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p G. D Sukharchuk (USSR)

p During the “cultural revolution" the Chinese press carried numerous statements and theoretical comment, an analysis of which gives an insight into the actual meaning of the concepts Maoism has “substituted” for Marxism-Leninism on the pretext of its “development”, “correction”, “specification" or “defence”. The atmosphere of bitter, uncompromising struggle in the course of the “cultural revolution" led the Maoists to make some very blunt statements. This was particularly true of the critical year of 1967, when the scales were yet to be tilted one way or another. That was when the three major Chinese periodicals—Jenmin jihpao, Hungchi and the army paper Chiehfangchiun pao—carried an editorial to mark the PRC’s 18th anniversary, entitled “Long Live the Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!”. It contained some highly important Maoist conclusions drawn from the PRC’s past record and laid down the general political line for the future. The socialist system, it said, had boosted the country’s productive forces. Thanks to socialism, “the poor, backward and long-suffering country has soared high, and has now become a mighty and prosperous socialist power”. The conclusion was that “the 18-year record shows that Mao Tse-tung thought is the only way to save (sic!) China”.

p Socialism, therefore, could do nothing to save China, although it had turned the country into a “mighty and prosperous" power: what the country needed was “Mao Tsetung’s thought”. Perhaps it was socialism itself that China 132 had to be saved from? No, it was from bourgeois degeneration, which infested the minds of nearly all the country’s working people. Moved by their “innate egoism”, these people were simply yearning to degenerate into bourgeois. Thus, the article said, it was neither the Chinese people’s victory in 1949, nor the building of a socialist society that should go down in Chinese history as the supreme event, but the “great proletarian cultural revolution”, aimed to combat that degeneration.

p Mao Tse-tung, who keeps urging the need to learn from and to trust in the masses, does not, in fact, trust them or believe in them himself, doubting their socialist enthusiasm on which he likes to hold forth. He is bent on “painting up" the masses’ minds with his own “beautiful pictures”. In 1958, he said: “It has always been so in history that the majority followed the minority, because the minority reflected the views of the majority.”

p Maoist “thought” regards revolution as nothing but overthrow and destruction. Since, it maintains, the revolution does not end but merely begins with the seizure of power by the revolutionaries, it should keep on destroying and breaking up all that has acquired any shape or stability, for otherwise the revolution is at an end. Now wherever the revolution gives out, it is bound to give way to a vacuum, which is then penetrated by the forces of counter-revolution and restoration, the woodworm that immediately starts eating away at the foundations of the revolution.

p This quasi-revolutionary logic shows a clear lack of understanding of the dialectics of revolution—the main feature of socialist revolution, its chief characteristic—as a process of simultaneous destruction and creation, destruction of the old and creation of the new. The negative and destructive element in socialist revolution prevails only at its initial stage, while power is being seized through the overthrow of the exploiting regime. From that point onward, it marks a new creative effort in every sphere of social life: economics, politics, ideology and culture. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolution continues and unfolds as a positive effort on the part of the working class and the whole working people, led by the Communist Party, to build a new society. This is the work that destroys all that is old.

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p In other words, having caught on to one of the basic propositions in Marxism-Leninism, concerning the need to carry on and develop the revolution even after the take-over, that is, after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established, the Maoists have twisted its essence. Their past experience drove them to believe that revolution largely boiled down to an inevitable struggle against a personified enemy, who had to be pursued and destroyed. The manialike fear of restoration stemmed from the idea of men’s inborn egoism, which was said to be identical with the bourgeois frame of mind. Maoist theorists maintained that as soon as socialist relations of production became fully established in town and country, “capitalism starts to revive hour by hour”, there being a constant threat of its restoration from within. This meant, they say, that the revolution (in the Maoist sense of the word) had to be continued even under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This “revolution” was aimed against the alleged vehicles of restoration, men who had gained a foothold in the leadership under the existing regime, and it was the only way to “prevent a restoration of capitalism”.

p The 1949 revolution freed the Chinese workers and peasants from bourgeois and landowner oppression and exploitation and opened up the possibility for a better life, thus, the Maoist argument went on, placing them among the “contented”, i.e., those who did not want to “carry on the revolution" because of their own egoism. The main source of “bourgeois degeneration" and egoism (in the Maoist sense of the word) lay in the revolutionary cadres of the Chinese Communist Party and socialist state, who embodied the regime’s gains and stability. In Mao Tse-tung’s opinion, that was the reason for their negative attitude to the results of the “great leap forward" and the “people’s communes" campaign, and also their activity in the “ordering” period.

p Any stability, in Mao Tse-tung’s opinion, contains the seeds of inequality, whereas inequality entrenched for a sufficiently long period leads to revisionism. Revisionism, he believes, is nothing but a desire to hold on to the state of welfare already achieved. Hence the need for a shake-up, for a blasting of stability, which is said to be tantamount to 134 doing away with stagnation and returning to the equality of the revolutionary days.

p “Cultural revolution" propaganda called on the working people “to insist on carrying on the revolution after working hours"—a formula whose practical purpose was to protect the economy from “sliding” into chaos. In theoretical terms, it gives a vivid idea of the very primitive nature of the Maoist concept of “revolution” under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, the formula implies that “to carry on production”, that is, to help develop the material and technical basis of socialism and build up the state’s economic, technical and other strength in the face of the hostile imperialist surrounding, does not amount to “carrying on the revolution”, but is no more than a commonplace, even if necessary activity. But since building up the country’s wealth is equivalent to making the people “bourgeois”, there is always a need for Maoist-type “revolution” to scrub away the bourgeois sore. Still, production has to be carried on. Hence, the “dialectical” need to balance out production, which holds the threat of bourgeois degeneration, by “carrying on" a Maoist-type permanent “revolution” mainly in the moral and political sphere.

p With these preliminary remarks, let us now consider Mao Tse-tung’s socio-economic views. Another thing to add is that neither Mao Tse-tung himself, nor any of his closest followers have ever come out with any open or more or less systematic account of these views, something that is, apparently, due to the fact that these views have been shaped during the latest period of Mao Tse-tung’s practical and theoretical activity, and also to the pragmatical and empirical approach that is typical of him in matters of theory. On the whole, pragmatism seems to be one of his characteristic features.

p A point to emphasise is that Mao Tse-tung’s policy aimed to impose his views (on socio-economic and other matters) on the Chinese Communist Party and people has constantly met and continues to meet with very strong resistance from the internationalist forces standing up for their own views and positions. Besides, China’s realities, the objective economic situation and the balance of class forces have also tended to frustrate Maoist schemes.

p At the time of the people’s revolution, Mao Tse-tung’s 135 political platform provided for a coalition government of the democratic classes led by the CPC as representing the Chinese workers and peasants—the two main classes of Chinese society. The Chinese bourgeoisie and bourgeois intelligentsia, regarded as active patriotic and anti-imperialist forces,^^1^^ were also to have not merely a token but a prominent, though subordinate, role.

p An analysis of Mao Tse-tung’s report to the Seventh Congress of the CPC (April 1945) and the documents of the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh CPC Central Committee (March 1949) shows that at the time he still had no definite economic programme for the development of China and the Chinese revolution after a take-over. He regarded socialism as a distant prospect, an “ultimate ideal of the future, a future of boundless radiance and beauty”, insisting that “for a long time to come there will exist in China a particular form of state and political power”, namely, a new-democratic state and new-democratic form of power.^^2^^ To make it quite clear that new democracy was not a form of proletarian dictatorship but was essentially different from the latter, Mao Tse-tung said: “Some people wonder whether the Chinese Communists, once in power, would follow the example of the Russian Communists and establish a proletarian dictatorship and a one-party government. Our answer is that a new-democratic state based on an alliance of several democratic classes is different in principle from a socialist state under proletarian dictatorship... . Throughout the stage of new democracy there cannot and therefore should not be in China a system of one-class dictatorship and one-party government."^^3^^

p The CPC’s record shows that far from seeking to make use of the international experience of the working class, Mao Tse-tung did his utmost to prevent it from penetrating and spreading in China. This will be seen from his campaign against the Chinese internationalist-minded Communists and their destruction during the Second World War (“ chengfeng" campaign to “correct the style of work”, launched in Yenan in February 1942), and the severing of the CPC’s ties with the international communist movement in that period.

p The historical background on the eve of the 1949 victory was marked above all by the emergence of the world socialist 136 system and the growing influence of the USSR and socialist ideas and practice on the Chinese national liberation movement and its vanguard, the CPC. Under the direct impact of that factor, the Second Plenary Session of the CPC Central Committee in March 1949 adopted a decision to shift the emphasis in Party work from country to town, underlined the leading position of the industrial working class in Chinese society and laid down the tasks for building a new China, which were later incorporated in the CPC general line for the transition period officially published in 1953. The political and particularly the economic and social tasks of socialist construction, formulated in the general line, their priority and deadlines for achievement were laid down in accordance with the experience of world socialism and were aimed to ensure a steadily growing political and economic role for the working class in Chinese society.

p In dealing with the political and social results of the first five-year period in August 1958, Mao Tse-tung made a very indicative statement when he said that up to 1953, that is, up to the adoption of the general line for the transition period and the start of the First Five-Year Plan, the country had developed correctly, in accordance with “Marxism”, but from 1953 to 1958, that is, during the successful fulfilment of the First Five-Year Plan, it had gone wrong and had cut across “Marxism”. Mao Tse-tung’s “accordance with Marxism" in the course of the country’s restructuring up to 1953 did not mean implementation of the “new democracy" programme, but above all the peculiarities of that period which made it akin to the Yenan system. This is fresh proof that he attached the greatest significance to politics and ideology, rather than to the processes going on within the economic basis.

p Mao Tse-tung voiced his dissatisfaction with the first fiveyear period (1953-57) and said that its drawbacks had resulted from “homebred capitalism" and the socialism that the Chinese had borrowed from “their elder brothers”. In saying so, he clearly implied that socialism as built in the USSR had some grave socio-political defects..

p He went on to say that it was only a very short period from the time the CPC’s “Marxist” line had been distorted (in 1953) and urged resolute abandonment of the line 137 followed during the first five-year period and transition, or rather return, to the “socialist line" of the earlier period. This meant virtual repudiation of the CPC’s general line as erroneous and even bourgeois.

p Mao Tse-tung maintained that the “bourgeois essence" of the general line and practice after 1952 had above all been expressed in the introduction of the principle of material incentives in the system of production and social relations, which was being implemented through the introduction of cash wages, ranks and distinctions for functionaries of the state, military and Party apparatus, so producing the alleged danger of social differentiation, and an imaginary loss of contact between the leading cadres and the masses, stemming from the system of ranks and distinctions. He also denounced any de jure as well as de facto shortening of urban working hours to eight a day, which meant a splitting up of the worker’s interests into social interests (on the job) and private interests (after working hours).

p To follow the “truly socialist line”, in agreement with “genuine Marxism”, the whole apparatus and all the working people had to work exclusively “for the sake of revolutionary ideas”. Material provision had to be uniform, being carried out under a single system. It had to provide for men’s minimal requirements in food, clothing and housing and had to follow the Yenan model of distribution in kind, which, in Mao Tse-tung’s opinion, was more expressive of equality. To have a system of this kind was to follow a communist way of life, a socialist mode of living in contrast to the bourgeois mode. Any supply in excess of the minimal requirements went straight to impair man’s moral and even physical health. Mao Tse-tung sought to “prove his idea by saying that as his own living conditions had improved and his comfort had increased, his health had worsened. All the functionaries, from top to bottom, should even have the same outward appearance so as not to differ from “what the people have been used to”. Thus, he said, it was quite enough to shave once a month and to have none but the simplest food. A varied diet and too much care for one’s person were a part of the bourgeois way of life, which turned all Chinese into “state, party, military or commercial officials”, who in 138 the eyes of the people were no different from the Kuomintang.

p On the whole, he took “socialism” to mean a return to the situation in the liberated areas at the time of the war against Japan, during the so-called Yenan period. He set up the various practices and the whole tenor of life at Yenan as an ideal, attributing it with the good old patriarchal qualities.

p In seeking to revive Yenan practices or, as Mao Tse-tung put it, “true Marxism" and “socialism”, he attached the decisive role to the army, proclaiming it to be the fittest, the ideal object for social experiment and went on to quote Engels, who had said that very many things had their origins in the army. He maintained the army to be society’s advanced contingent, so substituting it for the working class. The Party, on the other hand, was virtually identified with the country’s administrative-political apparatus.

p In advertising the idealised image of social life at Yenan, Mao Tse-tung claimed that the practices of “military communism" within the administration, the Party and the army in that area had created the necessary setting for rapid growth in production, as well as for maintaining a viable social organism. The example of the leaders’ plain and austere life and the reshaping of the country’s production structure with the help of the army were bound to have a powerful effect on the working masses, the peasantry in particular, so helping to create conditions for a steep rise in production.

p We find, therefore, that Mao Tse-tung has firmly held to his idea that socialism should be imposed on the people through the “model communist life" example set by the Party and the army. That is not to say, of course, that he has paid no attention at all to the development of production, industrialisation, and so on. But he does not believe that socialism (communism) implies a constant introduction of increasingly sophisticated machinery and techniques, one of Lenin’s constant demands. An interesting thing to note is that during the “cultural revolution" this bifurcation of the technical basis of socialism and its moral, political and ideological foundations was pushed to the extreme of their being regarded as opposites. Thus, Jenmin jihpao wrote on 139 February 4, 1968, that Teng Hsiao-ping (the then General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee) sought to convince the people that mechanisation was all powerful and that socialism was impossible without it. This is typical counter-revolutionary fetishism”.

p The fact that Mao Tse-tung came out with his programme of “socialist construction" on the Yenan model at a time when the results of the first five-year period had just become evident was due to various factors both in the domestic and the international plane.

p The most obvious and important factor was that Mao Tsetung and his entourage were dissatisfied with the outcome of the five-year period. Production growth rates during so short a period, however high,^^4^^ could not have brought about any decisive changes in China’s economic situation. Since China had started building up its socialist system from an extremely low economic level, these growth rates would, perhaps, have had to be sustained throughout the latter half of the 20th century if China was to create a coherent economic system with a modern industry, farming, science, culture and defence. That was the period pointed out as the only realistic one by many leading state and Party men during the “ordering” that followed the “great leap forward”, when Mao Tse-tung’s schemes were being given a critical review.

p The economic growth during the five-year period did not serve to solve the problem of urban employment. On the contrary, it had become even worse in view of the growing manpower flow from the village to the city, particularly after the social reforms in agriculture had been stepped up in violation of the time-scale laid down by the 12-year plan.

p Besides, some errors made in laying down the line for the first five-year period showed up the flimsiness of the agricultural basis, these errors being, apparently, due to an urge to establish a heavy industry regardless of the poor state of agriculture.

p Mao Tse-tung’s idea was that a resolute swing away from the old line would, on the one hand, ensure conditions for much more rapid progress towards a full-fledged “integral economic system”, and on the other, rule out completely any “capitalist” influences.

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p Mao Tse-tung also pointed out that the Soviet Union had still to eliminate various bourgeois survivals, notably, the “bourgeois-law” system, meaning the use of some prerevolutionary legal categories in Soviet practice. Let us recall in this context that neither Marx nor Lenin, far from “renouncing" some elements of bourgeois law, believed these to be unavoidable and logically necessary under socialism, as the first phase of communist society. Thus, the socialist principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work" and the material-incentives system it implies are bound to result in some material inequality between men and to deprive them of an equal right to consumption, in which sense they are expressions of “bourgeois law”.

p But, as Marx, for instance, has shown in detail in A Critique of the Gotha Programme, a system of this kind is objectively inevitable, being due to the level of society’s productive forces. The founders of scientific communism were decidedly against any attempts, whether in theory or practice, to skip that stage and go over to general material equality before the necessary production level had been reached.

p But Mao Tse-tung regarded “bourgeois law" merely as a danger of bourgeois degeneration. He maintained that cash wages and piece rates were bound to isolate the functionaries from the masses and to create and deepen social distinctions and inequality between the working people. The desire to earn more, he said, bred individualism and selfishness, setting the individual against the collective and killing all revolutionary spirit.

p The illusory success of the so-called socialist reform in agriculture and capitalist industry and trade, carried out in 1955 and 1956 in defiance of the CPC general line for the transition period and in breach of the targets of the First Five-Year Plan, appeared at first sight to be powerful proof that non-economic methods of socialist construction could well^be applied and could yield high results. The failure of the “preliminary leap forward" in 1956, on the other hand, could easily be imputed to resistance from the “Right-wing, bourgeois elements" and other subjective, rather than objective economic causes. In these conditions, the Maoists regarded and represented the failure itself as weighty evidence of the idea that a multiplication of the economic growth rate 141 was being blocked mainly by subjective causes. China’s economic and social progress would be ensured of unprecedented scope only provided these subjective factors were eliminated through organisational and ideological struggle. Their elimination was to be secured in the course of the 1957 campaign against the “Right-wingers” and to “correct the style of work”. The campaign, Mao Tse-tung claimed, served to “eradicate in the main" “bourgeois law" in China.

p Thus, Mao Tse-tung maintained, the way to achieve vast and rapid growth in production was to concentrate on the correct ideology and strictly guided organisation in line with that ideology, rather than on accumulations, proportions or, accordingly, the availability of equipment, skilled workers, executives, engineers and technicians.^^5^^ The People’s Liberation Army, he claimed, had provided repeated and brilliant proof of his propositions.

p During the Yenan period, an important external factor that served to strengthen Mao Tse-tung’s line in the CPC leadership was the dissolution in 1943 of the Comintern, which, to quote some Chinese leaders, “was a mere hindrance”, and also the falloff in the assistance to the CPC on the part of the international communist movement and the Soviet Union, something that was inevitable during the Second World War, whereas from 1953 onwards the Maoists made use of Stalin’s death to strengthen their positions in the CPC leadership. They did their best to use this to reduce the influence of the international communist movement and the CPSU on the CPC and Chinese affairs. But that was not their chief purpose: they merely aimed to create favourable conditions for Mao Tse-tung’s attempt to formulate and implement his “special” line.

p Since Mao Tse-tung regarded socialist economic construction in China purely as a matter of ideological and organisational struggle, he maintained that the main thing was to work out a “correct ideology" and spread it among the masses, something that could and had to be done through the establishment of paramilitary economic, cultural and other units in the spirit of the People’s Liberation Army, the “school of Mao Tse-tung thought”. Such, above all, was the reading given to the “All the People Are Soldiers" slogan. In other words, it was a matter of “military” principles in work 142 and everyday life having an influence on the people’s minds. The peasants’ military training in homeguard units in the course of the “great leap forward" was not so much aimed to realise the “armed people" ideal, which was given a very different rendering from that of the founders of scientific communism, as to habituate the “masses” to the army routine, which was of paramount importance for Mao Tse-tung for it turned the army (and consequently the paramilitary masses) into an ideal object of “social change”.

p Before considering Mao Tse-tung’s social ideals, let us note that these are fully oriented on the peasantry or rather its broadest sections—the hundreds of millions of poor peasants. He realised full well that the 1955-56 higher-type cooperation did not ease their lot to any marked degree or, official Chinese propaganda notwithstanding, open up prospects for a better life. That was, doubtless, due to the fact that the co-operative sector did not have any appropriate material-technical basis.

p Mao Tse-tung explained his urge to rely on the peasantry, rather than on the urban working class, by the fact that, among other things, the latter had a much too complicated wage system, which made for a deep entrenchment of “bourgeois law" and bourgeois influence on men’s minds in general. In other words, he thought that the workers were more corrupt in ideological and economic terms and could not take in the ideal of a “sound and simple life" to be ensured through a system of free rationing in kind, a system which also did away with money, that symbol of the bourgeois way of life.

p That is why, Mao Tse-tung said, the peasants were more receptive to what he claimed was the truly communist form of life epitomised in the “people’s communes”. The intelligentsia was even less receptive than the workers to the simple communist life. Its social origins and relatively high earnings, he thought, called for considerable effort and much gradualness in reforming its way of life “on communist lines”.

p That is to say, the poverty and the lack of any social differentiation among the peasants, or rather the poorest peasants, made them the only class capable of adopting the communist forms of a “poor and healthy life" from the reorganised 143 apparatus and the army. At the same time, Mao Tse-tung believed, a poor and healthy way of life would create the possibility of social production growth allowing for an equal and simultaneous rise in the material level of all working farmers. There was no need here for haste because for ages the farmers had been used to be content with very little.

p But to make their living standards truly equal the demoralising effect of the division of labour had to be done away with at the present stage, that is, from the very start of socialist construction, for, Mao Tse-tung said, the division of labour led to social differentiation, on the one hand, and on the other, tied the working man down for good to a definite occupation, line of production and type of activity.

p The fiasco of the “great leap forward" and the discredit this brought on the “people’s communes" institution in the countryside were, apparently, taken by Mao Tse-tung as an indication that Chinese society was still unprepared for a radical restructuring on communist (Yenan) lines. Since he thought that communism, the new society, could only be established through an ideological and organisational struggle against the vehicles of counteracting, that is, bourgeois, tendencies, he felt it necessary to launch a “proletarian cultural revolution" against the “men in power following the capitalist road”. In a characteristic statement to the French Minister, Andre Malraux, who paid a visit to China in July 1965 on President de Gaulle’s behalf, Mao Tse-tung said that “he was alone”. The context shows what he meant there was utter lack of understanding for his views, even among his closest associates. The “cultural revolution" struggle made it clear that many high-ranking Party and government leaders did by no means share his view about the causes of the “great leap forward" failure: in contrast to Mao Tsetung, they attributed the failure of his economic policy to its neglect of the objective laws of socialism and its denial of the leading role of some major economic categories. Thus, upon the failure of the “great leap forward”, the main clash developed between two lines—Maoist subjectivism in respect of the country’s economic development and the attempt to take account of objective requirements.

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p In the course of the struggle, Mao Tse-tung gave a fairly consistent account of his socio-economic views: from 1958 to 1965, these had not only remained unchanged but had become even more explicit. During and soon after the “cultural revolution" these were handed down to the leadership as “Chairman Mao’s latest instructions”, set out in a pretentious aphoristic form.

p In setting out Mao Tse-tung’s socio-economic views, let us say once again that he has always, apparently, been aware that the bulk of the Chinese people—400-450 million of the poorest peasants—still live in conditions of extreme poverty, not to say indigence. The revolution has as yet done very little to ease their life. The main difference is that poverty has been “averaged out”, which means that most peasants have to go on living a hard life, perhaps marginally easier than life before the revolution, and that henceforth to stand out in any way above the average is unjust and counterrevolutionary.

p Mao Tse-tung’s basic thesis in these conditions boils down to this: when there is hunger, the urge towards equality becomes as powerful as religious fervour.

p Egalitarian distribution here is inevitable, it is the only possible state of affairs at the lower stages in the development of society’s material productive forces, which must and actually do rule out the question of matching remuneration and labour inputs. Where simple, unskilled labour dominates, the average physical equality of individuals is seen to be identical with social equality. Physical “equality”, i.e., egalitarianism, thereby tends to blend with class equality.

p Any technical complexification (and, consequently, mechanisation) of labour, which springs from the inevitable division of labour in any complex production and tends to produce more inequality between individuals in skill, education and know-how, lays an objective groundwork for the demand for unequal pay for unequal work and tends to erode the egalitarian ideal.

p It was, of course, impossible in a short period—say, the first five-year period—to do away with the low level of the productive forces and the stagnant social forms of life in the old countryside, which were due to the specifics of the 145 social structure of production. The task, as we have seen, was not even formulated. The Mao group, which regarded the underdeveloped, undifferentiated economy of a “Yenantype" society as the ideal type of “military communism”, deliberately sought to preserve this undifferentiated uniformity, for the group and its leader, looking to the great homogeneous mass of very poor peasants, who regarded any urban differentiation stemming from more complex forms of social production as alien, obscure and, hence, hostile, believed that individual inequality, i.e, social differentiation resulting from the division of labour, carried within it the danger of isolation from the peasant masses, the decisive revolutionary force. Thus, in his talk with Malraux on the eve of the “cultural revolution" in 1965 (which Malraux has described in his Anti-memoirs), Mao Tse-tung said: “We were able to make better fighters of men reduced to eating bark, than of the Shanghai truck-drivers or even coolies.” In this way, Mao Tse-tung deliberately contrasted his view and the Marxist conclusion that the working class, the urban industrial proletariat, is the only consistently revolutionary class. This goes to confirm, among other things, that despite the various amendments in his writings, published in his Selected Works in the early 1950s, Mao Tse-tung’s views on the status and role of classes in the revolutionary struggle have not undergone any qualitative changes since the late 1920s: he has always been and remains the ideologist and leader of the “peasant revolution”.

p Another thing to add is that Maoism identifies class differentiation with the differentiation of social production and working producers due to the growing division of labour under technical progress, for he does not distinguish one class from another according to status in social production but according to income, regardless of its source, be it work or exploitation.

p Hence Mao Tse-tung’s fear of the “stratified” disappearance of poverty—first, say, in the towns and then in the countryside—and this is at the root of his sustained “class struggle under socialism" and the urge to bring all the Chinese together on the basis of their equal material status. The steady and universal growth of prosperity being impossible, the disappearance of poverty—the cementing agent—in some of 146 society’s sections or units, is said to do away with the “urge for change" and so to be counter-revolutionary.

p This conclusion also appears to account for the chief foreign-policy line of “Mao Tse-tung thought”, which took shape after the failure of the “great leap forward": first to tackle the problem of building a great and powerful China and only then the problems of improving the working people’s material standards. The latter is, apparently, to be left until after the worldwide revolutionary tasks are fulfilled. Here, the “peasant revolutionary spirit" of Maoism blends with Chinese Great-Power chauvinism.

p In other words, Mao Tse-tung, apparently, wants the people’s material condition to improve evenly for everyone at once, and so fails to combine the social and the individual element in any way, but regards them as being two opposite poles of a bifurcated whole.

p This, however, produces a contradiction which threatens to blow up the whole Maoist model of social development: modern large-scale and highly mechanised production cannot be developed without differentiated wages and earnings, Maoism has sought to overcome the contradiction by dividing the economy into two independent sectors. One of these, the mass sector, includes above all farming and local industry, that is, economic units where production can still be carried on along the old technical lines, through the utmost use of living labour.

p The other is a highly modern, well-organised sector, which makes use of all the achievements in technology and the division of labour, but which is, however, thoroughly isolated from the masses in social terms. It includes the nuclear-missile and various other military and technically advanced sectors, without whose high scientific and technical level it would be impossible to carry out any modern military-economic development programme.

p So long as the distinction exists, Mao Tse-tung believes, the objective causes for “class struggle under socialism" will always remain.

p In our opinion, egalitarianism, the claim that poverty is a necessary attribute of the revolutionary spirit and other components of “Mao Tse-tung thought" are a speculative 147 attempt to capitalise on the Chinese peasantry’s age-old traditional outlook.

p Naturally, the fact that Marxist Communists reject egalitarianism in principle does not mean that they are against social equality. On the contrary, their main purpose is fully to realise their ideal: the equality of all as a condition for the free development of each. The distinction between the two concepts lies in the fact that Marxism links up universal equality with the steady progress of the productive forces and the attendant transformation and improvement of the relations of production.

p It has been pointed out that in his social philosophy Mao Tse-tung looks to the traditional ideology of the broad peasant sections. That is not to say, however, that “Mao Tsetung thought" is really an expression of the interests of the lower peasant sections, a huge mass of men incapable of formulating and representing their own interests and demands in the political arena. Moreover, “Mao Tse-tung thought”, which cuts across Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the industrial proletariat, the most advanced revolutionary class of our day, is in fact patently hostile to the Chinese farmers’ basic interests, for it is only under the leadership of the proletariat, armed with the revolutionary ideology of scientific communism, that the Chinese peasantry can acquire any social prospects or take the socialist and communist road of development in the true sense of the word.

Mao Tse-tung looks in his social philosophy to the Chinese peasantry not because, shall we say, he is sincerely in error, but simply to make use of its vast spontaneous force to achieve his own ends, which have very little to do with the masses’ genuine interests. The whole of Maoist practice and domestic and foreign policy is firmly geared to the implementation of Mao’s Great-Power nationalistic goals. The “people’s communes”, which are being established on the Chinese countryside, and the attempts at the total militarisation of Chinese society under the “All the People Are Soldiers" slogan, attempts that are closely connected with the “communes”, all that has, apparently, been aimed to reduce the masses of Chinese people to “unreasoning cogs" to be used as material for building up a “great China" and 148 establishing the sway of Mao Tse-tung’s ideas throughout the world. Mao Tse-tung’s “lines”, however, have all met with steadily growing resistance among the Chinese internationalist-minded Communists. Neither the “cultural revolution" nor the anti-Soviet orientation, nor any attempts to establish co-operation with US imperialism on that basis can save Mao Tse-tung’s “ideas” from complete collapse.

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p ^^1^^ Mao Tse-tung has virtually always distinguished various classes on the strength of their material level and not of their status in social production. Under his scheme, the proletariat is the “class” of the poorest, the have-nots. Thus, in his earlier works (1926) he said that the proletariat included the landless farmers, prostitutes and all the declasse elements in general, including even the bandits, of whom there were quite a few in China at the time. This criterion, albeit slightly modified, is still at the basis of his definition of class memberhip.

p ^^2^^ Mao Tse-tung, “On Coalition Government”, Selected Works, Vol. 4, Moscow, 1953, pp. 507, 512-13 (in Russian).

p ^^3^^ Ibid., pp. 511-12.

p ^^4^^ More than 14 per cent a year; annual growth rate—more than 18 per cent.

^^5^^ During the subsequent “cultural revolution”, construction on the basis of economic methods was declared to be a downright “counter-revolutionary theory”. Such was the Maoist response to the outcome of the 1961-65 “ordering” after the “great leap forward”.