p On many occasions, Lenin analysed in detail the arrangement of class forces in China, drawing important conclusions about the difficulties and the main problems facing the revolutionary movement in that country. In April 1913, commenting on the intricate problems faced by Sun Yat-sen, he wrote: “What is this party’s weakness? It lies in the fact that it has not yet been able sufficiently to involve broad masses of the Chinese people in the revolution. The proletariat in China is still very weak—there is therefore no leading class capable of waging a resolute and conscious struggle to carry the democratic revolution to its end. The peasantry, lacking a leader in the person of the proletariat, is terribly downtrodden, passive, ignorant and indifferent to politics—-How little of the really broad popular mass has yet been drawn into active support of the Chinese Republic. But without such massive support, without an organised and steadfast leading class, the Republic cannot be stable."  [176•1 

p Lenin’s indication of the need to promote the growth of the working class, to enhance its vanguard, conscious and organising role in every sphere of social development to bring about the success of the revolution in China was grossly neglected.

p Mao never understood the fundamental Marxist-Leninist proposition about the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolution, and he has always essentially relied on the petty-bourgeois elements, which he regarded as the leader both in the bourgeois- democratic and the socialist revolution. That was his line when he set out on his political career, and that is still his line today.

p The 3rd Congress of the CPC was held in Canton from June 10 to 19, 1923, and it was attended by Mao. What was 177 his stand on this crucial question of the revolution at that time? He supported the capitulationist line of Chen Tu-hsiu, who denied the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution and who put his stake on the national bourgeoisie, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Three weeks later, Mao had an article in the CPC General Committee’s journal Hsiangtao, entitled “The Coup in Peking and the Merchants”, dealing with the role of the merchants in the Chinese revolution. He wrote: “China”s present political problem is none other than the problem of the national revolution. The Chinese people’s historical mission lies ... in using this force of the people to overthrow militarism and the foreign imperialists. This revolution is a task of the whole people and all those who constitute the people—merchants, workers, peasants, students, teachers—everyone must undertake a part of the revolutionary work. However, in virtue of historical necessity and the tendencies of the present-day situation, it is the merchants that have to take upon themselves the more vital and important part of this work for the sake of the national revolution rather than the rest of the people."  [177•1 

p We find, therefore, that Mao did not regard the workers or the peasants, but the merchants, that is, the petty- bourgeois and bourgeois elements as constituting the most important component part of the Chinese people, and assigned to them a decisive role in the Chinese revolution. He wrote: “The time has now come to unite the whole people for the purpose of starting a revolutionary movement, which makes it all the more important to prevent any split among the merchants. .. . The broader the unity of the merchants and the greater their influence, the more powerful the force leading the whole people and the more swiftly the revolution will achieve success."  [177•2 

p A reading of Mao’s earlier writings shows that he believed the definition of classes was not based on socio-economic relations between men, which are of different types, but on their property status, regardless of the actual form of relations of production (feudal, capitalist, etc.). Ignoring the historical approach, he classified all men into five categories: 178 big bourgeoisie, middle bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, semiproletariat, and proletariat. This was an extremely confused and unscientific approach to the definition of classes, and it stood out in the boldest relief in an article he wrote in 1926, entitled “Analysis of the Classes of Chinese Society".  [178•1  There, he grouped into a single class different social groups representing different types of relations of production. Thus, big feudal landowners, militarists and senior officials, senior civil servants, officials of banks and industrial and commercial enterprises, and the upper layers of the intelligentsia, like prominent lawyers, teachers and lecturers of institutions of higher learning, and also a section of the students, were lumped alongside the compradores together with the big bourgeoisie. Apart from the owners of various enterprises, the middle bourgeoisie also included small landowners, together with employees of banks, industrial and commercial enterprises, a section of the teachers and students of institutions of higher learning, small-time lawyers, etc.

p Consequently, the big and middle bourgeoisie included all the rich, propertied or well-off sections of the population in general. By including the landowners into the class of Chinese bourgeoisie, Mao ignored the domination of semifeudal relations in the country and took the edge off the agrarian revolution in China.

p The article also contained a muddled and equivocal definition of the petty bourgeoisie. Mao wrote: “To the petty bourgeoisie belongs the toiling peasantry, the small traders, the owners of handicraft enterprises, and the small intelligentsia—petty officials and employees, pupils of secondary schools and teachers of secondary and primary schools, small-time lawyers, etc."  [178•2  The petty bourgeoisie is divided into three groups depending on the size of income. In the first group we find men who have “surpluses of rice and money”, in the second those whose “annual income allows them barely to make ends meet”, and in the third, men “whose living conditions grow worse from year to year".  [178•3 

p Apart from the industrial workers, miners, railwaymen, seamen, dock-workers, the proletariat also includes all the 179 propertyless, poor and deprived sections of the population in general, like the city coolies, farm labourers in the countryside, and also the lumpen proletariat, which meant bandits, mercenaries, beggars, robbers and prostitutes. Mao wrote: “This category of people is able to carry on a heroic struggle. Under skilful leadership, they can become a revolutionary force."  [179•1 

p Mao characterised the role of the industrial proletariat as follows: “Despite its small numerical strength the industrial proletariat is the main force of the national- revolutionary movement."  [179•2  However, he explained the proletariat’s revolutionary activity by the fact that “its economic condition is low. Having been deprived of the instruments of production, it was left with its bare hands, without any hope of enrichment”. The implication here is that the workers were guided in the revolution not by their class consciousness, but by an urge for enrichment. Consequently, Mao defined classes not by men’s place in social production, but by their proprietary condition, the size of their income, that is, relations of distribution.

p Mao derived men’s attitude to the revolution, and the extent of the revolutionary activity of various social groups from the place these men had within the system of social distribution. This made the lowest sections of society the most revolutionary forces, instead of those who were connected with progressive, large-scale modern production; it turned out that the poorer a people, the better, because “poverty impelled men to revolution”. Because the peasantry was the poorest section of China’s population it followed that the peasantry was to play the leading role in the Chinese revolution. It is this anti-Marxist attitude to the question of classes—with the accent on the peasantry—that determined the adventurist line of action in the political sphere.

p No Marxist-Leninist has denied the important role of the peasantry in the revolutionary movement, especially in countries like China. While stressing the leading role of the working class in the Chinese revolution, Lenin did not in any sense minimise the great importance of the peasantry in social progress. He wrote: “By drawing ever broader masses of the Chinese peasantry into the movement and into 180 politics, Sun Yat-sen’s party is becoming (to the extent to which this process is taking place) a great factor of progress in Asia and of mankind’s progress. Whatever defeats it may suffer from political rogues, adventurers and dictators, who rely on the country’s reactionary forces, this party’s efforts will not have been in vain."  [180•1  Lenin believed that Sun Yat-sen’s democratic programme was a militant one, because it took account of the interests of the peasantry.

p Let us recall that after the Great October Socialist Revolution, Lenin attached much importance to the liberation struggle of the peasant masses, whom he regarded as the natural and principal allies of the proletariat in nationalcolonial revolutions. Accordingly, the Communist International repeatedly stressed the great role of the peasantry in the backward countries of the East. Thus, the “General Theses on the Eastern Question" of the 4th Congress of the Comintern in 1922 stressed that the “revolutionary movement in the backward countries of the East cannot win any success unless it is based on action by broad masses of peasants".  [180•2 

p The theses on the revolutionary movement in the colonial and semi-colonial countries adopted by the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928 said that “the peasantry, together with the proletariat and as its ally, is a motive force of the revolution".  [180•3  The Comintern Executive’s Directives to the 3rd Congress of the CPC in May 1923 drew the Chinese Communists’ attention to the fact that “it is the peasant question that is the central question of the whole policy"  [180•4  The resolution of the 6th enlarged Plenary Meeting of the Comintern Executive in March 1926 observed that “the peasant question is the principal question of the Chinese national liberation movement".  [180•5  A letter from the Comintern Executive to the CPC Central Committee in December 1929 stressed that “peasant war is a distinctive feature of the national crisis and the revolutionary upswing in China”.  [180•6 

p We find all these documents stressing that in countries like China the peasant question is the central and principal question; that the peasantry is an ally of the proletariat; that peasant war is a distinctive feature of the national crisis and the revolutionary upswing. All of this is undoubtedly true, but we do not find any of these documents saying that the peasantry is the vanguard force of the revolution in China or in any of the economically backward countries of the East in general.

p Let us recall that the 2nd Congress of the Comintern stressed the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the national liberation revolutions in the East, an idea which was further elaborated in the “General Theses on the Eastern Question”, adopted by the 4th Congress of the Comintern. While recognising the great role of the peasantry in the East, notably in China, the Comintern pointed to the need to subordinate the peasant question to the strategic goal of the proletariat. By emphasising the decisive role of the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, in the revolution, Mao ignores the idea of the proletariat’s hegemony, thereby breaking with the revolutionary line of the whole international communist movement.

p As early as 1923, attention to the fact that Mao tended to underestimate the role of the working class in China was drawn by the representative of the Comintern Executive in China. His memo to the Comintern Executive on June 20, 1923, concerning the 3rd Congress of the CPC, said that “the Hunan delegate, now Party Secretary, Mao Tse-tung, declared that it was now still impossible to set up either a national or a mass Communist Party”. In his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan”, published in March 1927, Mao expressed in general terms the view that the peasantry was the decisive and only force of the revolutionary movement in China.  [181•1  He went into this matter at greater length in his work “trategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War”,  [181•2  summing up the experience of Party work from 1927 to 1936. Once again, Mao advanced as the theoretical basis of the Chinese revolution, the proposition that the peasantry had the decisive role to play, and 182 reiterated this formula: the peasantry—the strategic mainstay; war—the principal tactical means of the Chinese revolution. In his work, “The Chinese Revolution and the Communist Party of China" at the end of 1939, Mao declared that the peasantry was the “main force in the Chinese revolution”, that the revolution had its mainstay in the countryside, and that the revolution was first to triumph in the rural districts and then in the towns.  [182•1 

p In his work “On New Democracy" (January 1940) Mao drew the general conclusion that “the Chinese revolution is virtually the peasants’ revolution, and the resistance to Japan now going on is virtually the peasants’ resistance to Japan. New-democratic politics is virtually the granting of power to the peasants.. . . And all that goes into the resistance to Japan and our own livelihood is virtually provided by the peasants. ... So the peasant problem has become the main problem of the Chinese revolution, and the strength of the peasants constitutes the principal force of the Chinese revolution".  [182•2 

p Back in 1931, Wang Ming, who was elected to the CPC leadership and subsequently also to the leadership of the Comintern Executive, and his followers pursued the Comintern line and tried to resist Mao’s line, by stressing the importance of relying on the proletariat. They emphasised that even in the specific conditions in which the revolution developed in China it was not right to ignore the historical role of the working class, to forget about its historical mission in the revolution and to bring the peasantry into the foreground. For all the specific features of the Chinese revolution, for all the importance of the agrarian and peasant question in China, it was not right to ignore the strategic line of the Party which saw the proletariat as the guiding and leading force of the revolution. Wang Ming and his followers said Mao’s line was an expression of the “specifically peasant revolutionary attitude”, of “peasant capitalism" and the “kulak line”.

p Mao started a drive against Wang Ming and accused him of taking a “Left-deviationist” line in the CPC leadership. By resorting to demagogy and juggling catchwords about 183 the need to fight subjectivism and improve and correct the style of work in the CPC, Mao got the 7th Plenary Meeting of the CPC Central Committee to adopt the “Resolution on Questions in History of the Party"  [183•1  expressing Mao’s view and criticising those who advocated the “Left-deviationist” line above all for having resisted the line of the peasant revolution and subordination of work in the towns to work in the countryside.

p These unscientific, opportunistic views of Mao’s, which had taken shape long ago, were most forcefully expressed after 1960 in his openly Right-opportunist line of depriving the working class of its vanguard role in Chinese society. In 1939 and 1940, Mao put forward the slogan that “the rural districts are the mainstay of the revolution" and that “the peasantry is the main force of the Chinese revolution”, whereas after 1960 he proclaimed the so-called general line of national-economic development: “Agriculture is the basis of the national economy, industry is its leading force.” Mao was unable altogether to drop all mention of industry, where the working class is engaged, but he did declare agriculture to be the basis of life in society. In a sense this realised the idea he had expressed in his article “On New Democracy" in 1940, that “our own livelihood is virtually provided by the peasants".  [183•2 

p This sharp turn-about from the “Great Leap Forward" in industry to reliance on agriculture cannot be construed otherwise than as a petty-bourgeois Right-opportunist response to the failure of the Leftist policy of instant construction of socialism and communism. Here we constantly find a toing and froing between “Left” opportunism and Right opportunism, for such is the “logic” of all those who abandon Marxism: the overdoing of the Leftist line and its failure impel them to retreat to the Right, and then once again to fall back on Leftist gambles.

p Mao’s line of slowing down the country’s industrialisation has inevitably caused a slow-down in the development of the working class and a reduction of its leading, vanguard role in the country. As a result, there has been a marked slow-down in the quantitative and qualitative growth of the 184 working class in China. From 1949 to 1957, the number of industrial and office workers increased 3-fold (from 8 million to 24.5 million), an increase of 16.5 million; from 1957 to 1964, it increased by only about 10 million (from 24.5 million to 34-35 million). From 1949 to 1957, the number of industrial workers alone increased from 3 million to 9 million, and from 1957 to 1965, the number of industrial workers increased by only 2 million (a growth of only onethird in a similar period), reaching 11 million (with China’s population in 1965 at 735 million).

Consequently, the share of the working class in the socioclass structure of present-day Chinese society is still very small.