p Mao Tse-tung’s great achievement is said to be his effort “to solve the theoretical and practical problems of carrying on the revolution and preventing a return to capitalism in the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

p The Maoists maintain that work by hand is an important way of preventing workers by brain, functionaries in 193 particular, from being turned into bourgeois. Let us recall that it was the Utopians who came up with the idea of combining mental and manual work as an important condition for eliminating the contradiction between the two, an idea the Marxist-Leninist classics accepted and developed. In the Soviet Union and other socialist countries there are various forms of combining mental and manual work on the basis of broad education, improvement of production and raising workers’ skills to the level of those of the engineers and technicians. The Maoists’ mistake is not that they have adopted and applied the idea of combining mental and manual work, but that they have debased an excellent idea and have been using it in their self-seeking interests to build up Mao Tse-tung’s personality cult and to put down and destroy workers by brain who do not share his views or support his policy. For many years now, massive groups of educated men have been sent down to rural, mountain and border areas, a practice particularly widespread during the “cultural revolution”. On Mao Tse-tung’s specific orders, masses of educated people were sent down to the countryside or the border areas to be “re-educated” in the spirit of “Mao Tse-tung thought" by the poor peasants. They were made to do heavy manual work and to live in hard and primitive conditions. The official Chinese figure for the number of those “re-educated” by work over the past decade is 40 million. All this shows that instead of making a practical elaboration of the Marxist-Leninist idea of eliminating the contradiction between mental and manual labour, Maoism merely vulgarises it and uses it to terrorise and suppress any opposition, so hampering the development of the productive forces and socialist relations of production.

p To “prevent the emergence of a new bourgeoisie”, Maoist theoretical constructions provide for various measures which in effect do away with the working people’s personal material incentives. The most important of these involve breaches of the socialist principle of distribution according to the quality and quantity of work, and also refusal to use various money-commodity categories of a socialist economy, like cost-accounting and profit which are necessary to create material incentives, increase production and develop the productive forces. The Maoists claim that by substituting gross 194 administration by fiat for material incentives, they are preventing the emergence of a bourgeoisie and a return to capitalism in China. In fact, however, as Marx pointed out in A Critique of the Gotha Programme, although the socialist distribution principle does give rise to some economic inequality between the members of a socialist society, this inequality is not class inequality and so cannot give rise to a new bourgeoisie. The new system of management and incentives in the national economy that is being successfully introduced in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and some other socialist countries makes a working man’s wages dependent on the profit of his enterprise, something that in fact results in a somewhat greater difference between the material levels of workers at different socialist enterprises. This creates greater material incentives for individuals and plants to improve the results of their work, but does not by any means increase the imaginary danger of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie.

p Mao Tse-tung’s greatest achievement in preventing a return to capitalism in China is said to be his effort to mobilise the masses for a bitter class struggle against the bourgeoisie, a struggle known as the “great proletarian cultural revolution”, in the course of which the “bourgeois headquarters" headed by Liu Shao-chi was destroyed, thus preventing the proletarian dictatorship from developing into a bourgeois dictatorship.

p The facts, however, are quite different. On the plea of waging an ever more intense class struggle against the bourgeoisie (which, in fact, continues to lead a comfortable existence in China, receiving interest on its capital) the Mao group has been fighting Party members and leaders who are against the Maoists’ faulty and adventurist policy. The struggle is labelled a class struggle to provide theoretical justification for their gross trampling on Party democracy and spearhead Mao Tse-tung’s personal dictatorship not against the actual bourgeoisie, but against the Party members who do not accept Maoism without reserve.

At present, Mao Tse-tung’s “doctrine” of classes and class struggle in socialist society is being loudly and boastfully proclaimed to be a great advance of Marxism-Leninism. In fact, however, far from developing the Marxist-Leninist 195 doctrine, Mao Tse-tung makes its vulgar revision, which is aimed to give theoretical backing to the dirty and dishonest struggle to impose Mao Tse-tung’s personality cult, entrench anti-Sovietism and justify the criminal splitting activity in the world communist movement.

p ^^1^^ Jenmin jihpao, May 18, 1967.

p ^^2^^ Ibid.

p ^^3^^ A pamphlet, entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, says: “Mao Tse-tung teaches that class struggle under socialism is an objective reality independent of men’s subjective will.”

p ^^4^^ Jenmin jihpao, May 18, 1967.

^^5^^ Khrushchovian Pseudo-Communism and Its World Historical Lesson, Peking, 1964.