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.
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