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p V. Gelbras

p The Maoist conception of socialism has nothing in common with scientific communism. In the "thought of Mao Tse-tung" the future society is pictured as state ownership of the means of production integrated with a political regime of personal power, where the will, interests and rights of one man tower above the will, interests and rights of 700 million people, where the machinery of state ignores the interests of the people and suppresses every possibility for the free development of society as a whole and each of its members.

p It is to the creation of precisely this society that the socioeconomic policy of Mao Tse-tung and his group is directed. Let us examine some aspects of this policy.

p Mao Tse-tung has formulated a "universal law" of social development as the "law of U-shaped development" or the "law of zigzag development”. The substance of this law is that equilibrium is followed by disequilibrium and then by equilibrium again.

p This subjectivist, mechanistical theory of equilibrium- disequilibrium is the methodological foundation of the Maoist idea of the factors and motive forces of social development. As a result, the Maoists concentrate on several central issues: how to upset the equilibrium of the social system, to secure disequilibrium, i.e., a "big leap”, avoid the consequent decline in production and maintain a "continuous big leap”. They believe the following factors will help them to solve these problems.

p The first is an all-embracing "political campaign”, in the course of which the "big leap" must become the cardinal, so to speak, ideological and political aspiration of the masses. Mao Tse-tung now regards "political campaigns" as the motive force of social development. The key aims of these campaigns are to secure an impulsive upsurge of activity by the masses, counterpose moral stimuli to material incentives, reduce the economic and cultural requirements of the people to a bare minimum and militarise all aspects of social life.

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p The second factor consists in making the maximum use of the country’s enormous manpower resources.

p Lastly, the third factor is the preservation of the extremely low wage level and the freezing of the people’s incomes. The currently operating rules governing labour and wages were formulated at the 3rd plenary meeting of the CPC Central Committee in 1957. According to Liu Tzu-chiu, Deputy Minister for Labour, "the basic political line in labour and wages in our country is that the food meant for three persons must suffice for five. It provides for the institution of a large number of enterprises and organisations which, with small investments, would ensure the employment of a large number of people. In this situation it is impossible to achieve a more substantial and faster rise of wages just as it is impossible to reduce and abolish unskilled and arduous physical labour within a short span of time”.

p Mao Tse-tung has called for the "permanent improvement" of relations of production with the aim of creating the corresponding forms of using labour resources and building up funds, “saved” at the expense of the people’s standard of living, for the development of a militaryindustrial complex and promoting missile-nuclear research. In his view, the relations of production are constantly “ renewed” regardless of the real changes occurring in the development of the productive forces.

The experience of the “leap” of 1956, the "big leap" of 1958 and the present "cultural revolution" indicates that Mao Tse-tung follows a stereotype pattern of action: " political campaign" giving the initial impulse to subsequent measures; “reorganisation” of the relations of production in order to mobilise funds and organise people; and, lastly, a "big leap" aimed at stepping up production. Neither failures, nor the frustration of the plans of economic development, nor the further aggravation of socio-economic contradictions have compelled the Maoists to reconsider their policies. The purpose of the "great proletarian cultural revolution”, it was announced in Peking, is to prepare the ideological, psychological and other prerequisites for the next “reorganisation” of social relations and achieve another "big leap”. All this is demagogically screened with references to Marxism, socialism and revolution.

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I

p According to Mao Tse-tung, an all-embracing "political campaign" is the foundation of any work. A specific of such a political “campaign” is that it is conducted in isolation of the objective requirements and possibilities of economic development and constitutes an attempt to spur social development artificially.

p In contrast to the Marxist proposition that in the long run social progress is determined by the development of the productive forces, Mao Tse-tung, in effect, maintains that social development is determined by the subjective aspirations of the leader and the actions of the masses believing in the wisdom of these aspirations. This is what underlies his notorious principle that "politics is the soul, the commanding force”. The instructions of the "great helmsman" are proclaimed as the iron-clad guarantee of the country’s successful development and the only source from which " absolutely correct and ready-made solutions" are to be drawn for every occasion in life. The Maoists assert that "as soon as it takes possession of the masses the thought of Mao Tse-tung turns into an invincible atomic bomb that engenders a huge material force”.

p In China all "political campaigns" involve the same political methods, the chief of which are the removal of all opposition elements from active politics, the isolation of waverers, the fanning of nationalistic and chauvinistic sentiments, the indoctrination of the people in a spirit of preparation for war and the creation of an atmosphere of mobilisation. To this end the Maoists have created new flashpoints of international tension or fanned those already in existence: recall the clashes staged by them in the Taiwan Strait, and military action on the frontier between China and India. In recent years the Maoists have been using the war in Vietnam to fan nationalistic and chauvinistic passions. For a number of years Chinese propaganda has been spreading the idea that China is a besieged fortress, threatened by the Soviet Union on one side, by India on another and by the United States of America on yet another. Matters reached a point where Mao Tse-tung and his group started military conflicts on the Soviet frontier.

p The present "political campaign" gives an idea of the 199 subtle means by which the Maoists exercise a moral- political, psychological and physical influence on the masses. They have put in action not only storm detachments of hungweipings and tsaofans but also army units, established military control in all spheres of life, destroyed the Party and disbanded the trade unions and the Young Communist League. Humiliating “trials” and public executions, and the resettlement of millions of people for "re-education through labour" have become standard practice. Paramilitary forms of labour organisation and education and special agencies controlling the thoughts and actions of the people have been set up.

This has been designed by the Maoists with the aim of physically destroying some people, politically and morally discrediting others, intimidating still others and completely subordinating the rest of the population, and all in order to preserve power in the hands of Mao Tse-tung and his supporters, create the illusion that the "subjective activity of the masses" is on the upsurge and enforce blind obedience to the instructions of Mao Tse-tung. However, the situation in China today witnesses not only the unparalleled tyranny imposed by the Maoists but also resistance to them from the masses, a struggle that is being waged on a huge scale by the Party, the trade unions and the YCL and affecting the life of millions of people.

II

p In recent months Mao Tse-tung and his supporters have been making every effort to speed China’s “reorganisation”, to set up a "new order" through an “improvement” of the relations of production.

What lies behind these terms? According to Mao Tsetung, success in the building of the new society depends not on the creation of the appropriate material and technical basis but on the reorganisation of the forms of ownership of the means of production, on a "revolution in people’s minds”, and on the materialisation of the traditional peasant ideals of equality among people, ideals which are being demagogically screened with slogans about the abolition of the distinctions between work by brain and by hand, between town and countryside, between industrial and agricultural labour.

200 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1972/MU245/20080516/245.tx" The Maoists do not even attempt to tie in these complex processes with the development of the productive forces.

p Mao Tse-tung and his group regard the development of the productive forces as purely a fact of will. Take agriculture, for example. In China agricultural production is founded on the employment of manual implements that have been in use for thousands of years. The most widespread of these are the hoe, the wooden plough and the scythe. There are very few draught animals with the result that in many cases the peasants harness themselves to the wooden plough. Boats, wheelbarrows and yokes are the means of transporting burdens. Agriculture is of a natural, and in some areas, semi-natural character. In other words, Chinese agriculture rests on extremely backward, medieval productive forces. Prior to the agrarian reform pre-capitalist relations of production were also very much in evidence. It was under these conditions that on Mao Tse-tung’s initiative the establishment of "higher type" agricultural producers’ cooperatives was speeded up in 1955-56. These cooperatives were founded on manual labour and the use of primitive, antediluvian wooden implements with the result that in these associations it was not always possible to benefit from the advantages even of simple cooperation. Nonetheless, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the formation of such cooperatives as a " decisive victory of the socialist revolution”. In 1958, the same production basis was used for the formation of "people’s communes”, which were proclaimed as the best means of transition from "collective to public ownership" and the most effective way of accomplishing the transition from "socialism to communism”.

p During the same year (1958), the Maoists worked out and put into effect their first "concrete measures" to lay down other conditions for "speeding up" the building of communism. The “worker-and-peasant” system instituted in the paramilitary labour armies formed of peasants and used in industry, building and transport has been proclaimed a means of eradicating the distinctions between industrial and agricultural labour. However, in the conditions obtaining in China this system only meant—it could mean nothing else— an organised transfer of unskilled labour from one project to another. But this transfer did not turn peasants into industrial workers. The entire system of production 201 management was abolished at industrial enterprises and office employees were forced to engage in manual labour. For their part, the workers, of whom 80 per cent were illiterate or partially literate, could not become workers ^by brain. Nevertheless, in China they began to extol the "new type of worker"—the “worker-and-peasant” and the “ workerand-employee”. A campaign to implant a "communist attitude to work" was started on a massive scale. Actually, the object of this campaign was to lengthen the working day from eight to ten or twelve hours, reduce the number of off-days from four to two per month, establish a barrack regime at factories, abolish payment according to work and introduce "free meals" and levelled distribution.

p The attempt to speed up the building of communism collapsed, and its sole result was that China’s economy was hurled back several years.

p In subsequent years Mao Tse-tung did not reconsider his views on the relations of production. He persisted in his efforts to speed up “improvement” of the relations of production and use it to “boost” agricultural and industrial development. The Chinese leaders mean to use the " cultural revolution" to ensure a "far-reaching reform of the socialist system”, "complete the socialist revolution on all fronts" and even "ensure the successful transition from socialism to the great goal of communism”.

p The "reform of the socialist system" and the " reorganisation of the superstructure" are now in full swing under Mao Tse-tung’s slogan calling for the "seizure of power”. However, this pseudo-revolutionary shell conceals a drive to set up a regime of absolute personal power in China. The programme of reorganising the relations of production has been outlined long ago in the "new instructions of Mao Tsetung" christened the "golden bridge to communism”.

p The principal aim of this “reorganisation” of the relations of production is to set up local social units—“self-sufficing” economies that would embrace industry, agriculture, transport, trade, military training and so forth. The members of such collectives have to be "workers, peasants and soldiers" at one and the same time. These semi-natural production units with poor economic links between them, in which universal participation in exhausting manual labour is combined with a working day lengthened to the utmost limit, 202 have been proclaimed the "golden bridge to communism”. The motto "Poverty is a good thing”, coined by Mao Tsetung, is applied in these units. Man’s spiritual world is forcibly restricted to the postulates of Maoism.

p The Taching oilfields and the Tachai production brigade at the commune of the same name in Shansi province are held up as models of the Maoist style units.

p The building of the Taching oilfields was started in 1961 in a sparsely inhabited region of Northeast China. In this connection we should like to note two important circumstances. First, from the very beginning the building of this project was conducted in such a way as to produce a " model for the application of the thought of Mao Tse-tung”. Second, the experiment was conducted under conditions of a modern industrial enterprise with several tens of thousands of workers.

p According to Cheng Kuo-tse, deputy chief of the political department at Taching, the following directive was received when the project was under construction: "We are instructed by leading comrades from the Central Committee of the CPC that the general line in the development of the mining district is to combine industry with agriculture, to integrate the town with the countryside, which would benefit industry and be convenient for life; hostels for workers and employees and hostels for families must be spread out, they must not be built in one place, and no large towns must be built; families must be properly organised—the men must work in industry and the women in agriculture, they must be workers-and-peasants and combine industry with agriculture; an organ of authority  [202•*  must be set up in the mining district and it must function in the interests of the enterprise under the overall direction of the mining enterprise’s Party committee.”

p At Taching everything is subordinated to the idea of a comprehensive, "self-sufficing economy”, of "combining industry with agriculture”. It has "several large and a few score of medium centres of population”. The " industrialagricultural villages" are sited with their crop area near them. The local organ of authority fosters education fully 203 in accordance with Mao Tse-tung’s instructions: at the schools studies are combined with work and all the pupils learn the "thought of Mao Tse-tung”, engage in trade—the schools produce vegetables and other food—and so on. In short, Taching is an urban people’s commune (the attempt to set up such communes on a national scale in 1958 ended in failure), a local lower unit of society with a comprehensive economy functioning in full conformity with the line of "reliance on own resources”, without aid from the state. The Chinese press stresses that "the Taching way of life embodies the revolutionary traditions laid down in the 1930s and 1940s in Yenan, where the Chinese leaders lived in caves”.

p But there is more to this. Measures are being taken to “erase” the distinction between work by brain and by hand, between town and countryside and between industrial and agricultural labour. The distinctions between labour by brain and by hand are “erased” by forcing engineers and technicians to work regularly in the fields. The distinctions between town and countryside are also “erased” in a very peculiar way. "All service premises, canteens, shops, polyclinics and clubs,” Hsinhua News Agency reported, "are in houses made of clay, straw and waste”. "There is hardly any difference in the housing of the oilworkers and the peasants of the nearby villages. Besides, they are situated near fields where the members of the workers’ families engage in agriculture.” This is nothing less than a flagrant violation of modern industry’s demand for a specialised, highly trained machinery of management. It shows the Maoists’ scorn for the achievements of civilisation and progressive culture, and signifies a regression, as Marx put it, "to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and undemanding man”,  [203•*  to the artificial cultivation of universal exhausting manual work, to closer day-to-day contact of workers, engineers, technicians and office employees with backward agricultural production.

p In China the "spirit of Taching" has been proclaimed as a "model of the great revolutionary school of the thought of Mao Tse-tung, of the link between town and countryside”. It appears that Taching has opened the road to the creation 204 of "enterprises of the Chinese type" in conformity with the "thought of Mao Tse-tung”.

p The same “spirit” is embodied in agriculture by the Tachai production brigade. There, too, efforts are being made to create a comprehensive, “self-sufficing” economy functioning in accordance with the policy of "reliance on own resources”. It is stated in China that this brigade grows grain and raises pigs. It manufactures and repairs primitive farm implements, produces building materials and provides itself with seeds, fodder and fertilisers. All purchases are reduced to a minimum. The brigade members have stopped buying even ink and paper.

p The brigade is attempting to "erase the three great distinctions"—between labour by brain and by hand, between town and country and between industrial and agricultural labour—in much the same way as at Taching.

p Such are the two piers of Mao Tse-tung’s "golden bridge to communism”. The "spirit of Taching" and the "spirit of Tachai" in many ways lay bare the substance of his views and plans.

p The attempts that have been made in the course of almost a decade to set up enterprises of the "Taching type" and communes of the "Tachai type" have evidently shown the Mao group that the people do not regard these undertakings with enthusiasm. By the time the "cultural revolution" was started there were in China only 70 enterprises of the "Taching type" and only 56 “Tachai-type” communes. This is a drop in the ocean of small enterprises, brigades and communes. That explains why they are now pinning their hopes on the army carrying out this programme. The Maoists are determined "to turn the army into a great school" for the building of the "golden bridge”.

p The “spirit” of Taching and Tachai mirrors Mao Tsetung’s manipulations with the ideals of socialism and communism and his use of Marxist terminology to deceive the people.

The "correct road for China’s industrialisation" and the "correct road for the development of agriculture" in the spirit of the "thought of Mao Tse-tung" are leading China into an economic impasse and aggravating socio-economic contradictions. Forced to surrender the bulk of their output to the state, deprived of material assistance even in the 205 event of elemental calamity and compelled to reduce local requirements to a bare minimum, the production units "of the Chinese type" are in no position to develop the productive forces. Actually, this is a policy of setting up isolated economic units, of divorcing the interests of the state from those of individual collectives of working people and breaking the alliance of the working class with the peasants. Objectively speaking, Mao Tse-tung’s policy is aimed at conserving and reproducing the archaic form of the " traditional society" consisting of isolated communes engaged in self-contained social and economic activity.

III

p We have noted that Mao Tse-tung ignores the material and technical factors of social development. It must be added that his own arguments about industrialisation and the technical reconstruction of agriculture (as distinct from some Party decisions and statements by other leaders of the CPC) are extremely vague. Nowhere does he specify his understanding of these terms although he uses them fairly often in his works. An analysis of his statements in the light of the practical measures started by him will make it clear that he equates industrialisation to the development of industrial production generally (including artisan production as one of the main orientations of industrial development), and the growth of the productive forces to the growth of production regardless of how or at what price this growth is achieved. This is abundantly illustrated by the "big leap" of 1958 and by the “spirit” of Taching and Tachai.

p Mao Tse-tung says nothing of the creation of the material and technical basis of socialism in China. Although in past years he has sometimes mentioned industrialisation and the technical reconstruction of agriculture (more often than not in connection with the task of "speeding up" the building of communism), in practice he has insisted on accelerated development of artisan production, on the building of small and medium enterprises and the wide use of manual labour.

p In the USSR the Party’s clear-cut and consistent policy has from the very beginning oriented the Soviet people on the building of the material and technical basis of socialism. 206 Manual labour not machinery was predominant during the years of economic restoration and the first five-year plans. But this labour resulted in the erection of modern factories and the building of the material and technical basis of socialism. In China, on the other hand, the result of the labour of many millions of people in 1958 was the appearance of hundreds of thousands of primitive blast-furnaces, openhearth furnaces and tiny factories and workshops whose output could not be fully used because of its extremely inferior quality. In recent years, too, the building of such enterprises has proceeded on a considerable scale. In many branches of industry they account for the bulk of the output. According to Chinese statistics, they produce 40 per cent of China’s chemical fertilisers, 60 per cent of her coal, 70 per cent of her cement and 60 per cent of her farm implements.

p Low labour productivity, high production costs and the unsatisfactory quality of the output are due to this large number of small and medium artisan factories with primitive equipment and poorly organised production. Another outcome of this policy is the regression of the rate of growth of the working class at the large factories.

p The semi-natural character of Chinese agriculture, which is founded on manual labour, the backward state of the productive forces, the low labour productivity and the absence of stable and considerable sources of accumulation are posing the Chinese leadership with grave problems in charting economic policy. So far agriculture is unable to supply anything near the adequate quantity of food and raw materials for the urban population and industry.

p In principle, under these conditions it is possible to steer towards a gradual and, at first, a relatively slow expansion of a modern, large-scale industry capable of becoming the material and technical basis of the new society. But Mao Tse-tung and his group have chosen to follow an altogether different road. Objectively speaking, the entire range of the Maoists’ postulates and practical measures are aimed at conserving China’s economic backwardness. Efforts are being made to hasten the state’s conversion into the supreme owner of all the means of production. The people are removed from the management of these means, which are not used to further the standard of living. In China they are completing the process of levelling wages and securing the peasants to the 207 land and the workers and employees to their respective factories and offices. Paramilitary, coercive forms of labour organisation are being introduced, extra-economic forms of compulsion are being devised in order to increase accumulation, and mass consumption is being reduced to the lowest possible level. As in past years, China is building thousands upon thousands of new primitive enterprises.  [207•* 

p For a short period after 1958, as a result of the establishment of rural people’s communes and under pressure from the organs of authority heading the communes, a sharp increase of accumulations in agriculture was made possible and the vast manpower resources in the countryside were mobilised and employed in a centralised manner. The Chinese press reported that in that period the accumulations of the state and the people’s communes amounted to 30 per cent of the net output of agriculture, which means that they reached 10-13 per cent of the national income. In other words, compared with the 1953-57 level they were more than doubled. Further, from 60 to 100 million people were taken from agriculture and formed into labour armies. This meant that from one-fourth to one-half of the able-bodied rural population was diverted from agriculture and employed on irrigation projects and on the construction of small primitive enterprises for the production of pig iron, steel and so on.

p In subsequent years the rural people’s communes were split into smaller units. In 1958 there were more than 24,000 communes, while in 1965 their number exceeded 73,000 (in 1957 there were over 740,000 rural cooperatives). The production brigades, set up in many cases on the basis of former agricultural producers’ cooperatives of the "higher type”, have become the basic production unit in agriculture. These brigades were officially re-established in their right to own land, implements, livestock, buildings, household property and so on. However, the people’s communes remained and, in addition to their function as organs of local authority and, thereby, representatives of the state, they planned agricultural output in the production brigades and determined the size of their deliveries to the state and the size of the agricultural 208 tax. Through the people’s communes the state began to determine the volume of food grain consumption by the peasants, the distribution of incomes and even the system of remuneration for labour. The commune was turned into an agency handling the granting of credits and material assistance to the peasants and also the formation of prices in the rural market. It began to control the commodity-money relations between all the organisations and brigades in the given region.

p As a result, despite the certain retreat from the practice of 1958, the production brigades were, in fact, not restored as collective farms in the full meaning of the word. The state retained its hold on all the levers regulating production, exchange, distribution and consumption in the production brigades. Under these conditions the brigades could be called collective farms with considerable reservations. On the other hand, the commune has become a state form of extraeconomic compulsion with regard to the production brigades.

p The communes have, moreover, retained the important function of securing the peasants to the land. In principle, this is typical of a semi-natural economy. In China they had recourse to this on a large scale after 1956, when at the height of the cooperative movement there was a mass migration of peasants to the towns. In 1957 a law was passed forbidding any "spontaneous flow" of peasants to the towns and prescribing administrative measures to evict peasants from the towns and send them to their place of permanent residence.

p While preserving the people’s communes in the countryside and setting the task of amassing experience of setting up similar communes in the towns (the "Taching experiment”), the Maoists have sharply intensified the ideological and political indoctrination of the people and taken steps to work out special organisational forms of temporarily releasing part of the labour force from agriculture. One of these forms is the “worker-and-peasant” system, under which the peasants sent to work outside agriculture have no right to sign a labour contract. All questions concerning labour conditions, wages, term of work in the new place, the living conditions and so on are settled without the participation of the peasants by special agreements between the enterprise concerned and the people’s commune.

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p In the process of setting up the "new order" Mao Tsetung and his supporters are endeavouring to use the people’s communes for a reversion to their 1958 line. The production brigades are being deprived of the last vestiges of economic and production independence. A new campaign has been started to abolish the ancillary plots, the free market and all forms of material incentives, and to effect a return to the militarisation of labour. Millions of urban dwellers—- intellectuals, office employees and students—are being exiled to the villages for "permanent settlement”. People’s communes of the Taching type are being set up in the towns. Mao Tse-tung and his group are pinning tremendous hopes on the new "big leap”, which is supposed to have started this year.

p The political aims and slogans of Mao Tse-tung and his group are leading to upheavals in China and, as the experience of many years shows, they are impeding the solution of basic socio-economic problems of social development and making it difficult to put an end to economic backwardness. Industry and industrialisation cannot be promoted through the development of primitive production. The discontinuance of economic incentives for factories, communes, production brigades and the working people and the forcible disruption of the established social division of labour are giving rise to new socio-economic problems and are by no means helping to settle existing problems. The policy of the Maoists has already done irreparable damage to the Chinese people and the cause of socialism.

p The social effects of this policy have also been devastating. They are not limited to the falling standard of living, the curtailment of housing, cultural and everyday service projects and the disruption of the long-term programmes of abolishing illiteracy. What Mao Tse-tung is out to achieve is to give final shape to his "absolute power" and "absolute authority”, and the course followed by him is destroying normal economic links between the state, the factories and the communes, between the factories and the personnel employed by them, between the communes and the production brigades, and between the production brigades and the peasants. The whole of social production functions on the basis of extra-economic compulsion with all the attendant consequences. This is one of the chief reasons for the destruction of the system of organs of authority through the 210 campaign to "seize power" started by Mao Tse-tung during the "cultural revolution”.

p Sooner or later, the road followed by the Maoists is bound to lead to attempts to set up a regime of personal power. The state’s isolation from the entire range of society’s economic interests inevitably leads to the militarisation of all aspects of social life and the establishment of a militarybureaucratic dictatorship demanding military discipline and dictatorial methods of directing and administering all aspects of social life from above. Independent thinking is stifled. Criticism and self-criticism (except in cases of forced repentance) are prohibited. Everything that may facilitate the growth of the people’s cultural level and political awareness is suppressed. In this respect, the "cultural revolution”, started with the promise of “reforming” China’s social system, is a considered political campaign whose objective is to remove all the obstacles to the creation of precisely such a new state. The 9th Congress of the CPC was used by the Maoists to obtain formal approval of their programme. This “congress” called on the people to make further sacrifices, prepare for war and elemental calamities and be ready for another “leap”.

Politicheskoye samoobrazovaniye, No. 5, 1969,
pp. 28-37