p The events taking place in China have made Marxists all over the world return to the problem of “the state and revolution”, which is central to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin.

p Let us recall that Marx in the 19th century and Lenin on the eve of the 1917 Revolution believed that it was unnecessary to establish in the course of the revolution a professional apparatus of coercion and pointed to the need for the army, carrying on a war against the bourgeoisie and the landowners, to be merged with the mass of the population, with the people, to the need of officials being elected by the people, to the need for full democracy in organising production and distribution.

p These ideas of the founders of Marxism rested on the experience of history, on the experience of the first proletarian state, the Paris Commune. The Commune, having done away with the police, having armed the population, and having transferred the whole executive and legislative power, all the levers of management of production into the hands of functionaries elected by the Communards or the workers of the enterprises, transformed the functions of administration into truly popular ones, and wrested them from the hands of a specially trained ruling caste isolated from the people. The whole of social life, all social relations became transparent, open and crystal-clear. Marx wrote: “[Gone is] the delusion as if administration and political governing were 121 mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste—state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists, in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower places of the hierarchy. Doing away with the state hierarchy altogether and replacing the haughteous masters of the people by its always removable servants, a mock responsibility by a real responsibility, as they act continuously under public supervision."  [121•1 

p However, this highly valuable practical experience of state construction under the Paris Commune was highly short-lived, this city-state lasted for only a few months and its boundaries did not extend beyond the city of Paris. What is more, the outcome of the civil war between Paris and Versailles showed that in the conditions of civil war it was precisely the various fundamentally new features of the Commune, which promised to give the new society tremendous advantages in the long-term historical prospects, that proved to be a tremendous practical shortcoming: the Commune went down, in particular, because it was unable to carry out a ruthless centralisation in the sphere of military affairs, administration and management of production. The Paris Commune on the whole failed to solve the problem of the balance between democracy and centralisation, and its shortlived experience had to be put to the test over and over again.

p The October Revolution, having repeated in its initial stages the experience of its predecessor, subsequently introduced substantial additions. In order to withstand the flames of the Civil War, which proved to be a “natural state of transition" of the proletarian revolution in one country, the Soviet power had to resort to a sharp intensification of centralism in every sphere of social life.

p In the very first year of the revolution, counter- revolutionary resistance forced the Soviet power, which at first relied on the people who were armed to a man, to set up special agencies and apparatuses of class suppression—the Red Army and the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission. Their edge was now directed against the overthrown 122 oppressors. This class orientation was guaranteed above all by the make-up of the leadership of the Red Army and the AllRussia Extraordinary Commission, which had recruited from the ranks of the Party its best fighters who had passed the test of revolutionary battle. However, the existence of special apparatuses of coercion was to some extent latent with dangerous tendencies and in the event of any relaxation of Party control over these agencies or in the event of any violation of the Leninist principles of democratic centralism within the Party, opened up the possibility for their abuse. It was essentially about these difficulties of the revolutionary process, the difficulties of the transition period in a country which had gone through the epoch of civil war that a warning was sounded for the Communists of all countries by the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which pointed to the connection between some aspects of the personality cult and the temporary and inevitable limitations on democracy in the course of the revolutionary process. The CPSU Central Committee resolution “On Overcoming the Personality Cult and Its Consequences" said: “This complicated international and internal situation required an iron discipline, tireless vigilance, and the strictest centralisation of leadership, and this necessarily had a negative effect on the development of some democratic forms. In the course of fierce struggle against the whole world of imperialism our country had to make some limitations of democracy, which were justified by the logic of our people’s struggle for socialism in conditions of the capitalist encirclement. But even at the time, these limitations were already regarded by the Party and the people as being temporary, and as being subject to elimination as the Soviet state was consolidated and the forces of democracy and socialism throughout the world developed."  [122•1 

p The Chinese leaders, carrying out their transformations of the transition period in more favourable international conditions, had every possibility of taking account of the experience of socialist construction in the USSR.

p The CPC leaders tried to do this directly after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, as will be seen from the decisions 123 of the 8th Congress of the CPC. Speaking on behalf of the Central Committee in a report on changes of the Party’s Rules, the former CPC General Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping gave a high assessment to the 20th Congress of the CPSU and condemned the personality cult. He said: “An important achievement of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lies in the fact that it showed us what serious consequences can follow from the deification of the individual. Our Party has always held that no political parties and no individuals are free from flaws and mistakes in their activities, and this has now been written into the General Programme of the draft constitution of our Party. For the same reason, our Party abhors the deification of the individual."  [123•1  Today the documents of the 8th Congress, adopted collectively and in approval of the line of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, have been discarded by Mao and his associates. The “great Mao’s” formulas have been substituted for the Marxist doctrine of the state and revolution. The precepts of the founders of Marxism and the whole of historical experience gained by the world communist movement has been forgotten.

p Mao’s Little Red Book said: “Every Communist must grasp the truth: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."  [123•2  There is some truth in this, but not the whole truth. In the course of the proletarian revolution the gun does not merely produce power, but military-revolutionary power. In the flames of the civil war, which the overthrown exploiting classes impose on the classes rising up against the exploiters, the revolutionary forces have to resort mainly to violence and coercion, when everything is decided by orders “from above”, by military orders. Following its victory over the armed counter-revolution, the proletarian revolution ( especially a proletarian revolution winning out in a backward, petty-bourgeois country) faces long years of struggle against sabotage, dislocation and the ignorance and inertness of millions of people. In this period, it is inevitable that the old agencies and some of the old methods of struggle are maintained. But it would be a bad mistake to see violent 124 military methods alone as providing the key to a solution of all the problems and tasks of the transition period.

p The Party directing the transformative socialist process must modify its methods of struggle as the situation changes, and this means above all its own organisation and the organisation of the whole government machine. Thus, in the early years of the Soviet Republic, the Civil War conditions did little to help develop the principles of inner-Party democracy at every level of the Party organism. On the whole, both the form of organisation and the methods of work were necessarily determined by the concrete historical situation and the task of organising resistance against the interventionists and the whiteguards. The Resolution of the 10th Congress of the RCP(B) said: “Accordingly, the Party’s organisational form was inevitably to be in that period a militarisation of the Party organisation. Just as the form of proletarian dictatorship assumed the nature of militaryproletarian dictatorship, so the form of Party organisation has assumed—and from the standpoint of revolutionary purpose, inevitably had to assume in such conditions—a corresponding character. This was on the whole expressed in an extreme organisational centralism and a fold-up of the collective organs of Party organisation."  [124•1 

p With the end of the Civil War and the entry upon the period of peaceful construction there necessarily appeared some contradictions between the Party’s forms of organisation and methods of work on the one hand, and on the other, the tasks of educating the broadest masses of Party members in a spirit of initiative and active solution of all the questions of Party life. These contradictions were already brought out by the 10th Congress of the RCP(B), whose Resolution also outlined ways of doing away with them.

p After the Civil War, the forms of organisation of the socialist state were bound to be modified in various ways: “the military-proletarian dictatorship" gradually lost its features of a militarised and extremely centralised apparatus. The transition period is simultaneously a period in which the remnants of the hostile classes are being eliminated, in which their resistance is overcome, and a period in which millions 125 of working people develop and are involved in the cause of socialism, a period in which the new proletarian democracy, the new socialist legality is established and consolidated, a period in which the state machine, adapted to the Civil War conditions, is improved and restructured. Without all this, it is impossible for the socialist revolution to advance.

p Let us stress that centralised power which is built up in the process of revolutionary struggle is simultaneously a system of definite human relations, of definite dependence of men on each other. Leading workers, habituated in the Civil War epoch to issue orders and appoint performers, may continue in the same manner, even after the situation has changed and when there is need not only of unquestioning execution of orders but also freedom of discussion, not only oneman authority but also collegiality, not only continuity, but also change and renewal of leadership.

p There is a possibility here of different variants of development. The contradictions which inevitably arise in the course of socialist construction may be painlessly and openly resolved through an improvement of the system of democratic centralism, but these contradictions may also be resolved behind closed doors, within a tight little group of leaders, so that the Party is faced with the faits accomplis. That is when situations may arise, as they have in China, when the Party loses control of its Central Committee, and the Central Committee loses control of the Politburo, the highest leading group.

p The consequences of this are well known: the line of gradual advance towards socialism was substituted by an adventurist attempt extremely to accelerate the pace of socioeconomic change, producing the idea of a “Great Leap Forward”, which was to carry the country straight into communism, while the old level-headed warnings about the country taking “only the first few steps along a 10,000-mile way" gave way to boastful and irresponsible promises, like “three years of persistent labour effort—10,000 years of happy life”. When the inevitable collapse soon followed, the CPC leaders hastened to put the blame for these failures on the designs of “enemies” at home and “revisionists” abroad. Leninist norms of inner-Party life were trampled, open and principled polemics and self-criticism were supplanted with intrigue, designed to do away with those who opposed the 126 adventurist line. Educational work within the Party and in the masses was increasingly supplanted by violence, while the ideology of proletarian socialism was ousted by primitive forms of socialism, egalitarian, barrack-room socialism, with Mao’s personality cult assuming monstrous forms. The preaching of chauvinism went hand in hand with a fanning of hostility for the USSR and attempts to impose a hegemonistic line on the world revolutionary movement. Finally, in the period of the “cultural revolution" Mao and his followers came to look for support to the politically most immature masses of young people and increasingly to the army. It is not the Party, not the working people’s grass roots organisations, but the army that has been raised over and above the other sections of the political superstructure.

p This practice was provided with ideological backing in the report to the 9th Congress of the CPC, which, as the current practice is, referred to Mao’s authority when it said: “The People’s Liberation Army is the mainstay of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Chairman Mao Tse-tung has repeatedly said that from the Marxist standpoint the army is the main component part of the state."  [126•1 

p Indeed, the people’s army is a reliable bulwark of the proletarian dictatorship, which ensures defence of the socialist countries against imperialist aggression, but to declare it to be the “main component part" of the socialist state and an instrument of “support of industry, agriculture and broad masses of the Left" and to impose on it the functions of “military control" over the country’s life and of “ military-political education" of the whole people is to convert the socialist state system into a military-bureaucratic state system.

p The army’s interference in the inner-Party struggle and the country’s social and economic life is more than an additional minor detail in the “helmsman’s" biography or another feature of the overall picture of the revolution. A political coup has been staged in the country, with real political power taken over by the army; the country’s life is being rapidly militarised, and the real gains and cadres of the people’s revolution in China have been destroyed under the guise of the “cultural revolution”. All of this is subordinated 127 to a single goal, that of helping Mao and his followers retain power.

p The dangerous tendencies of the people’s democratic power being transformed into a military-bureaucratic dictatorship first became evident at the early stages of the “cultural revolution”; the subsequent course of events led to the consolidation of these dangerous tendencies in the whole of the country’s internal political life.

p Analysing the processes going on in China, the Marxists must naturally not discount some objective circumstances which have helped to inflate the centralising elements at the expense of the democratic elements, and to militarise the whole of governmental and social life. The whole of China’s modern history is marked by strong tendencies towards local separatism, with the provincial governors concentrating vast political, economic and military power in their hands. After the 1911 revolution, China was, for all practical purposes, split up into a number of areas, each a state within a state, and each headed by a definite militaristic group. The establishment in 1927 of the central Kuomintang government with Chiang Kai-shek at its head, could not result in the establishment of centralised power. Seeking to put down the revolutionary movement, Chiang Kai-shek struck an alliance with the local militarists, who agreed to support him provided they retained great powers in running the provinces, within whose limits they operated.

p Japan’s occupation of the north-eastern provinces in 1931 and the subsequent aggression against the rest of China not only disrupted the ties between the various parts of the country, but also removed a sizable part of it from the Kuomintang government’s control. On a vast territory in northwest China, the Communists succeeded in setting up their own organs of power, organising the army, etc. Consequently, in the early 1940s China was not a united state.

p It was quite natural therefore that after the victory of the people’s revolution there was intensified centralisation in the country, and at the first stage of socialist construction some methods characteristic of the period of the armed struggle against the Kuomintang were retained.

p Let us also note that before the people’s democratic revolution China was a country virtually without democratic government institutions; the feudal traditions had an impact 128 not only on the policy of the ruling class. At the end of the 1920s, Mao wrote the following about the legacy of the past: “The evil practice of arbitrary dictation in feudal times, deeply rooted in the minds of the masses and even of the Party members in general, cannot be swept away at once; when anything comes up, people seek the easy way out and do not like the elaborate democratic system.”  [128•1 

p During the civil war which was fought for decades the democratic centralism system within the Party and the mass organisations could not be fully developed. Add to this the inadequate Marxist training of the leading Party cadres and the obvious oversimplification of the scientific socialism theory down to primitive levels in the theoretical writings of Mao Tse-tung, who headed the CPC Central Committee.

But although a number of objective circumstances in China hampered the development of the new, proletarian democracy, there was nothing fatally inevitable about the people’s democratic state degenerating into a militarybureaucratic dictatorship. The CPC leadership, taking a critical view of its own activity and learning from the international experience accumulated by other revolutionary parties could well have put a stop to the development of the undesirable and dangerous tendencies. Observance of innerParty democracy, and the Leninist principles and rules of Party life could well have become a most important guarantee of successes in building up a socialist state. Lenin wrote: “More confidence in the independent judgement of the whole body of Party workers!... The whole Party must constantly, steadily and systematically train suitable persons for the central bodies, must see clearly, as in the palm of its hand, all the activities of every candidate for these high posts, must come to know even their personal characteristics, their strong and weak points, their victories and ’ defeats’. . .. Light, more light!"  [128•2  This was said at a time when the Bolshevik Party had to work in the underground. But what Lenin said has even more relevance to ruling parties.