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p The anarchists resolutely opposed any form of state power and wildly preached against any authority whatever. The Narodniks, on the other hand, although they borrowed much from the anarchists, extolled men of authority, “heroes” able to liberate the hoi polloi. The Trotskyists constantly flaunt their intolerance of any cult of the personality. In China the cult of Mao has assumed a frenzied fanaticism. Here there is an apparent contradiction. But a comparison of the methods used by representatives of the different varieties of petty-bourgeois revolutionism show that they have many common features linked with the personality cult.

p The reason for these is not hard to see. Among small producers, lumpenproletarians, degenerated intellectuals, that is, all the social layers forming the social basis of petty-bourgeois revolutionism, outbursts of frenzied rebellion alternate with submission to fate and the hope that a “strong”, “just” man will appear and arrange everything as it should be.

p The Russian autocracy not only drowned peasant revolts in blood but also exploited the peasants’ naive faith in the kindness of the tsar for a long time. Bonapartism laid its stake on the small-proprietor, conservative instincts of the peasantry. Hitler also used the desperation of the petty bourgeoisie unsettled by the crisis and even some of the most backward workers, to strengthen the power of the monopolies.

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p In the history of social movements, there have been many leaders whose authority rested on petty-bourgeois backwardness and narrowmindedness.

p Marxism has always had to fight against the penetration into the working-class movement of illusions and morals alien to the proletariat, including some which prove a fertile ground for the emergence of the personality cult.

p The struggle Marxists led against subjectivism, which is part and parcel of all varieties of pettybourgeois revolutionism, was at the same time also a struggle against an exaggerated idea of the possibilities of leaders of the liberation movement. Subjectivism develops in leaders such traits as faith in their own infallibility and intolerance to opposition. This explains why people of very different stature, living in very different epochs, people not deprived of individuality, but dominated by subjectivism, acquired features of character which gave them a certain resemblance to one another.

p Among the representatives of pre-Marxian socialism there were many who claimed the role of prophets and were infatuated with their own teachings. Megalomania was a feature of many leading figures of petty-bourgeois socialism, whether they had a numerous following or not. It became an almost invariable trait in leaders of pseudo-revolutionism.

p A letter to Marx written in June 1846 by Schapper, a League of the Just functionary, is a kind of generalised description of such people as the working-class movement has had to fight from its beginning up to our days. He wrote about Weitling, an ideologist of “egalitarian” communism, whose views were popular among 134 workers and craftsmen at the time when the German proletariat was only forming: "Wilhelm Weitling can get on only with those who follow his orders blindly, who do not consider a single book interesting if it was not written by Weitling. He thinks that he alone has the monopoly of truth and can save the world, that everything written by other people is sheer nonsense. For this reason he does not learn anything and does not want his followers to learn either—they must be content with his gospel...."  [134•1 

p The megalomania of Weitling, who saw people envying him, rivals, secret enemies and machinations everywhere, left a certain imprint on the Charter of the League of the Just. That is what Marx had in mind when he wrote: "When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes."  [134•2 

p Marx and Engels succeeded in having deleted from the statutes of the League of the Just everything that tended to make the admission of new members a semi-mystical ritual, required that they should take an oath, and threatened inevitable vengeance if they divulged any of the society’s secrets. Everything that limited the rights of rank-and-file members, everything that opened the door to manifestations of despotism on the part of the leaders, was removed from the statutes.

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p The new statutes were based on the principles of centralism and democratism, and provided, in particular, for the accountability of the elected bodies.

p So long as the International Working Men’s Association existed, Marx, "out of aversion,” as he said, "for any personality cult”, never permitted publication of the numerous appeals mentioning his services, never answered them, contenting himself with rare rebukes for them.

p How this contrasted with Bakunin’s self- glorification, his attempts to assume the role of infallible pope of the revolutionary movement! Negating all authority, he himself demanded implicit obedience and was pitiless to anyone who did not do his bidding. Analysing the ideology and practice of anarchism in The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association, Marx and Engels showed that Bakunin’s democratic declamations were aimed at perpetuating his own dictatorship in the Alliance.

p Lenin also had to fight anarchist “leaderism”. He exposed that ideology which in words rejected any authority but in practice led to the establishment of a small oligarchy of leaders. The principle of "free agreement" between the members of the organisation set up by the anarchists in opposition to democratic " subordination of the minority to the majority" was nothing but a demand for unrestricted freedom of action for the “leaders”, who indulged in all sorts of scheming among themselves. The anarchist profession of "absolute freedom" inevitably degenerated into personality cult, since it was the “personality” itself that laid down the 136 limits of its rights and duties, the nature of its actions and deeds.  [136•1 

p Trotsky’s petty-bourgeois anarchistic individualism was shown in all its ugliness when he fought against the organisational principles of Bolshevism before, and still more after, the revolution. Like the anarchists, the Trotskyists camouflaged the anti-democratic essence of their ideas with words in praise of democracy. They did everything to depict themselves as fighters against personality cult. All reactionary forces in the world are actively spreading this myth. But there is not an iota of truth in it.

p The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adhering to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, considers the personality cult entirely incompatible with the democratic nature of socialist society. As is pointed out in the C.P.S.U. C.C. Theses on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, "In pursuing its course towards the further development of socialist democracy, the Twentieth Party Congress resolutely condemned Stalin’s personality cult, which was expressed in the glorification of the role of one man, something that is alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, in departures from the Leninist principle of collective leadership, and in unwarranted reprisals and other violations of socialist legality which inflicted harm on our society. These distortions, for all their gravity, did not alter the nature of socialist society, nor did they shake the pillars of socialism. The Party and the people had abiding faith in commu- 137 nism, they worked with enthusiasm to implement the Leninist ideals, overcoming difficulties, temporary setbacks and mistakes".  [137•1 

p After the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U., the so-called Fourth International attempted to make it appear that the condemnation of Stalin’s mistakes was proof that Trotsky’s views were sound. The reactionary press all over the world readily joined the propaganda campaign to pass off the Trotskyists as opponents of the personality cult. Never before, perhaps, had the bourgeois papers printed so many photos of Trotsky, so many excerpts from his works, biographical details, etc. But, all this fuss soon petered out, although attempts to revive it are made now and again. It was too obvious that the Trotskyists fought not the Stalin cult, as they tried to make out, but the Party which was building socialism in the country and had rejected the adventuristic capitulationist policy of Trotsky, who denied the possibility of building socialism in the U.S.S.R.

p The noisy propaganda made by the enemies of communism around Trotsky’s person once again proved that the C.P.S.U. was right in fighting Trotskyism, for without its rout there could not have been any successful socialist construction.

p There is no need to prove that Trotskyism does not oppose the personality cult. On the contrary, use of administrative methods, curtailment of democracy, individual instead of collective decision-making, arbitrary action, i.e., all the methods typical of the personality cult were characteristic of Trotsky more than of anybody else. In his 138 “Letter to the Congress" (December 1922) Lenin characterised Trotsky as follows: ”. . . he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work."  [138•1 

p Administration by mere injunction was manifest in everything Trotsky did. Why then, it may be asked, did Trotsky advance the demand for greater democracy in his anti-Party struggle after Lenin’s death? This question is easily answered: although the Trotskyists now strive hard to pass off Trotsky as a fighter against the dominance of the Party apparatus, against "Stalinist bureaucracy”, etc., Trotsky was too experienced and subtle a politician not to know what horse to back. His demagogic and ingratiating appeals to the young were designed to implant an anarchistic idea of democracy, to set up democracy against leadership.

p In attacking the Party apparatus, Trotsky was not against the apparatus in general (all his practical activities leave no doubt about that) but against the actual apparatus defending the Leninist line. He wanted to set up his own Trotskyist apparatus. When he criticised the system within the Party, Trotsky had no intention of developing genuine democracy. He was acting then as often in the past, in a way which Lenin, describing him and other factionalists like him, characterised as follows: they ".. . recognise the will of the majority of the class-conscious workers, not in the present, but in the future, only in the future event of the workers agreeing with them...."  [138•2  No, the democratic phrases the Trot- 139 skyists were and are using to further their political ends can deceive nobody. There is no doubt that Trotskyist methods resemble in many respects those of the personality cult. Striving to raise himself on a pedestal of grandeur, Trotsky profited by every occasion in and out of season to extol his person, scorning anybody who did not agree with him.

p In his My Life Trotsky attempts to show how much the C.P.S.U. lost by rejecting him and how much it would have gained if it had appointed him its leader. But any unbiased reader immediately sees that the book is pervaded with the braggadocio of a man convinced of his own infallibility. He claims that in his early childhood, long before he was acquainted with Marxist literature, Trotsky was already a Marxist, and he “modestly” admits that when he later began to read that literature, he found "in the works of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Mehring what in gaol had seemed to me to be my own conjectures”. Later, reading the correspondence of Marx and Engels, "I discovered not only my theoretical but also psychological kinship with the founders of Marxism".

p Hence Trotsky was an accomplished advocate not only of the use of administrative methods and violence, but also of self-advertising, and selfpraise which are typical of the personality cult.

p Today we see repugnant manifestations of the personality cult in China which put in the shade anything of the kind known to history. In China, a peasant country where the emperor cult, the cult of the "father of the Celestial Kingdom”, ruled for ages, conditions promoted idol worship. The influence of the petty bourgeois atmosphere of extolling “heroes” could be observed in the 140 Chinese Party long ago. As early as 1939, Liu Shao-chi said in a cycle of lectures he delivered at the Marxism-Leninism Institute in Yenan that there were many people in the C.P.C. who knew nothing of Marxism-Leninism but only juggled with Marxist-Leninist terminology imagining themselves a "Chinese Marx" or a "Chinese Lenin”. "Moreover, they had no qualms of conscience in demanding that the members of our Party should respect them like Marx and Lenin, support them as ’leaders’, and entertain loyalty and love for them. They could even appoint themselves ’leaders’ without waiting to be nominated as such; they worked their way into responsible positions, ran the Party as though it were a patriarchal family, attempted to lecture our Party, condemned everything in it and inflicted blows at will on members of the Party, punished them and manipulated them as they saw fit."

p The author of these lectures did not mention names, saying that all this took place in the past. However he asked: "Can we affirm beyond doubt that such elements will not re-appear in our Party?" and answers: "No, we cannot affirm that."  [140•1  The Mao Tse-tung cult has assumed really monstrous proportions. All the achievements of the Communist Party and of the Chinese people, all the gains of the revolution and successes in construction are ascribed to Mao alone. The press controlled by Mao never mentions the names of those who founded the Party, the entire history of the Party is interpreted in such a way as to 141 praise Mao alone. All decisions of the Party are nothing but the concrete expression of Mao’s ideas, expressing the "supreme wisdom of the Chinese people”. Crowds of propagandists vie with one another in inventing metaphors to glorify his name. There is a sort of pathological, hysterical competition in singing his praises. First Mao was compared with the sun, then it was said that there are "two red suns in the world—one in heaven, the other among people”. Then even this was not enough since "the sun rises and sets, while the works of Chairman Mao always radiate light".

p Everything Mao has written has long since been officially described as a universal "golden key" helping to solve all questions, big and small, including the tiniest ones arising in private life. All mistakes in economic policy which can no longer be hushed up are explained simply by blaming them on those who understood Mao’s "brilliant instructions" one-sidedly and interpreted them wrongly. That is why the press constantly reiterates that all that is necessary to ensure success always and in everything is "to read the books of Chairman Mao, to obey Chairman Mao, to follow the instructions of Chairman Mao, to be a good fighter of Chairman Mao".

p There is no point in trying to discover the secret of the skills of a surgeon who has carried out a successful operation, or of a sportsman who has set up a new record—the press always gives the same stereotype answer: they studied the works of Mao, were faithful pupils of the Chairman. Even to be successful in selling melons in the market place one has to follow Mao’s precepts.

p For many years, a campaign has been going 142 on in the country to make the people study the works of Mao. Propagandists describe production teams who formerly produced rejects, but now, having read the works of Chairman Mao, have begun to work well; they recommend that these works be studied by whole families, that new arrivals who stay in a hotel for more than six days be drawn into study circles; they praise those who declare that their spare time does not belong to them, who "revolutionise their spare time”, that is, study Mao’s writings, those who believe that "though it is possible to live without sleep or food it is impossible to live without reading the works of Chairman Mao".

p Year in year out, the newspapers advise how to find a spare minute during the day for reading Mao’s works. Peasant women, for example, are advised to fill in time on "rainy days, while resting, before and after meetings, while giving their child the breast, or putting it to bed, before preparing food, and, of course, during the study periods fixed by the Party cell".

p Pablo Neruda, the well-known Chilean poet and journalist, a great friend of the Chinese revolution, sadly wrote: "In every street, on every door you will see Mao’s portrait. Mao has become a living Buddha, isolated from the people by the court bonzes, who interpret Marxism and modern history at his wish. Peasants bow to the portrait of the leader and kneel before it. Is that communism? It is rather a ridiculous, unacceptable, mystical religious worship. The personality cult in China is leading to tragical consequences."

p This was written a few years before the socalled cultural revolution. Now the religious worship of Mao has assumed a really monstrous 143 scale. "Come quickly and clasp my hand: my hands have just touched the hands of Chairman Mao!"—those, according to the Chinese newspapers, are the words of the one who had been found worthy to shake hands with the august Mao. Mao’s sayings have been put to music and are sung like psalms. Children in kindergartens are made to learn them by heart, they are recited at meetings, read as prayers before a plane takes off. Everybody has to know the texts by heart to prove his loyalty to the Chairman.

p Once, under the emperors, those applying for a post in the state apparatus had to recite the sayings of Confucius collected in a special book. Now the memory of civil servants is checked by their ability to quote Mao.

p The entire population, including the illiterate, are instructed to study Mao’s works. It does not matter whether they understand them, the only important thing is to learn them by heart. In medieval Europe, the peasants went to religious services held in Latin and prayed devoutly without understanding a word they said. In the same way, Mao’s “thoughts” have become prayers in modern China. The little red book of the Chairman’s sayings that every Chinese must possess is not so much a collection of "pearls of wisdom”, as a talisman, a means of communion with the “deity”.

p In 1922, Lenin criticised the Left doctrinaires because, "far too often, instead of soberly weighing up the situation that was not very favourable for immediate and direct revolutionary action, they vigorously indulged in the waving of little red flags".  [143•1  Lenin was speaking figuratively. In 144 China today, sober politics are literally replaced by the waving of red flags, only the flags are replaced by little red books of excerpts from Mao’s writings.

p All this profanation shows the deep contempt in which the Maoists hold the people, their shameless exploitation of poverty, ignorance and superstition. As early as 1958, Mao Tse-tung wrote: "In addition to other features, a specific feature of the 600 million Chinese, is its poverty and the fact that it is like a blank sheet. At first glance this may seem bad; actually, however, it is good. Poverty makes them strive for changes, forces them to action, compels them to make revolution. A blank sheet is empty, but on it can be written the newest, the most beautiful words, can be drawn the newest, most beautiful pictures".  [144•1  Now it has become plain to all what "beautiful pictures" Mao paints, and what he wants to transform this great people into.

p The insistent emphasis of Mao’s group on faithfulness to the "line of the masses" cannot conceal its lack of faith in the masses. In one of its resolutions, the leadership of the Spanish Communist Party aptly noted: "Those who do not tell the masses the truth, even though they curry favour with them in words and extol them to the sky, show thereby that they do not believe in the masses."

p Indeed, as Mao’s policy has encountered growing resistance, it has become increasingly clear that he believes only in personal dictatorship relying on the army and that he will not allow anything to prevent him from achieving his 145 objectives. He has advanced the downright voluntaristic slogan "Politics is the commanding force" to justify his actions in the economic sphere, his disregard for objective laws in giving any orders to his subordinates.

p Demanding implicit obedience, Mao tramples on all democratic standards, even the most elementary. Party congresses have long ago been replaced by plenary meetings of the C.C. According to the C.P.C. Rules, these meetings must be called at least twice a year, but four years passed between the 10th and llth meetings and the socalled llth plenary meeting of the C.C. in August 1966, which proclaimed the "cultural revolution”, was actually not a plenary meeting since only Mao’s followers, who constituted the minority in the C.C,, were admitted to it. The Central Committee of the C.P.C. has become a purely nominal concept. The C.C. has been replaced by the "group on questions of the cultural revolution”. Local Party bodies have been dissolved. Mao has discarded the Party, which does not want to be his servile tool, and has replaced it by gangs of young hooligans organised from above.

p In April 1969, 13 years after the Eighth Congress of the C.P.C., Mao decided to assemble all those in China on whose support he relied in his so-called cultural revolution. This gathering was called the Ninth Congress of the C.P.C. This designation once more proves how willfully the Maoists handle terms. While preserving Marxist terminology, Mao uses it deliberately in order to create the semblance that his policies are in some way connected with Marxism-Leninism. Actually, however, there are no grounds whatsoever for calling the April gathering in Peking the Ninth Congress of the C.P.C.

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p The Communist Party of China, which has traversed a long and glorious path, is now deprived of every possibility to convene congresses. The Party has in fact ceased to exist. This determined the composition and nature of the "Ninth Congress”. The delegates to it were not elected, but appointed. Chief among them were the military, who have become the backbone of the regime.

p Even though the Rules adopted by the congress speak of democratic centralism, they fix no periods for convening congresses and plenary meetings of the Central Committee, and make no mention of the Party members’ rights. Now the anti- democratic practices will be carried on not in violation of the Rules, as Mao Tse-tung had to do up to now, but on perfectly “legal” grounds. The Rules, which are permeated with the spirit of the personality cult, contain an unprecedented item—Lin Piao is proclaimed Mao’s successor. Mao has adapted the imperial dynasty’s principle of hereditary succession by appointing his successor in his lifetime.

p His successor declared at the "Ninth Congress" the following: "Anybody, ever and under any circumstances, daring to oppose Chairman Mao Tse-tung, or Maoist ideas, will be condemned by the entire Party and punished by the whole coun- try."

The personality cult is harming the people’s interests, obstructing the struggle against imperialism, for socialism. The personality cult dazzles not only those who worship the idol, but also the idol himself. In his effort to win immortality, Mao throws so much fuel onto the critical fire of history that the myths he himself created will sooner or later be burnt to ashes.