p In mid-1958, the Maoists announced that the transition period in China had been fully completed, that socialism had been built, and that an immediate start could be made on building communist relations. The adventurist idea was put forward that China could move rapidly towards communism by executing a “Great Leap Forward”. Chinese society did not in actual fact have the necessary material, social and cultural prerequisites even for developed socialism, but the Maoists argued that it could attain communism merely by carrying out this “Great Leap Forward”.

p The fact that Mao and his followers suggested the “Great Leap Forward" idea showed that they had lost the ability of making a realistic assessment of the situation, of starting from the actual level of development at which Chinese society then found itself. This undoubtedly sprang from the hegemonistic aspirations of Mao and his followers. In order to rise to leadership in the world’s revolutionary movement, it was necessary to “surpass” the Soviet Union, and the “accelerate the transition to communism" slogan was issued to achieve this aim. This subjectivist and anti-Marxist slogan was seized upon and “theoretically” analysed by the Chinese press. The journal Hsin chianshe wrote: “Not long ago many believed that for a fairly long subsequent period changes in the relations of production in our country would take place within the framework of socialism, i.e., that this would be a completion of the socialist revolution on the economic front, with all the main forces being thrown into the implementation of the technological and cultural revolution.” The journal declared this quite correct view to be wrong, and suggested the following as the right approach: “Under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee and Comrade Mao Tse-tung, simultaneously with the full completion of the socialist revolution, with the productive forces growing at an exceptionally fast rate, we have already created the conditions for gradual transition to communism."  [173•1  Thus, the completion of transition to socialism and the all-round 174 development of socialism were declared to be a stage that was over.

p An idea which runs right through the numerous publications in the Chinese press from 1958 to 1960 is that China is on the threshold of transition to communism. In their efforts to provide a theoretical grounding for such transition, Chinese theorists fell back on the well-known statement of Marx’s that between capitalist and communist society there lies a period of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter, with a corresponding political transition period. From this they drew the conclusion that socialist society could not be regarded as an independent stage of social development, because it allegedly had a transitional character. The Maoists started to include socialism, the first phase of the communist formation, into the transition period. All of this was to help them remove from the order of the day the task of completing socialist construction in China, and orient the Chinese people upon immediate transition to communist society. Jenmin jihpao wrote: “After all, socialism is not our supreme ideal. Communist society is our supreme ideal. . .. We are building socialism to move on to communist society and not for the purpose of consolidating the making of socialist society, and regarding it as a historical period of stability and absence of change, or of quantitative but not qualitative change."  [174•1 

p Indeed, communist society, its highest phase, is the ideal of the working class, but to attain it there is need to build full-fledged socialism, a whole phase of the communist formation, and to make it function and progress successfully. However, it is impossible to find in any of Mao’s statements a full-scale programme for completing the construction and further development of socialism, dealing with the improvement of its material and technical basis, and the rapid development of the productive forces corresponding to socialist relations of production.

p The Maoists have come to regard the strengthening and further improvement of the foundations of the socialist social system as no more than the treading of water, and as unwillingness to go on from socialism to communism. One journal, criticising the advocates of “frozen socialism”, 175 wrote: “The demand that socialist relations of production and also collective property and the distribution according to labour should be rigidly fixed at one point expresses the standpoint of those who want to conserve socialist society. Such views are erroneous."  [175•1 

p Consequently, before the “Great Leap Forward”, the Maoists regarded the transition period as one of transition from capitalism to socialism, while following the announcement of the “Great Leap Forward" in 1958 their views underwent a fundamental, totally unfounded change: on the one hand, they ceased to draw any line of distinction between the transition period and socialism proper, and on the other, enlarged the framework of the transition period to include the construction of full-scale communist society. In other words, they discarded socialism as a lawgoverned socio-economic state of society on the way to communism.

p The “Three Red Banners" (the general line, the “Great Leap Forward”, and the people’s communes), the line Mao put forward in 1958, far from accelerating the socio-class development of Chinese society, in fact slowed it down, because it ran into contradiction with the tendencies of social development objectively required by socialism. This was expressed in the following.

p First, there was a slow-down in the quantitative and especially qualitative growth of the working class which usually goes hand in hand with a country’s industrialisation, because the accent was on the establishment of primitive, handicraft enterprises.

p Second, the implanting of people’s communes in the countryside in effect diverted the peasantry from the natural socialist path of development onto a path of artificial egalitarianism and a barrack-room social system.

p Third, the accelerated transition to communism resulted in a neglect of the need for a relatively long period in which state-private enterprises are transformed into socialist enterprises, and the members of the bourgeoisie are moulded into working people of socialist society.

The outcome of all this was that the transition to communism was actually slowed down and a brake was put 176 on the socialist transformation of classes and their relations in the country. The greatest harm was thereby inflicted on the development of the already small working class.