p The economic stabilisation that began to show in 1962- 1965 did not bring about any marked improvement in the life of the workers. Only the most urgent problem, that of famine, was settled. Wages remained at the 1956 level of 40 to 60 yuans a month. Some categories of workers, mainly apprentices, are paid 23 yuans. The minimum cost of living in Peking is 59-60 yuans a month for a family of three. Staple foods are still rationed. Factory and office employees receive a guaranteed minimum of grain, averaging half a kilo a day, which is frequently replaced with sweet potatoes. Meat is issued only on holidays, and the annual ration of vegetable oil and sugar does not exceed 2.5 kilos. Cotton fabrics (from four to seven metres a year per person) are sold against ration cards. The high commercial prices (2.52 yuans per kilo of pork, 1.6 yuans per kilo of vegetable oil, 0.5 yuan per kilo of rice, 20-40 yuans per metre of woollen fabric, over 1,000 yuans for a television set) make it impossible to increase individual consumption because the working people cannot afford these commodities.

p Under this extremely high cost of living the Chinese leaders called for more austerity, asserting that from 8 to 10 yuans a month were enough to ensure a person with a satisfactory standard of living. Even before 1963, the psychological atmosphere at factories and offices was such that the workers and employees found themselves compelled to deposit a considerable portion of their earnings in the savings bank. In practice the possibility of drawing on these savings accounts was ruled out. The working people were thus burdened with an additional tax, which provided the state with a growth of accumulations by cutting down the budget of the workingman’s family. The vicious circle of errors committed by the Chinese leaders brought them round to 121 abolishing material incentives for work. On the eve of the "big leap" piece-rates and bonuses were replaced with a system of "rational low wages”. This system, likewise a kind of indirect tax levied by simply holding down wages while demanding higher labour productivity, has become particularly widespread in recent years.  [121•* 

p The "latest word" in the economic thinking of the Maoists is the institution of an experimental system of labour organisation—“workers-and-peasants”—which in 1965 embraced more than 30 branches of the national economy. Under the new system from 20 to 50 per cent of the permanent staff of workers at industrial enterprises located in rural localities (at some enterprises this percentage is much higher, reaching 70) are replaced with temporary or seasonal workers recruited from among the peasants. Factories and people’s communes conclude labour agreements under which the communes provide labour, periodically renewing it. This category of workers is used chiefly on heavy, manual work that does not require modern machinery. It is not embraced by social insurance and gets the lowest rate, which is not paid out directly to the worker or, if it is paid, the worker receives at most one-third of the wage. The rest of the income goes into the collective fund of the people’s commune and is subject to centralised distribution, mainly for production requirements.

p The experience of the Taching oil workers is given out as an example of a "genuinely socialist attitude to labour”. It consists of a “voluntary” renunciation of material incentives, in a transfer to self-supply, in the promotion of production with minimum investments by the state. At Taching and at enterprises being set up or reorganised after its model, wages are 50-66 per cent lower than at factories equipped with modern machines. The Taching experience combines industrial and agricultural labour and involves the enlistment of all the members of the families of factory and office workers. Men are employed chiefly at the oilfields and in construction, and women and children work in 122 agriculture and in the services industry. Industrial and office workers and the members of their families have built dugouts, which serve them as dwellings. In 19G4 this saved the state 20 million yuans, while the labour force needed for dwelling construction was cut by several thousand people.

p The "Taching example" has been proclaimed the programme line in economic development in China. The Mao group has called on the people to reshape factories in all branches of industry, offices, organisations and educational institutions on the Taching model, which is described as the prototype of communist society and called the "golden bridge to communism”. In an effort to give a Marxist content to these measures, the Chinese journal Laotung wrote that "the new forms of labour organisation not only meet the vital requirements of socialist construction but serve as a means of strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat and preventing the restoration of capitalism; they gradually erase the distinctions between workers and peasants, between town and countryside and between work by hand and by brain, and create the conditions for the transition to communism".*

In effect, these high-flown words hide a policy of abolishing the cadre composition of the proletariat, achieving a general social levelling, and replacing free and creative work with universal labour conscription. If this is communism, it is barrack communism, which Marx and Engels caustically ridiculed when they denounced the views of the Bakuninists as expressing the instinctive hostility of pettybourgeois, anarchist revolutionaries for the working class.