p Let us recall that Mao’s followers have declared him to be the “greatest Marxist-Leninist of our day”. The extent to which Mao is actually out of touch with Marxism-Leninism will be clearly seen from his views concerning the substance and development of the socialist mode of production. Marxist-Leninist theory regards the mode of production as a dialectical unity of its two sides: the productive forces and the relations of production. These two sides cannot be detached from each other, because in reality they are organically connected and develop in accordance with the objective law of their mutual concordance. That is also the law governing the development of the socialist mode of production; conscious consideration of the requirements of this law means the balanced maintenance of the concordance of the productive forces and the relations of production, and their simultaneous improvement. Once the working class takes over political power, it can and must use it for the balanced establishment and development of socialist relations of production on the basis of the development of the productive forces. To try to establish new relations of production without relying on a development of the productive forces is to establish these relations of production only in formal terms, without the substratum on which alone they can be consolidated and developed.

p The triumph of socialism in the USSR was secured because Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were guided by the proposition of simultaneously improving the productive forces and the relations of production, and consciously working to maintain them in harmonious balance. The Party Programme, adopted by the 8th Congress of the RCP(B), said that the “all-round boosting of the country’s productive forces" should be the main line which determined 213 the whole economic policy of the Soviet power.  [213•1  Lenin felt that it was necessary to supplement the full-scale plan for social change, above all change in the sphere of relations of production, as set out in the Party Programme, with a concrete plan for developing the country’s productive forces, above all its material and technical basis, the plan known as the GOELRO, which was elaborated on Lenin’s initiative.

p Lenin resolutely opposed any attempt to identify the development of the productive forces with the quantitative growth of production which went forward without any reliance on technological progress. He saw the rise of the productive forces as implying an improvement of technology and the technical organisation of production, going hand in hand with a development of the working people themselves through a change in the content of their work and the supplanting of manual operations by mechanised operations arising from steady technical improvements, through higher living standards and a raising of their general educational and professional levels.

p Lenin said that the way to establish social property throughout the national economy lay through socialist industrialisation, the building of a large-scale machine industry capable of supplying all the branches of the economy with modern means of production and establishing a technical basis for a developed agriculture. He wrote: “Without highly developed large-scale industry, socialism is impossible anywhere; still less is it possible in a peasant country."  [213•2 

p These precepts of Lenin’s have been the CPSU’s guideline in the whole of its economic policy. It rejected the opportunist suggestions to delay the establishment of a heavy industry, and to lay stress on the boosting of output in the light and handicraft industries, which had a backward technical basis. The CPSU also discarded the Trotskyite suggestions for developing production by putting pressure on the workers and peasants and lowering their living standards. In line with Lenin’s precepts, the CPSU based its economic policy on the need to ensure the technical improvement of production together with the creation of 214 conditions promoting a steady rise in the material welfare and cultural and technical levels of the working people, the chief productive force.

p Mao’s conception has nothing in common with the MarxistLeninist doctrine of the substance and development of the socialist mode of production, which has been tested and confirmed by the practice of socialist construction in the USSR and the other socialist countries.

p Whereas Marxist-Leninist theory regards the mode of production as a dialectical unity of the productive forces and the relations of production, Mao’s conception has these two aspects of the mode of production mechanistically detached from each other. He assumes that it is possible to establish socialist relations of production and even to transform them into communist ones without reliance on a corresponding development of the productive forces. In Mao’s view it is not the establishment of the necessary material conditions, not the development of society’s material and technical basis and change in the content of labour that provides the groundwork for the development of socialist relations of production, but decrees, instructions from the political leader, and political instruments which make the masses obediently bend to his orders.

p Mao’s neglect of the improvement of society’s material and technical basis is ever more clearly revealed in his statements as he formulates his new economic line. In a report dealing with co-operatives in agriculture in 1955, he said: “We are now carrying out a revolution not only in the social system, the change from private to public ownership, but also in technology, the change from handicraft to largescale modern machine production. . .. We must on no account regard industry and agriculture, socialist industrialisation and the socialist transformation of agriculture as two separate and isolated things, and on no account must we emphasise the one and play down the other."  [214•1  This appears not only to insist on a simultaneous development of the productive forces and the relations of production, as stated in the CPC’s general line in that period, but also to emphasise the need for this proposition, the need for the technical improvement of production (agriculture in particular) as a 215 condition for switching it to socialist lines. But recognition of the need to abide by the requirements of the law of concordance amounted to no more than demagogy, for what Mao said in the above-mentioned speech clashed with the main content of the report from which the words are taken: in the report Mao urged a step-up in the collectivisation of agriculture, without ensuring the real possibilities for its technical equipment.

p Let us recall that the CPC Central Committee’s general line provided for a gradual implementation of socialist change in the country over a period of roughly 15 years. In 1956, Mao proposed that this period of transition to socialism should be reduced to one-third. He told the Supreme State Conference: “Since the summer of last year, socialist change, that is, a socialist revolution, has been started on an exceptionally large scale. Within another three years or so the socialist revolution will in the main be completed on the scale of the whole country."  [215•1 

p The idea of instantly establishing socialist relations of production throughout the national economy without providing the necessary technical basis clearly clashed with the principle of developing the relations of production on the basis of an improvement of the productive forces. While in 1955 Mao still pretended that he had considerations for this principle, when he declared that the “revolution in the social system" should be implemented together with the “ revolution in technology”,  [215•2  in 1956 he openly discarded this principle. This was expressed in his distorted view of the operation of the law of concordance of the productive forces and the relations of production in the period of socialist construction. In 1956 Mao declared: “Socialist revolution aims at liberating the productive forces. The change-over from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production."  [215•3 

p There is good reason why the idea of developing the productive forces has been supplanted by the idea of their “liberation”. The substance of Mao’s new line in effect consisted in putting off the development of the productive forces and the technical equipment of agriculture for an indefinite period, merely gaining the advantages to be had from a simple co-operation of the peasants’ unmechanised labour. On this basis, which did not allow the productive forces to go beyond the framework of a very limited level, Mao expected not only to establish socialist relations of production in an immature form, but also to develop them to a high state of maturity, and to convert the forms of organisation in production into communist ones. Mao was not put out by the lack of the necessary material and technical basis: he decided that the political power of the state was a factor which could serve as a substitute.

p Thus, the new line oriented the CPC’s economic policy away from a consideration of the objective requirements of the law of concordance of the productive forces and the relations of production and upon a deliberate neglect of these requirements: it did not induce a balanced resolution of the contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production, but an artificial sharpening of these contradictions. It will be easily seen that the idea which, let us recall, Mao put forward in that period, namely, that under socialism contradictions are resolved through their artificial sharpening, served not only as a “substantiation” for the sharpening of the class struggle within socialist society, but also as justification for the new line in the CPC leadership’s economic policy. In fact, Mao took a cynical attitude on the question of contradictions under socialism: guided by the principle “the worse the better”, he declared massive poverty and backwardness to be a favourable factor in socialist construction. He said: “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. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution."  [216•1 

p Above we already dealt with Mao’s voluntarism and his 217 off-hand attitude to the people, expressed, in particular, in his well-known statement in which he compares the people with a “clean sheet of paper" on which, “the newest, the most beautiful characters" can be written, and “the newest, the most beautiful drawings can be created”. This patent voluntarism, this scorn for the working people, the chief productive force, were most clearly revealed in the economic sphere. Mao’s statement quoted above suggests a haughty confidence on his part that the impoverished and backward mass of people can be made to do anything, that it can be turned into a pliant tool of the adventurist politician imagining himself to be a demi-god capable of changing the social system at will.

p The “sheet of paper" on which Mao intended to write “the newest, the most beautiful characters" in the expectation of setting up communism in some miraculous fashion was indeed a “clean” one in the sense that the objective conditions for such a project were lacking. The peasantry, constituting 80 per cent of China’s population, was engaged in subsistence and semi-subsistence farming. It lacked even the primitive implements which require the application of arduous manual labour, while in many places the peasants had to pull their ploughs and carts themselves because they were short of draught animals and mechanical means of traction. In industry, the bulk of the workers were engaged in handicraft production or at small and medium-size enterprises with extremely backward techniques and machinery and with the prevalence of manual labour. These workers had a productivity which came to no more than 10 per cent of that at the very small number of large enterprises equipped with machinery.

p In these conditions, there was an especially acute need to concentrate efforts on developing the large-scale machine industry as the only basis for the technical equipment of production and the substitution of mechanised for manual operations, so as to enhance productivity. But Mao thought on different lines. He assumed that economic problems could be tackled without technical improvements in production, if the entire working population were involved, while the working people’s poverty and backwardness would make it possible to get the most out of them through longer hours and lower living standards, to make up for the low labour 218 productivity. Instead of setting the goal of technical development and higher living, cultural and technical standards for the people, Mao put forward the idea of boosting production and increasing accumulation at the expense of the working people.

p That is precisely what was done in 1958. Enterprises were switched to a 10-12-hour working day with two holidays a month, and in the countryside more intensive use of manpower was made through the peasantry being saddled with the duty, in addition to farming, of also doing industrial work by extending rural handicraft production. The level of consumption among the rural population was sharply pressed down while the closed 3rd Plenary Meeting of the CPC Central Committee in 1957 formulated a special policy of “low and rational wages" in order to press down living standards among industrial and office workers. The substance of this policy was expressed by Minister of Labour Liu Tze-chiu, when he said: “At the present time, the basic policy in the sphere of labour and wages in our country is aimed at having five men consume the food of three."  [218•1  The urge for higher wages and better living conditions was declared by Mao to be an expression of “unhealthy style" and of the bourgeois mentality. He proclaimed this slogan: “Poverty is good.”

p The substance of the new economic line proposed by Mao and his entourage boiled down to the following: to accept the technical backwardness of production based on manual labour, to involve all the manpower reserves in this backward production by setting up labour armies and a great many handicraft industries, to put millions of men and women in conditions of hard labour, setting the goal not of boosting productivity, which is impossible without technological progress, but of wearing down men’s physical strength and pressing down their living standards to the utmost. This was a programme for the barbarous use of the available productive forces, which ruled out any possibility of their development. Nothing but a destruction of the productive forces could result from this programme.

p While holding forth about the “liberation” of the productive forces, Mao put this in the context of triumphant 219 socialist relations of production and socialist property. The terms “socialist property" and “social property" constantly occur in his speeches. However, behind the Marxist terminology there is nothing but a distortion of these concepts of MarxistLeninist science.

p Marxism-Leninism regards socialist relations of production not as the result of a formal socialisation of the means of production, decreed by some political body, but as a true realisation of relations involving the social ownership of the means of production and signifying that the various branches and the numerous units of the national economy are no longer fragmented economically, but have been brought together and are ruled by a single plan. Real establishment of social property means development of comradely co-operation and mutual assistance in the relations involving exchange of labour activity and a system of incentives for this activity which provides for a blend of personal interests, group interests and the interests of society as a whole. According to Marxism-Leninism, socialist democracy alone allows the development of all these aspects of socialist relations of production and their growth into communist forms of socio-economic organisation of social production.

p It will be easily seen that the political instruments which Mao has decided to use have nothing in common with socialist democracy, and the socio-economic system which he has been stubbornly trying to implant with these instruments has nothing in common with socialist relations of production.

p Mao’s idea about the political instruments to be used to establish the new relations of production is expressed in his call to “militarise organisation, take combat action and carry on a collective way of life”, as formulated in the CPC Central Committee’s resolution of August 29, 1958. Among the means used by Mao and his followers to implant the “collective way of life" are decrees establishing the form of organisation the people are to adopt, backed up by ideological brainwashing, and the introduction of these forms through administrative and military pressure on the masses. The so-called collective way of life itself, which is being established in this manner, is a system of extra-economic coercion of the working people, who have been switched to 220 near barrack-room conditions, and who have to play the part of faceless little screws doing the will of their senior. The people’s communes, which Mao declared to be the best organisational form for transition to communism, have always been instruments of extra-economic coercion designed to make the masses put up with any privation and give up the fruits of their labour to the state without a murmur.

p As Mao saw them, the communes were economic organisations essentially embodying not social but group property. This means that Mao’s views of the ideal economic organisation of society did not originate in Marxism but in anarchisttype conceptions and ideas going all the way back to Proudhon. Instead of realising the need to set up an integrated national economy with developed economic ties, and rational specialisation and co-operation of its units, Mao set for China the ideal of a semi-subsistence economy claiming that economic cells isolated from each other constituted a communist system. For one thing, each of these cells had to look to its own supplies, and not expect to co-operate with other cells, and for another, it was forced to make deductions into a state’s accumulations fund, without expecting any help from the latter.

p In the last few years, these conceptions have been expressed in Mao’s principle of “relying on one’s own strength”, which in application to China’s internal economic development boils down to the requirement of self-supply by economic cells and complexes. The practices at the Tacheng oil fields and of the Tachai production brigade were declared to be setting a model in the application of this principle. About 80,000 families, constituting the population of Tacheng—an oil-bearing area in north-east China, live in villages and hamlets situated in such a way as to enable the men to work on the oil fields and the women on the farms. The “spirit of Tacheng" which the Chinese press has extolled over a period of several years, amounts to a low rate of consumption and wretched living conditions in barrack-rooms and mud-huts, self-supply of foodstuffs and “voluntary” renunciation of assistance from the state. The same thing applies to the “spirit of Tachai”, with the sole difference that this is not a large industrial enterprise, but a small farm consisting of 83 households. The Tachai brigade is 221 credited not only with having provided their own supplies of seed, feed, fertilisers and building materials, but also with having refused to use paper and ink, so as to refrain from acquiring anything for their office from outside. The Tachai brigade practises the following principle: the greater part of the crop goes to the state and the rest is used for the needs of the farm and food for the peasants. One of their slogans is “three never ask" (never ask the state for grain, money or materials).

p The principle of “relying on one’s own strength" is the “substantiation” of the thesis that the isolation of the areas, the communes and production collectives is not a defect of China’s economy, but a great boon. At the same time, the Maoists have used this principle to justify their line of isolating China economically from the other socialist countries, a line which is in conflict with the objective need for international division of labour within the world socialist system and is aimed at undermining the economic unity of the socialist countries.

p Substitution of group for social property and of relations of economic isolation for relations of co-operation and mutual assistance necessarily had an effect on Mao’s views of the mechanism of the national economy and the economic laws governing its operation and development. Mao regards commodity-money relations as something that is alien to socialism, that is only outwardly connected with socialist relations of production and that exists alongside these relations. One would think that this view implies recognition of the need for strict centralisation of the national economy and comprehensive planning. But Mao has in fact also denied the need to regulate the national economy on the basis of the objective law of balanced and proportional development.

p In a speech before the Supreme State Conference in 1957 he said that grain was the only item that needed to be planned centrally, because the production of other industrial and agricultural items has to be determined by “local social organisations or by the masses themselves”. There is nothing paradoxical about this conclusion, because once the isolation of the economic units is idealised it logically follows that there is no need for centralising social production and carrying it on under a single plan. What is paradoxical is this: 222 Mao has failed to see that the separation of the economic units inevitably results in the anarchy of production and spontaneous operation of the law of value, and that consideration of the objective requirements of this law is a necessary condition for the balanced development of a socialist economy. In fact, he appears to regard socialist production as being a realm of spontaneous movement, in which there are no objective regulators.

p According to Mao, the law of “undulating” development is the only “law” that governs socialist production. He says that social production spontaneously fluctuates between a “state of equilibrium" and a “state of disequilibrium”, with alternating ebbs and flows, ups and downs. It is impossible, he says, to do anything about this and make economic development steady; the only thing that can be done is for the subjective factors to exert an influence on the economy so as to whip up the spontaneous rise and limit the spontaneous fall, when the time comes. Those are the only limits, according to Mao, in which the planning and conscious regulation of the development of socialist production is possible.

p Personal incentives are not among the means to be used in putting up the rises and tempering the falls. The working people have to be induced to do better by means of ideological influence and administrative pressure, with the products of labour so distributed as to ensure maximum accumulation, while keeping personal consumption’ down to a minimum, which the principle of levelling should help the working people to accept.

Thus, in his view of socialist relations of production and their development, Mao is as far from Marxism-Leninism as he is in his view of the substance and importance of the productive forces in the socialist mode of production, and of the need for their improvement. Mao’s conception is an eclectic mixture, in which distorted concepts of MarxistLeninist science are interwoven with concepts and notions borrowed from anarchist-type theories whose roots go back to Proudhon, together with the mechanistic “theory of equilibrium" which the Right opportunists once advocated, and other similar ideas.