisted and supervised by the secret police, against anyone suspected of disloyalty to the “Emperor.” So intended targets did include many specific bureaucrats suspected of opposing Mao’s policies, but not the bureaucracy as a whole. True, in some places control over the movement was lost for a time, and Red Guards started deciding for themselves whom to attack. One organisation even denounced the “butcher” Kang Sheng, who acted promptly to isolate and arrest its activists. In Hunan, a Red Guard alliance called Sheng-wu-lien published a manifesto redefining the enemy more broadly as “the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie.” Denounced as a “counter-revolutionary” by Mao himself, Yang Xiguang, author of the manifesto, was jailed for ten years and narrowly escaped execution. (For more on Sheng-wu-lien, see http://www.marxists.de/china/hore/03-cultrev.htm. On Yang Xiguang, who died in Australia in 2004, see http://www.csaa.org.au/news11.04.html#Vale and his book Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution.)

At least since 1949, all top party leaders have lived and worked under extremely privileged conditions and in virtually total isolation from ordinary people. In Beijing they cloister themselves (and their servants) inside the Zhongnanhai complex, while in summer they vacation together at the seaside resort of Beidaihe. We get a sense of the unhealthy, claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere of this environment from the memoirs of Mao’s personal physician, Dr Li Zhisui (The Private Life of Chairman Mao). Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and other members of Mao’s faction were certainly no less privileged, corrupt, or cynical than his opponents. It is absurd to cast them as champions of the people.

The Red Guards appeared to be attacking privilege, but appearances were deceptive. First, they only attacked the privileges of those who had already been identified as “class enemies” on other grounds. Second, the net result of their rampage was merely the redistribution of privilege and property within the elite. Some individuals temporarily or permanently lost positions of power, while others – favoured Red Guard leaders and assorted opportunists – were elevated into the nomenklatura. The numerous antiques that Red Guards confiscated from well-to-do homes ended up not in public museums and art galleries but in storerooms where army generals and their wives took their pick — as did Kang Sheng, himself a keen collector (John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon).

Styles of capital accumulation

What then were the real policy differences between Mao and the “capitalist roaders”?

Any state capitalist regime must pursue the long-term goal of capital accumulation within the context of great-power competition. In this respect, there is no difference between Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-61) and the “Four Modernisations” of the post-Mao period. But there is an important difference in strategy and style of management. Mao, a romantic with a pre-scientific mentality, relied on unrealistically ambitious and consequently disastrous campaigns. Aiming to overtake Britain in steel production, he forced the peasants to neglect agriculture and build small “backyard” furnaces that produced junk, plunging the country into history’s greatest famine. The “capitalist roaders” wanted a more rational, steady and sustained strategy for the accumulation of national capital. Mao’s idiosyncratic impulses kept on messing things up for them.

What did Maoism mean for ordinary people? Some of Mao’s policies may have been of benefit – for example, the (now defunct) “barefoot doctor” program that attempted to make basic medical care available to the rural population. On balance, however, the modest positive impact of such policies was surely outweighed by all the suffering, repression, waste and disruption for which Mao was responsible.

Socialist Party