Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Lao Tian: Lenin and Mao as sincere revolutionaries


This article commemorates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin, the great revolutionary teacher

23 Ar 2020 17:22:01 Source: Red Song Club.com Author: Lao Tian

(Translator's preface: in this article from 2020, Lao Tian addresses the question of how to prevent a restoration of capitalism once a socialist revolution has occurred. My translation is that of an amateur - I accept responsibility for any errors and shortcomings.  I have added footnotes where I think the average non-Chinese reader would find them useful.)


No sincere revolutionary is satisfied with the victory of the revolution. Only by dealing with the problems that will inevitably arise on the second day of the revolution in accordance with the spirit of the revolution can the root causes of the revolution be avoided, and this is what a sincere revolutionary must think about, and Lenin did not stop at victory. But when we look back at Lenin today, it is precisely what those who were content with the triumph of the revolution, while refusing to substitute the revolutionary spirit into post-revolutionary society, did, that is the basis for the mainstream world's assessment of Lenin, and it is the serious question of what the gap between the two is that we should ask in order to commemorate Lenin.

Marx distinguishes between the weapon of criticism and the criticism of weapons, and that to overthrow a specific ruling class one must engage in a process of criticism of weapons like a violent revolution. But with all revolutions so far, there are two different kinds of revolutionaries: the specific revolutionary and the abstract revolutionary[1]. Any sincere revolutionary must be an abstract revolutionary - he will be critical of all ruling classes and methods of governance, whereas a specific revolutionary is sincerely critical of a specific ruling class alone.

Lenin was just such a sincere revolutionary, whose revolutionary character opposed all oppressive rule and exploitation. By the time Chairman Mao Zedong was on his deathbed, he was quoting Lenin's key judgement about post-revolutionary society - Lenin said to use bourgeois right required a bourgeois state without capitalists, and we had built such a country. This is the threshold issue that all sincere revolutionaries need to face - how to avoid the restoration of the old way of rule after the revolution, and sincerely demonstrate the abstract criticism of all forms of governance.

Today, capitalism has become a purely destructive force, but the immaturity of the subjective forces of revolution has, on the contrary, allowed the existence of the capitalist system, and even to some extent allowed it to go backwards towards the primitive accumulation of the nineteenth century. How to stand on the shoulders of revolutionary mentors and look forward to and promote abstract criticism is the key to restrict the further degeneration into capitalism.

I.           Sincere revolutionaries would be intolerant of all disguised forms of restoration of the previous rulers

When we talk about the revolution or commemorate Lenin today, it is already at a time when the ashes of the revolution have long since cooled down so that we can look back on that period of history and its leaders, which, apart from allowing for a different perspective, also has the advantage of being a bit of a "post-mortem" - of looking back at the history and the choices made by the various figures after the revolutionary achievements have been overturned.

Into the home of Lenin and the October Revolution came Khrushchev, and after his visit to the United States in 1959, the conditions we are talking about today were already present. Chairman Mao Zedong wrote a poem about this situation and the power of this "farewell to the revolution from within", which must be linked to the comment about Lenin. The poem says:

The West Sea[2] is now home to a saint, a smear of powder attends the gentry[3].

A car, a few houses, three yellow calves, half a plate of silver[4].

The whole world is working for the same master, and the universe is free from strife for ten thousand years.[5]

Lenin's flames have turned to ashes, and mankind has now entered into a utopia.[6]

Based on the experience of China's Cultural Revolution, in the middle of a communal society, the general public can be somewhat hazily critical of political alienation, but the solution to the crucial question of how to defend a political and economic system that favours the majority and move this new system forward, and at least to avoid its regression and a restoration - requires that the new political forces grow successfully and establish leadership over the majority, and then to work closely with the people to criticise and avoid being held hostage to the restoration and regression preferences of the officialdom, especially those at the top. Because the answer to this crucial question was not found, history entered a cycle and we can only stand on the ashes of the revolution today and look back on that dramatic period of history and the reflections of the leading figures involved.

II.        The question of specific revolutionaries and "fellow travellers in the democratic revolution"

After the complete defeat of the Kuomintang in 1949, some people were very unconvinced, saying that the Communist Party's claim that it wanted to complete the revolution and build a new society was nothing more than rhetoric, and that its real pursuit was nothing more than this: to bring down the old landlords in order to become landlords themselves, and to bring down the old bureaucrats in order to become bureaucrats themselves. The implication is that the compatibility of the interests of the new regime and its public character will not be enhanced in the slightest.

The KMT's narrative is full of losers' grievances and a bit of AQ’s spiritual victory[7], but it is a good fit to describe specific revolutionaries who are critical only of the specific ruling class, because this wave of people have no way out without their own downfall; they lack abstract revolutionary criticism, critical of all ruling classes and their means of domination. And being critical of all ruling classes necessarily means continuing the revolution - whose task is to avoid the re-formation of any ruling class and its means of domination - and by the time the abstract revolution has reached its stage, many specific revolutionaries - especially if the revolution has been won and they are then in high positions of power - whose targets of criticism had long since disappeared, for them continued talk of revolutionary issues was often instinctively resented and opposed. In terms of the performance of high-ranking officials during the later Cultural Revolution, apart from Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou, and a few others such as Xie Fuzhi, it is rare to see conscious supporters of the abstract revolution.

Among the leaders of the last revolution, most of them were specific revolutionaries - revolutionaries who had no way out for themselves and who hated revolution the most when they themselves were privileged. Chairman Mao, on the other hand, was very different in that he started out as an abstract revolutionary - directly critical of all exploitation and oppression, and the abstract revolutionaries were very much to the right - everyone in their united front strategy would have a way out. Some people say that they killed landowners in the early stages, but revolutionary killing was never a question of whether it was necessary - whether and to what extent unnecessary killing could be avoided. By the end of the revolution, the landowners and their sons were extremely well-behaved, not only extremely pro-communist but also beating their brains out to get into the organisation, and at least by then they had ceased to be a resistance to specific revolutionary goals.

Nor did Grandpa Mao[8] reach the heights of understanding he deserved from the outset, but this did not detract from his position as an abstract revolutionary. The closer the revolution came to success, the more the group that was the object of the revolution no longer chose to resist it, at which point the new problem was rather the specific revolutionaries within the revolutionary ranks, many of whom became reluctant to move forward. The so-called "fellow travellers of the democratic revolution" were such a group of specific revolutionaries who were only critical of the specific ruling class, and even retained this outdated criticality for an inappropriately long time, as demonstrated by the suppression of the "Black Five" by the princelings[9] at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Beyond this, they saw no need or relevance for the revolutionary spirit.

III.          The inevitable problems of the second day of the revolution and the new criticality  

 

In post-revolutionary societies, there are also people who have taken a radical revolutionary stance, and according to the experience of the Cultural Revolution, most of them are disillusioned people within the system, because they have always suffered at the hands of the mainstream in the officialdom, and have become the "disadvantaged group" with the worst input-output ratio[10] in the officialdom. In their eyes, if the mainstream does not collapse, they feel that they will not be able to get ahead in life, and in order to get ahead themselves, it is better for the system to follow the mainstream officialdom and be buried with them.

Yang Xiaokai, Gao Hua[11] and Zhang Rong's[12] father's generation were the disillusioned ones within the system, whose contradictions with the mainstream needed a complete collapse of the mainstream to be resolved before they would have a chance to become the wave with the best input-output ratio within the officialdom, and they were such consummate revolutionaries. Yang Xiaokai's article 'Whither China?',[13] which expressed his father's situation in mainstream officialdom, was largely unpopular within the rebel ranks, and he was in a very small minority within Changsha No. 1 Middle School - only three people in the small group of seven, the 'Military Power Grabbing Group', agreed with him. Such revolutionaries, though fond of a purely leftist rhetoric, really wanted an individual way out - to raise their input-output ratio above the average level.

For these specific revolutionaries of the new wave, their ultra-left thoroughness could be transformed into a radical ultra-right position at any time, without the slightest obstacle, depending on what external environmental conditions permitted. Therefore, their thoroughness of critique is limited to their specific personal conditions and circumstances, but in the context of the anti-communist Cold War, Yang Xiaokai's article is still extremely sought after in the West - it still has a voice within a Communist Party that is utterly fucked up, and die-hard anti-communist and anti-China elements in the West cannot help but feel a great sense of camaraderie.

During the Cultural Revolution, a number of "debut cadres" participated in the Revolutionary Committees, most of whom were former mainstream Cultural Revolution officials who had worked with the rebels for some time. When the time came to criticize Lin and Confucius, the rebels made a judgment on these people based on their contacts and experience, believing that these big officials, politically extraordinarily unreliable, wavering greatly, were a typical "surrender faction", a matter of the moment, not asking about the rights and wrongs of policy, but first weighing the stakes before speaking. In their everyday thoughts, they always wanted to "win a wife and children" like Song Jiang[14], and were ready to change their stance and criticism to achieve this goal.

IV. Institution-building in post-revolutionary society and the implied tendency to restore the old ways of rule

In Mao's time, the number of people who hated abstract revolutionary measures increased as they got to the top, and the relevant debates took place within the framework of "restricting bourgeois right". On the contrary, many of the grassroots cadres consciously embraced this direction and even created and invented things, and a large number of early rural models such as Chen Yonggui were good examples of this. The grassroots rural models, such as Chen Yonggui and Geng Changsuo[15], had a very simple class stance and stood firm, standing up to the test of some major historical and political twists and turns, and were really able to take charge and could “Be indifferent when faced with wealth, and not avoid difficulty when confronted by it.”

During the Mao era, in the middle of a series of policy adjustments led by the top, for example, in the adjustment of the agricultural system, highly opportunist and extremely-urgent turnarounds were designed by the top, one being the rapid expansion of the size of agricultural collectives in 1956-1958 and the other being the dismantling of collective agriculture in 1979-1982, both of which were policy choices of the top intervening in the agricultural collectives and did not originate from the grassroots. In addition to being far more opportunist at the top than at the grassroots level, there is often a variety of "reform or consolidation" in which the big officials oppose the small officials' abstract revolutionary measures, often to the point of them being banned. The result was to verify Mao’s famous statement: "What will you do if there is revisionism in the Central Committee?" This huge difference between senior and junior officials existed in all respects, and in the 1980s when the top brass was planning the liquidation of the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong, the junior officials were still not on the same page as the senior officials, which led to Deng Xiaoping's remark that he feared that excessive non-Maoism would lead to rejection by a large group of grassroots cadres linked to the workers and peasants.

In contrast to the situation of the big officials, who are above the masses and in all respects distant and detached from them, the small cadres, who are closer to the basic masses and are implicitly conditioned by the social opinion of their acquaintances, are closer to the state of what Gramsci called "organic intellectuals" in their thinking or conditions of thought. The best of them, in close interaction with the masses over a long period of time, formed a stable two-way identity with them, and with this support many rural collective villages resisted all kinds of political pressure from above for "privatisation", and also resisted all kinds of temptations to become big capitalists through privatisation, and it is only through this double test that some collective villages have survived. Among the grassroots cadres, many of them are somewhat unconsciously resistant to social division - somewhat conscious of their being anti-revisionist and anti-bourgeois rights, and willing to create a way out for the good of all for their folks. During the restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the city, there were also many small factory cadres who refused outright to implement the buyout, retaining a strong identification with the workers under their supervision or with their colleagues in the factory. The Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, Chen Xitong, in his internal speeches, also urged the small cadres to be "three iron" to the workers - iron face, iron heart and iron hand.[16]

The small cadres of Mao's time lacked the institutional conditions for the pursuit of individual wealth and prosperity, and it did not really matter what they thought, but what they could do. In fact, until the 1990s, the small treasuries of many units in Wuhan were not at the disposal of cadres for their own personal benefit, but served the welfare of the units and were distributed almost evenly - a large number of factories and institutions in the 1980s and 1990s were allocated houses from this "off-book funds," and my classmate in one bureau got a house on this basis. The institutional remnants of the Mao era are still reflected in the equal opportunities under qualifications for membership. Later, the illegal income of units often went directly into the pockets of individual officials. This was a qualitative change and escalation of corruption.

Unlike the senior cadres who had a clear reform orientation towards depriving the lower classes, the lower cadres also used to support various institutional arrangements in favour of the majority for no other reason than the fact that in the Maoist era the small cadres earned about the same as the masses, that the masses' difficulties were also their difficulties, and that the mutual production and provision of all kinds of living services --The real institutional underpinning of the "factory-run society" was the fact that it was the "lack of opportunities for class differentiation" that was practised through such concrete mechanisms - from the unit canteens to the education of children. Herein lies the real institutional underpinning of the 'factory-run society'. The Japanese scholar Yuzo Gouguchi's claim that the Mao era raised traditional clan solidarity and welfare to the level of a national system is somewhat, but not entirely, true.

For example, if the commune (township) cadres did not have universal primary and secondary education, their own children would not have had a place to go to school, and it would have been unrealistic to send their children to school in the county on a salary of some thirty yuan; therefore, the commune cadres were very active in popularising primary and secondary education during the late Cultural Revolution. Without barefoot doctors and health clinics, family members of these lower level cadres, who were "half of the family", could not find a place to see a doctor, so they were very active when the opportunity arose. Deng Xiaoping said in 1974 that the co-operative medical network was a communist thing done under socialism[17], a statement that commune cadres certainly did not make as they and their family members depended upon it.

V. How to move the revolution forward rather than backward on the second day of the revolution and who are the new progressive forces

 

In the daily management of the Mao era, in addition to the specific interests of the cadres and the masses, in the direction of the abstract revolution, the equality of political officers and soldiers will be the first choice for institutional construction to get rid of the old mode of governance. The relevant debate in the Mao era was under the signboard of "restricting bourgeois right" and "opposing hierarchy ". Efforts in this direction were opposed by Deng Xiaoping, but the grassroots cadres were more supportive and often consciously practised it.

The advancement of abstract revolutionary goals has the same interplay of thrust and resistance, with the thrust needing to overcome the resistance in order to move forward. The theory of continued revolution, also known as the "Great Transition Theory", which has been repeatedly emphasised by Chairman Mao and which attracts particular hatred, says in effect that the majority of the power elite and intellectual elite in leadership positions and at the top of socialist society are the negative obstacles to the transition to communism. The real forces to be relied upon are those of the lower classes and the small cadres who are still deeply critical (especially in the abstract) – the multitudes who do not like the big shots oppressing them. However, the experience of the Cultural Revolution proved that you could not rely on this latter force or group, who were not politically mature and lacked the conditions for organisation, and who had a less prominent role to play in the positive advancement and in the end proved unable to escape from the "bourgeois state" and "bourgeois right" originating from above, and who effectively defended the new society and system. It is a fact that there was not enough thrust and too much resistance, but the complete demonisation of the rebels after the Cultural Revolution completely reversed the direction of thrust and resistance, and of course this demonisation was written in a way that "unofficially" argued with Grandpa Mao - the people you counted on and relied on were totally ineffective..

Chairman Mao Zedong's "basic line of the Party for the whole historical stage of the transition from capitalism to communism" is that socialist society is a fairly long historical stage in which there are still classes, class contradictions and class struggles, and the danger of capitalist restoration. This is his own formulation of the 'Great Transition Theory', in which, in this relatively obscure formulation, the upper classes of the new society, because of their higher stock of both human and political capital and, on the contrary, their closest proximity to all kinds of opportunities for getting rich first, have all kinds of grounds for rejecting abstract criticality, and are consequently seen as carriers of the "danger of restoration", while all hopes and expectations were placed on the unsophisticated critical views of the immature underclass. The various judgements and statements of Chairman Mao Zedong that the upper stratum was reluctant to practice socialism and had become a source of resistance were later summarised as the "widening of the class struggle" and openly and permanently criticised.

China did later revive capitalism, and because it was at the bottom of the global division of labour, it lacked the slightest hint of the "good capitalism" that characterised the post-war period in the West, and instead had all the features of a brutal system of predatory accumulation. From this post-Cultural Revolution evolution, some blame the ordinary people during and after the Cultural Revolution, especially the conservatives, for their complete lack of class consciousness, for having gone along with the capitalists' choices to a certain extent, for failing to recognise the capitalists' schemes early on, for failing to reject the corruption of material stimuli and for not expressing early on the political energy to stick to the socialist system. It should be said that this accusation is unjust; for in a state of scattered individuals, survival is the first priority. Political resistance or reconstruction will only become a reasonable choice during the period when the revolutionary ranks need to be organized. Therefore, the participation of ordinary people and becoming part of the thrust requires prior political conditions.

The failure of thrust to overcome resistance is due to its lack of a vanguard force to organize and lead the masses forward. The failure and repression of the Cultural Revolution planted the seeds of failure when the rebels failed to form a true vanguard to lead the people. And for the rebels to complete their transformation into a vanguard, the depth of the political practice of the Cultural Revolution and the amount of time available were far from sufficient; there was no real core of natural leadership; the core needed to grow and be tested in the struggle and be trusted by the people. In the end, there was a historical inevitability involved in the post-Cultural Revolution situation; the population, scattered as individuals, was certainly apolitical, and gathering and organising the population required a real vanguard, and the growth of a vanguard required conditions - conditions which were not in place at the time.  Even, to a certain extent, the fact that the older generation of capitalists did not go to extremes but resorted to all sorts of deceptions and had not yet completely lost the hearts and minds of the masses was one of the important conditions for the people not being able to become aware.

The organisational situation and conditions of resistance outweigh the organisational conditions of thrust, and many ordinary people chose to follow the resistance rather than the thrust, a situation which, even after a cultural revolution, has progressed but failed to change completely, a situation which can only be truthfully acknowledged: the twists and turns and cycles of history are inherently inevitable.

VI. The rise of the petty bourgeoisie and the problem of its excessive criticism

Today, some so-called pure leftists are always concerned about what stage China is in and what the nature of the ruling class is, as if, by starting from these, they can see the general direction and become left-wing leaders who are qualified to give orders. The point is, what about the people? If the people are not enlightened and the ideological rule of the ruling class is effective enough, it is uncertain whether the people will follow the direction of thrust or resistance. And who, apart from the conscious organised people, is going to confront the main contradictions and take on the tasks identified by these teachers? The left-wing leaders of these teachers seem to be content with pointing out the targets and tasks, and it seems that it is none of his business who undertakes them, it is someone else's. The rest of what the teachers love to do is to find all kinds of " impure leftists".

That is to say, the problem of organising the masses as a thrust - conscious and organised - to overcome resistance, a problem that was not solved in the past, and still exists today, with some even refusing to address it, while the critical impotence has worsened. The balance of power gives the forces of decay greater power and scope for degradation - the system of predatory accumulation survives and thrives.

Chairman Mao said that the standpoint of the people, and of immersing oneself deep in the masses, are the highest priority criteria: “In the final analysis, the dividing line between revolutionary intellectuals and non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary intellectuals is whether or not they are willing to integrate themselves with the workers and peasants and actually do so. Ultimately it is this alone, and not professions of faith in the Three People's Principles or in Marxism, that distinguishes one from the other. A true revolutionary must be one who is willing to integrate himself with the workers and peasants and actually does so."[18] “Here I advanced a criterion which I regard as the only valid one. How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary.”[19]

The refusal to join the working masses in their search for the path to liberation, always still dreaming of first becoming rich and having an elite status, became a key mechanism for the petty bourgeoisie to attach itself to the ideological leadership of the bourgeoisie, often refusing to choose the path of the organic intellectuals and their orientations even when pursuing a critical career - unconsciously assuming all sorts of patronising gestures of superiority -- bringing into prominence the authority and validity of the cultural capital at their disposal. By rejecting a critical path that is embedded in the masses, it is also no longer concerned with the state of mass consciousness and organisation, nor with the accumulation and evolution of class power contrasts, but will from the outset consider "theoretical purity" as the only criterion. This path, which in a way does not even reach the criticality of the specific revolutionaries, is a disguised repetition of the Second International's way of looking at things, which saw a specific "management of the stock of human capital" as a prerequisite for the success of the revolution.

As Chairman Mao commented in 1959 when he read the textbook on Soviet socialist political economy, the strength of the leadership of the bourgeoisie is, in part, linked to the unconscious condition of this new petty-bourgeois class and workers who claim to be educated: "In pre-revolutionary Russia, illiteracy was seventy-six per cent of the population. In our country, before liberation, illiteracy was eighty to ninety per cent of the population. Both of these countries made revolutions. The European and American capitalist countries, where there is little or no illiteracy, have not been able to bring about a revolution until now. This contrast of facts proves that the Second International is completely wrong in saying that the proletariat cannot seize power and retain it if it does not yet have a sufficient number of ready-made cultural and administrative cadres capable of organising the administration of the state.". " In the various nations of the West there is a great obstacle to carrying through any revolution and construction movement i.e., the poisons of the bourgeoisie are so powerful that they have penetrated each and every corner. While our bourgeoisie has had, after all, only three generations, those of England and France have had a 250-300 year history of development and their ideology and modus operandi have influenced all aspects and strata of their societies. Thus the English working class follows the Labour Party, not the Communist Party."[20] Of course, this does not mean that more knowledge is more reactionary, but merely that, with bourgeois ideological leadership strong enough and effective enough, it is true that to organize new critical forces, as Gramsci says, to win a battle for ideological leadership and build a solid starting point for popular awareness, this renewed hidden resistance or obstacle needs to be overcome.

After Lenin and Mao, the new barriers to critical force stem from the practical mechanisms by which the ideological leadership of the bourgeoisie works, and the huge obstacles to the reunification of the various petty bourgeoisie with the working masses prevent them from being organised into new critical forces and thrusts, for which, more than ever, we need to re-learn Lenin and Mao.

Both the October Revolution, the greatest ground-breaking revolution in human history, and the Chinese Revolution, the most radical revolution in human history, were unable to avoid the domination by the specific revolutionaries after their victory, gradually losing their abstract criticality and sharpness. The law of class differentiation was undoubtedly at work in those two groups of concrete revolutionaries, and all the counter-revolutionary factions rejoiced and celebrated the fact that the revolution had inevitably entered the cycle of history, and used it to denounce and even discredit it. But the role of revolutionary victory in advancing history and politics has long since taken hold, and revolutionary teachers like Lenin and Mao, with their relentless dissection of the specific revolutionaries and their critical practice of abstract revolution, will continue to guide humanity on its quest for liberation, and the limitations of their predecessors will eventually be surpassed.

April 22, 2020



[1] Lao Tian’s use of “specific” and “abstract” does not convey in English the full meaning. “Specific” is clear enough: it refers to those revolutionaries who are supportive of only a specific revolutionary objective, whereas the term 抽象( chouxiang), while it clearly means “abstract”, has in this usage the meaning of having a general view drawn from specific circumstances.  I suppose you could say that “specific” is exclusive of all but the preferred revolution, while “abstract” is inclusive of all revolutions against oppression and exploitation.

[2] Generally refers to the West.

[3] The rich and powerful, the imperialists led by US imperialism.

[4] During the 1959 National Day, Khrushchev visited China, and briefed Mao Zedong on his trip to the United 

States, boasting about his popularity there, saying that a farmer had given him three good breeding calves and that a 

capitalist had given him a plate of ancient silver coins. He also said that almost every family in the United States had a car, 

had several rooms, lived in villas, and ate beautiful food.

[5] Khrushchev’s revisionism consisted of the “three peacefuls” (competition, transition (to socialism), and coexistence). He believed that these would guarantee peace between the Soviet bloc and the US and other imperialists.

[6] Mao uses the term “da tong” which is also the name of the late Qing reformer Kang Youwei’s influential outline of a utopian socialist future for China.

[7] Lu Xun’s satire on false, deluded revolutionaries – see The True Story of Ah-Q (marxists.org)

[8] A term of respect and admiration, another being “the old man”.

[9] During the Cultural Revolution, the term "Black Five" often referred to the children of the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists. They were often persecuted ad discriminated against by the children of senior cadres known as the “princelings”.

[10] The input-output ratio is a management tool in bourgeois economics and is used to measure the added value during the operational life of a production process compared to the funding put into it. It ignores the role of working people in a project. Lao Tian uses it ironically to describe the motivation of certain senior cadres jockeying for position within the CCP, motivated only by what they could get out of it.

[11] Gao Hua (May 12, 1954-December 26, 2011) was a history professor at Nanjing’s East China Normal University. He is best known for How the Red Sun Rose, an anti-Communist treatise on the Yan’an Rectification Movement.

[12] Zhang Rong (1952 -) is better known by her English name Jung Chang.  She is a reactionary anti-Communist whose books have attacked the Cultural Revolution and vilified Mao Zedong.

[13] Yang Xiguang (6 October 1948 – 7 July 2004) was the son of senior CCP cadres. He became part of a Red Guard faction in Hunan and published a political treatise entitled "Whither China?", which was highly critical of Mao Zedong from an ultra-left perspective. After ten years in prison, he worked at Princeton and Yale universities, moving permanently to Australia in 1988, lecturing in economics at Monash University.

[14] Song Jiang was the leading general in the classical novel Water Margin. The reference to a “wife ad children” refers to his desire to pass on his privileges to his posterity.

[15] Chen Yonggui was the Party branch secretary of the Dazhai Production Brigade, He came to Mao’s notice by persevering in hard work and self-reliance, and the whole country was called on to learn from Dazhai. He was promoted to the Central Committee and the Politburo and became a vice-Premier of the State Council before being demoted by Deng Xiaoping. Geng Changsuo was leader of the village of Wugong, some 200 km south of Beijing. Wugong was designated as a model village, partly to honor its having founded a co-operative at the height of the War of Resistance Against Japan.

[16] Chen Xitong  June 10, 1930 – June 2, 2013) was Mayor of Beijing from 1983 until 1995 when he was deposed by forces loyal to his opponent, Zhang Zemin. He was a member of the Politburo at the time. Chen’s reference to the “three irons” can be understood as to be selfless, fair and just “iron face”; to be determined “iron heart” – not “callous” as some might think; and to be strict with those who break the law “iron hand”. The Yongshan Coal Mine in Shandong has embraced these “three irons” in its coal mine safety policy (The practical significance of reshaping the spirit of "three irons" in coal mine safety management is that of Weishan Lake Mining Group Co., Ltd. in Shandong Province (wshkyjt.com.cn)). In 1992, state-owned industries were characterised as having “three irons” -the “iron rice bowl”, “iron wages” and an “iron personnel system” which allegedly removed incentives and made people lazy.

 [17] A criticism meaning that it was in advance of it time, that it was an initiative reflecting the communist principle of “to each according to need” rather than the socialist principle of “to each according to work”.


Monday, June 21, 2021

Lao Tian: May 7 Cadre Schools in pictorials.

12 May 2021 15:20:38

 

Translator’s preface: May 7 Cadre Schools, so-called after Chairman Mao’s May 7 directive on education, were one of the great socialist initiatives of the Cultural Revolution. Officials in pre-revolutionary China were an elite who despised manual labour and regarded the masses as ignorant and dirty. The officials (cadres) of the new socialist society were encouraged to change that view of things, to “remould their outlook”, by doing productive labour on a regular basis. This could be on a regular weekly basis close to their own work unit, or by being “sent down” for a longer period to a cadre school in a rural area. Lao Tian uses photos from pictorial magazines published during the Cultural Revolution to illustrate his point.

...........................

During Snow's visit to China in 1971, Premier Zhou received him and briefed him on the situation of officials working in the May 7 Cadre Schools. Premier Zhou said.

"In the past, there were ninety departments directly under central government. Now there are only twenty-six left. They are now all administered by revolutionary committees, with a party caucus playing a leading role in each of them. In the past, there were more than 60,000 administrative staff in the central government. Now there are about 10,000." "Where did those displaced cadres go? In Beijing, about eighty percent of the displaced cadres were sent to the rural centres commonly known as the May 7 Cadre Schools'. ...... ‘Going down’ to communal schools was not for punishment, but was said to be seen as continuing re-education within the party. In future, all but the most senior cadres would periodically be 'sent down' to undergo ideological check-ups as a kin of routine political therapy."

[The Long Revolution, by Snow, translated by Wu Zhixiang, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1975, pp. 13-14][1] By the way, Chairman Mao's youngest daughter, Li Ne, also went to the May 7 Cadre School of the Central Government, and she found a man to marry in the cadre school.

According to the Chronicle of the History of the Communist Party of Wuhan:

On October 21, 1968, the Wuhan Municipal Revolutionary Committee (WRC) and all the district and bureau revolutionary committees (revolutionary leading groups) immediately organized cadres to study the experience of Heilongjiang. The 4500 cadres of the former municipal organs (about 75% of the total number of cadres of the municipal organs) were sent to several farms and suburbs in 6 brigades by squad, platoon and company to carry out "fighting, criticism and reform", starting the stage of "comprehensive cleaning of the class ranks" among the cadres of the organs. By December, another 2,492 people in the city's urban areas had gone down to the farms to engage in "fighting, criticism and reform". On the 26th, in a report written to the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, the Municipal Revolutionary Committee praised the cadres of the authorities for "going down and waging a people's war to clean up the class ranks", and for clearing out more than 700 so-called "bad guys" in just one month, accounting for 13.5% of the total number of sent-down cadres.

Huang Jisu is the son of a cadre. I once asked him what it was like for his parents to go to a cadre school, and he said that when he was in primary school, he told his friends.

"My father and mother went to the cadre school, and it was the same feeling that people have today when they say who in our family went to university, they are very proud. When his mother came home from the cadre school, he felt that his mother had a militant feeling and was very capable, and in the past, when the taps and light bulbs broke, they had to find someone else to repair them, but now they were all fixed by themselves, and they were fixed immediately."

The reason why it was called the May 7th Cadre School was the Heilongjiang Revolutionary Committee. They took the lead in finding a way to relocate surplus officials. This method was promoted by the People’s Daily as an advanced experience and was affirmed by Mao. On October 4, 1968, the "People's Daily" published the experience of the "May Seven Cadres School" in Liuhe, Heilongjiang. The editor's note also conveyed Mao Zedong's call for "sending the majority of cadres down to do labour."


People's Pictorial No. 1, 1969

There was a phenomenon in the 60s and 70s: many people rebelled against and criticised the people in power, and a lot of the dark side of what had been going on for years was exposed. However, the masses not only had no doubts about the "legitimacy" of this, but many also agreed. This phenomenon has not attracted the attention of the academic community.

There is a saying from Mao's time that "practice leads to true knowledge and struggle leads to ability", and it seems that this is not just a saying, but a true one.

It became convenient to enhance the responsiveness of cadres to legitimate demands by criticising them. Prior to the introduction of Article 13 of the 1975 Constitution, which guaranteed the rights of the " Four Bigs"[1], there was no longer any risk of writing a big-character poster to cadres, and as long as the demands made in the big-character poster were reasonable, the cadres' responsiveness was timely and adequate.

Workers generally liked study sessions and criticism meetings, because they objectively reaffirmed the right to criticise whatever was said. In essence, it did not matter what was said or what was heard at these meetings, but rather that they were held regularly to strengthen the position of the "vulnerable masses in the face of the powers that be".

In the view of many older workers, one of the great advantages of such meetings was that the position of the masses vis-à-vis the cadres was improved and the risk of exercising the right of criticism against them was reduced to near zero.


There are many old and new elites who despise the old cadres of the Mao era, saying that they were just a bunch of poor peasants led by Chairman Mao into the city to take power. However, there is partly a basis for this. This deputy department-level senior official would have herded sheep originally, and learned it during the Yan'an period, which is regarded as old experience.


Chairman Mao's "Highest Instructions" for the May 7 Cadre School

The Xi'an Revolutionary Committee set up the May 7th Cadre School in Nanniwan and organised the city's remaining officials, in the words of Premier Zhou, who told Snow, to take part in "routine political therapy".


When they arrived at the Cadre School, they were all known as May 7 soldiers, regardless of their former status as officials. The militarisation of operations was a feature, and at that time the training exercises were the equivalent of today's group donkey walks.


Old soldiers gave lectures.


Old farmers gave lectures.


Doing homework: the cadre school is all about living and learning and relating to practice, it is not enough to listen to the teacher, you have to say it yourself, and it is not enough to say it verbally, but occasionally you need to write it down in black and white to make it count.



Taking a labour class


Report cards for Labour Classes


Social Research Classes


For the agricultural labour class, fishing for three days and drying the net for two days is not enough. You must have a plan for a protracted battle.



In the course of hardship and simplicity, the needle and thread bag had to be carried with you, and you could not rely on your mother or wife to help you, let alone on a female secretary; the old men had to learn to do it by themselves, or in a mutual supervision or mutual study session.

The famous poem that all primary school children would have memorised back then was dedicated to praising the needle and thread bag and the craft of mending clothes - "The little needle and thread bag is a revolutionary heirloom; when the Red Army climbed the snowy mountains, they used it to mend their cotton coats; they fought the wolves in the north and south, sewing their shoes and hats."

It was the educational policy of the Maoist era that to advance the building and construction industries, you had to study industry, agriculture and the military. 



Advance animal husbandry, raise authentic local pigs, local pork is really delicious, yes!

Be self-reliant and raise your own sheep to eat. Diversify your business and develop it comprehensively.


Chairman Mao said: develop sports to enhance the physical fitness of the people.


Some people have said that during the Cultural Revolution there was only one writer and eight model plays, and it seems that this propaganda team's performance was omitted.


A "luxury vegetable growing program" in a cadre school.


They have a "majestic and heroic" look to them, and they look happy, not like they are going to sow the fields.


 








[1] The “four bigs” were rights entrusted to the masses in the Cultural Revolution and enshrined in the 1975 Constitution. They were the rights of speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates and writing big-character posters. In March 1978 Deng required that these be restricted, and they were finally removed altogether in 1980 to stifle opposition to the capitalist reforms that Deng was introducing.



[1] For the English reader, you will find this on p. 14 of the same title published by Hutchinson and Co., in 1973)