Ruling Class
p The striving to forge ahead at all costs, leap over indispensable historical stages and proclaim the establishment of communist relations in China earlier than in any other socialist country was dictated not only by the complex situation in China herself but by the CPC leadership’s intention of dominating the international working-class movement. But here too grave setbacks awaited the Maoists. The unprincipled factional activity, the slander hurled at
123 Communists who disagreed with them, the barefaced falsification of Marxism, the insistent preaching of war invested with revolutionary verbiage alienated the overwhelming majority of Communist and Workers’ Parties from the CPC.p Finding itself in self-imposed isolation and faced with difficult problems, the Chinese leadership sought to give its miscalculations the guise of "scientific socialism" and the appearance of the latest word in the theory and practice of Marxism. To this end it chose the road of deifying Mao Tse-tung proclaiming him the highest authority on scientific communism and the leader of the world revolution and using his name to sanctify any arbitrary and ill-considered act in domestic and foreign policy.
p The Maoists used the people’s vague and amorphous ideas of socialism and tenacity of Chinese traditional social psychology founded on the millennia-long moral teaching of Confucianism to whip up the Mao cult to fantastic proportions. Confucianist dicta are an immutable law, an absolute dogma and ultimate truth that must be remembered and complied with at all times. Dogmatic faith in the infallibility of authorities and the scholastic repetition of approved wisdoms seriously undermined the inclination towards independent thinking and judgement. Man saw the entire value of the world solely in the rules and aphorisms formulated by the authorities. By playing on these survivals in the minds of the masses it was possible to establish the Mao cult and raise Mao Tse-tung to the level of a "supreme leader" and "master prophet”. Absolute ideological conformism and the regimentation of individuals were to serve as the pedestal for the "supreme leader" and his unlimited dictatorship. Not only criticism, but even silent disapproval of the deified prophet’s ideas were regarded as a threat to the very existence of the socialist system in China.
p All that the latter-day prophet had to do to become a second edition of Confucius was to spread his teaching as widely as possible. "The thought of Mao Tse-tung has to be instilled into the minds of the workers and peasants by closely connecting the study and application of his works with practice. This is the only way to change the spiritual make-up of the working people and turn spiritual force into a huge material force,” wrote the newspaper Jenmin Jihpao. The application of the “thought” of Mao Tse-tung, the same 124 newspaper reported, developed "into an ideological revolutionary movement that has no parallel in human history”. Quotations from the “creations” of Mao Tse-tung were learned by heart, sung, and used as accompaniment for dances. People of various professions "achieved unprecedented labour successes" with the assistance of these quotations.
p The front along which the assault was made on people’s minds was steadily widened. A new campaign of "socialist re-education" was announced in order to uproot alien ideology and “revolutionise” the thinking of factory and office workers. The people were deluged with apologetic articles and documents, whose purpose was to find a way out of the tangled economic situation by preaching "an adequate form of consciousness”. This was an organised assault by all media of ideological indoctrination—the press, radio and television.
p One of the aims of this assault was to turn the worker into an unthinking robot in the production process, regiment the thoughts of all the people and stifle all their material and cultural requirements. The ultimate purpose of the campaign to "revolutionise thinking" was to complete the process of reducing the worker to the level of a simple mechanism and a disinherited pawn on the political chessboard started soon after the failure of the "big leap”. To this end the spiritual law-makers of modern China invented new moral criteria that have become known as the “heroisation” of the individual.
p Slogans were turned out and offered to the masses: "learn from Lei Feng”, "learn from Wang Chieh”, "learn from Chiao Yu-lu" and so on ad infinitum. Propaganda described the death of Chiao Yu-lu, secretary of a county Party committee, from a liver disease as death "for the sake of the revolution”. "Heroic self-sacrifice" was how official propaganda described the death of Lei Feng who died in a road accident, the death of Owuyang Hai, who was accidentally run over by a train, and the death of Wang Chieh, who was killed as a result of carelessly handling explosives. As a rule, after their death, diaries "were found" which showed the moral credo of these "good disciples of Mao Tse-tung”.
p The philosophical journal Chehsueh Yanchiu undertook the task of “theoretically” substantiating the birth of the new norms of human behaviour in accordance with the ideal 125 of the Maoists. "The moulding of communist morality among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers,” this journal wrote, "takes place in the course of revolutionary practice and is the result of their heeding the counsels of Chairman Mao, keenly studying and effectively applying the works of Chairman Mao and breaking with all the old notions of morality. The principal condition is to arm oneself with the thought of Mao Tse-tung and drive all survivals of personal concepts out of one’s head. . .. Lofty ideas are the source of lofty moral qualities, and the teaching of Chairman Mao is the source of all lofty ideas.” [125•*
p In order to prove that truth comes from the lips of the people, the same magazine offered a cross-section of utterances by "heroic individuals”. This cross-section was reprinted by all leading Chinese newspapers and presented as the "basic principles of the proletariat’s communist morals”. The following are some of these precepts, which have been turned into a kind of model for the new man of the Mao Tse-tung mould.
p “Man’s role in revolutionary work is similar to that of a cog in a machine. A machine consists of a vast number of inter-related cogs and it is only due to this that it can operate at its full capacity. Although a cog is small, its role is inestimable. I want to be a cog always. A cog must be constantly cleaned and protected so that it does not rust. The same concerns man’s ideology. It too must be constantly checked to prevent hitches" (from the Diary of PL A soldier Lei Feng).
p “I want to become a universal cog. I shall remain wherever the Party places me, and I shall shine eternally, never rusting" (from the Diary of PLA soldier Wang Chieh).
p “I must be like a cog: if it accords with the Party’s interests, wherever I am driven, into a rifle, a farm implement, a lorry or a machine-tool—I agree to everything, and everywhere I shall perform the role of a small cog" (Chang Hungchih, model worker at Taching).
p The sole purpose of this vulgarisation of the role of the individual, of this humiliation of human dignity, is to educate people in a spirit of slavish and unconditional obedience. The same aim was pursued by another thesis of Chinese 126 propaganda, namely, "always be a simple toiler”. This was nothing but an aspiration to snuft out any attempt on the part of the people to change their social position, and it was permeated with the spirit of Confucianism with its strict regimentation of immutable social relations.
p The "revolutionisation of thinking" was accompanied by practical steps to paralyse the will of the working class and nullify its political rights. The insignificance of the role played by the working class is shown also by the social composition of the Chinese Communist Party, in which workers comprise 12-14 per cent of the membership. Large proletarian organisations—Party, trade union and Young Communist League—have been in effect removed from the leadership and supplanted by political departments, most of which are headed by army officers. These have their own propaganda, organisation, personnel and military training divisions. One of the propaganda slogans—"learn from the People’s Liberation Army"—demands that the working people live and work in military fashion. Workers, employees and peasants are made to devote several hours a week to military drill. The country’s entire life has been put on a military footing.
p Between the workers and the enterprises employing them, and between the workers and the organs of power there is a ramified and numerous social substratum of cadres called kanpu. In the oppressive atmosphere created by the Mao cult the enormous, all-penetrating administrative apparatus with its nearly 20 million employees has acquired all the features of a bureaucratic machine. Regulation of the activities of the kanpu from above has fettered individual initiative. The kanpu are required to carry out orders unconditionally in the spirit of army discipline and have been turned into a blind instrument of the “supreme” will of one man. Originally designed as an organ of dual control, the bureaucratic system of administration functions only in one direction—from top to bottom. Signals from the locality about economic difficulties are regarded as criticism from discontented elements or doubters. Formally, the kanpu act in the name of the people, but in fact they are the force which obstructed and stilled the creative initiative of the masses. This has resulted in the curtailment of the workers’ constitutional rights and of their political role, and in the 127 restriction of their participation in production management and in the organs of state administration.
p The absence of control from below cleared the way to arbitrary decisions. Political and social measures degenerated into countless campaigns, which were adopted as a style of work by the state apparatus. Subjectivism and arbitrary rule became standard practice in state and inner-Party life. The top echelon of the state apparatus and the Party grew into a despotic force that depended chiefly on the army and passed decisions at its own discretion.
p The state’s distrust for the workers made the workers distrust the state. Latent discontent mounted, causing an estrangement between the working class and the policies pursued by the Maoists. Explosive material accumulated in the proletarian organisations—in the Party and the trade unions. Even the kanpu system itself came into sharp conflict with the people whose job it was to put it into effect. This unfeeling machine weighed down not only on the working masses and the intelligentsia but also on the state and Party apparatus. Many of the kanpu officials were recruited from among workers, peasants and soldiers of the PLA. They saw at first hand the difficult condition of the people and the disastrous effects of Mao Tse-tung’s adventurist line. The failure of the "big leap" proved to be a serious test for many cadres. It shook their confidence in the "leader‘s” infallibility, sowed bewilderment and vacillation and made them doubt the current policies. As an antidote to the fermenting discontent, the Maoists injected a “pacifying” vaccine into the body of the nation in the shape of the "great proletarian cultural revolution”, which was nothing less than an assault on Party cadres, intellectuals and all doubters and discontented people. [127•*
p It was not easy for the Chinese workers to see where they stood in the struggle that had broken out in the Party. The programme of removing a considerable section of the creative intelligentsia and Party and state cadres, who dared to think independently of the canons of Maoism, was screened with pseudo-revolutionary slogans calling for a struggle 128 against bourgeois and reactionary elements "in Party authority taking the capitalist road”. The psychological terror directed against Party cadres was conducted as "criticism from below" and given the form of a "mass line”. The struggle for power at the summit of the hierarchic pyramid was camouflaged as a movement against old ideology, customs and culture.
p At the outset of the "cultural revolution" the working masses, including the industrial proletariat, adopted the stand of passive observers. But when the battle of words erupted into action—the seizure of industrial enterprises, a further offensive on wages, which were cut by another 10 per cent, the disbandment of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the destruction of the Komsomol organisations, the dissolution of provincial, town and county committees of the CPC, the replacement of organs of people’s power with "revolutionary committees" of hungweipings and tsaofans— the workers found themselves compelled to go over to a spontaneous defence. This reaction was not expected by the inspirers of the political hysteria, for they had counted on the blind support of the masses.
p The reign of terror instituted by the Maoist fanatics and the atmosphere of fear could not suppress the anger and indignation of advanced contingents of the proletariat. The strikes at the factories and the bloodshed in many cities, particularly in Nanking and Shanghai where a hundred thousand workers took part in the fighting in January 1967, made it obvious that a large section of the Chinese workers did not share the idea of the "cultural revolution”.
p The leadership reacted instantly to the resistance of the workers. Army "propaganda teams" were sent to the factories to suppress the proletariat and maintain “discipline”. The reorganisation of the constitutional organs of power and their replacement with military-control and "revolutionary committees" consisting of representatives of the army, the tsaofans and top echelon officials supporting Mao Tse-tung is still in progress. Army control has been established over political and economic life throughout China.
The struggle has by no means ended. The actions of the working masses against the excesses of the "cultural revolution”, the serious dislocation of the country’s economy, the widespread resistance being put up by the opponents of Mao 129 Tse-tung in the Party, in state institutions and even in the army, and the differences between the "exponents of Maoism" themselves have forced the Mao group to change to a policy of temporary manoeuvres and even to beat a partial retreat. The one-sided information coming from China makes it impossible to consider all the facets and nuances of phenomena that have not reached their logical climax. Any forecast made today would be premature, to say the least. But the trends as a whole amply show what the Mao group is hoping to achieve by spearheading the "cultural revolution" at the working class of China. Its objective is to suppress the working class, crush its resistance and protests, and discourage its efforts to uphold its human rights under the prevailing authoritarian, dictatorial regime. Evidence of this is the invention being spread about the bourgeois degeneration of some contingents of the proletariat.