Author: Shandong University's Mass Criticism Group
Period number: 1976.02
(Translator’s Preface: The success of any socialist
revolution depends on the measures taken to restrict, and not expand, bourgeois
right. Bourgeois right is inevitable and necessary as part of the transition
from capitalism to socialism, and from socialism to communism. It incudes a
wage system with inherent different levels, and various social privileges based
on differences between mental and manual labour, junior and senior ranks, and
the perceived values attached to political and professional responsibilities.
From Marx’s recognition of the necessity for bourgeois right to continue from
capitalism into socialism, up to Mao Zedong’s recognition that it provided a breeding
ground for the emergence of new bourgeois elements within the highest levels of
the Party and government, elements that were more dangerous and more attached
to the capitalist road then even the old overthrown bourgeoisie from the
capitalist era, bourgeois right cannot be denied. Here, a mass criticism group
from Shandong University writes in support of the campaign to restrict
bourgeois right, and against the capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping who had been named
Acting Premier following Zhou Enlai’s death in January 1976. The mass criticism
group’s intense criticism of Deng Xiaoping, and that of other writers from the
same period, adds to our understanding of the revenge taken against the Gang of
Four by Deng Xiaoping in October 1976 and at their subsequent trials. I have
added some footnotes where I thought they would add clarity.)
As early as the Second Plenary Session of the
Seventh Party Congress, Chairman Mao pointed out that "a restrictive
policy towards private capitalism is bound to be resisted by the bourgeoisie in
various degrees and in various ways. ...... Restrictions and
counter-restrictions will be the main form of class struggle within the new
democratic state. " Our people have won a great victory in this struggle
of restrictions and counter-restrictions, our workers and peasants have largely
broken free from the chains of private ownership, and the economic basis of our
socialism has been gradually consolidated and developed. But the struggle has
not ended. On the basis of the victories already achieved, "a new and
higher form of struggle against the bourgeoisie is on the agenda." Under
the leadership of the great leader Chairman Mao, the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, both inside and outside the Party, are engaged in a new and
serious struggle of restrictions and counter-restrictions around bourgeois
right. This struggle is a more complex, more arduous and longer-term battle
than the three major reforms. Around the summer of last year, shortly after the
publication of Chairman Mao's important instructions on studying theory,
opposing and preventing revisionism, and restricting bourgeois right, Deng
Xiaoping, a capitalist-roader within the Party who refused to change his ways,
jumped out to perform again, just like Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao and other
representatives of the bourgeoisie, and desperately opposed restricting bourgeois
right and attacked the new thing of restricting bourgeois right. Analysing and
criticising Deng Xiaoping's fallacious arguments against restricting bourgeois right
will certainly further increase our consciousness in restricting bourgeois right
and opposing and preventing revisionism.
One.
After Deng Xiaoping, the unrepentant capitalist-roader in
the Party, resumed his work, he again staged a right-leaning reversal of the
verdicts and engaged in the criminal activities of restoring capitalism, but in
order to conceal his actions, he refused to admit his guilt and resorted to the
stealthy deception that "this place does not have 300 taels of silver"[1].
You see, he is rampantly promoting revisionism, but he says that "the old
cadres are not engaged in revisionism"; he is obviously preaching the
" theory of productive forces " which abolishes class struggle, but
he repeatedly argues that it is "not a productive forces theory"; when
his review of Water Margin[2]
hit the nail on the head of his revisionism and surrenderism, he immediately
pleaded that he was "not Song Jiang" and "did not
surrender"; when his criticism and restriction of bourgeois right hit him
where it hurts, he did the same thing. He refused to acknowledge the existence
of any bourgeois right, and no one was even allowed to mention the concept of
"bourgeois right".
It is a fact for all to see that bourgeois right still
exists in our country. Although our socialist revolution has won a great
victory, it is still a long way from the historical task of eliminating classes
and the three major differences that we have to accomplish in the whole period
of socialist history. Our socialist revolution in the relations of production
has not yet been completed, and there is still partial private ownership in
industry, agriculture and commerce; the socialist system of public ownership is
not always universal, but two kinds of ownership. The system of collective
ownership by the working masses, generally "three-tier ownership,
team-based", is a lesser degree of public ownership, and universal
ownership is not yet a communist system of public ownership. Bourgeois right
has not yet been completely abolished in the area of ownership, it still exists
in a serious way in the interrelationship of people, and it still dominates in
the area of distribution. In all areas of the superstructure, some aspects are
still practically dominated by the bourgeoisie, which still has the upper hand.
As Lenin put it, "Marx did not arbitrarily insert a
scrap of 'bourgeois right' into Communism, but indicated what is economically
and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb
of capitalism." The unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping shouted,
"How is more work for more pay a bourgeois right?" We would like to
ask this unrepentant capitalist-roader, how is the distribution of labour according
to work, and more work for more pay, not a bourgeois right? Did Marx not point
out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme that the distribution of
labour "remains, in principle, a bourgeois right"?
Did Lenin not say very clearly in The State and the
Revolution that "'bourgeois right' still prevails as far as the
distribution of products 'according to labour' is concerned"? It can be
seen that the distribution according to labour is certainly a profound
revolution in the system of distribution, a rejection of the system of
distribution based on private ownership of the means of production for
thousands of years, in which "those who work do not receive and those who
receive do not work"; however, it should be seen that the
"distribution according to labour" "acquiesces in the natural
privilege of different individual talents, and therefore of different
capacities for work", and "what prevails here is the same principle
that also prevails in the exchange of commodity equivalents, namely that a
certain amount of labour in one form can be exchanged for the same amount of
labour in another form ", this principle of equivalence prevailing in the
capitalist exchange of commodities is still a bourgeois right of formal equality
and de facto inequality".
Chairman Mao said, "There is still an eight-grade
wage system, distribution according to work and exchange through money, and in
all this differs very little from the old society." This is precisely in
terms of the fact that the distribution according to work reflects bourgeois right
and that there is still de facto inequality. When the distribution of labour is
applied the remuneration received differs due to the different intellectual and
physical strength of each worker and his or her different working capacity.
Even when the work capacity is the same and the pay for labour is the same,
there are differences in the degree of affluence due to the size of the family
burden, which, if left unchecked, can lead to polarisation. The concealment of
de facto inequality by formal equality is precisely the characteristic of
bourgeois right. The equality demanded by the proletariat is not formal
equality but de facto equality, the elimination of exploitation, the
elimination of classes and the elimination of the three great differences[3].
These are the basic common sense of Marxism. The unrepentant capitalist-roader
Deng Xiaoping does not read books or newspapers, does not understand
Marxism-Leninism at all. His non-recognitionist approach to bourgeois right is
precisely the great exposure of his ugly face in opposing Marxism-Leninism and
Mao Zedong Thought.
The unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping
strenuously denied the existence of bourgeois right, which was determined by
his reactionary bourgeois position. Chairman Mao recently pointed out: "
With the socialist revolution they themselves [i.e. the
capitalist roaders—Ed.] come under fire. At the time of the cooperative
transformation of agriculture there were people in the Party opposed, and when
it came to criticizing bourgeois right, they were resentful. You are making the
socialist revolution, and yet you don’t know where the bourgeoisie is. It is
right inside the Communist Party -those in power taking the capitalist road.
The capitalist roaders are still on the capitalist road."
The emergence of capitalist roaders in the Party during
the socialist period was no accident. Apart from its class and ideological
roots, a very important economic basis was the presence of bourgeois right in
the relations of production. After the old bourgeoisie had lost power and the
means of production, they desperately clung to bourgeois right and tried to use
it as an important condition for restoration activities; the new bourgeoisie
and those who wanted to take the capitalist road also tried to develop
capitalism by consolidating and expanding bourgeois right. The capitalist-roaders
became the representatives of the old and new bourgeoisie inside and outside
the Party, and they looked upon the bourgeois right as a protective magic
weapon. People like Deng Xiaoping, who was not a Marxist but a bourgeois
democrat, had already shown wavering in their opposition to the Three Great
Mountains[4],
and even more so during the socialist revolutionary period when they opposed
the bourgeoisie. They had become big officials, had good houses and cars, were
paid well, had high salaries, were well off, and no longer moved forward. In
order to maintain and expand their vested interests, they are bound to try
every possible means to expand bourgeois right and oppose its restriction by
every possible means. Bourgeois right is precisely the lifeblood of such
people. The unrepentant capitalist Deng Xiaoping's denial of the existence of
bourgeois right is precisely the great exposure of his bourgeois nature.
Two.
Chairman Mao said, "Our country at present practices a
commodity system, the wage system is unequal, too, as in the eight-grade wage scale,
and so on. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, such things can only be
restricted." The unrepentant capitalist Deng Xiaoping blatantly sang the
opposite of Chairman Mao's instruction, saying something like "to restrict
bourgeois right, there must also be a material basis, how can we restrict it
without it?" This is an excuse to oppose the restriction of bourgeois
right, the dictatorship of the proletariat and to have the restoration of
capitalism in the name of not having a material basis. The question is: what
kind of material basis must be in place in order to restrict bourgeois right?
Can this only be done when there is a great abundance of social goods? If
bourgeois right is not restricted now, will it not only expand the material basis
for the restoration of capitalism? In the Soviet Union, did not the socialist
Soviet Union become social-imperialist as a result of the unrestricted
extension of bourgeois right by the revisionists?
The revolutionary
aim of the proletariat is to achieve communism throughout the world, and it
therefore necessarily engages in a struggle of its own to limit bourgeois right.
One hundred and five years ago, when the French working class established the
Paris Commune, the first dictatorship of the proletariat in human history, it
immediately adopted measures to limit bourgeois right on all fronts, despite
its poor material conditions, such as abolishing the high salaries of state
officials, abolishing economic privileges for anyone, introducing cadres to a
system of election, supervision and dismissal by the masses, thus enabling the
staff of the state apparatus to become true public servants in the service of
the people.
After the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, the
Soviet regime had just been born and material conditions were poor, but Lenin
fought tirelessly against the bourgeois right that existed in Soviet society in
order to consolidate and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat and
prevent the restoration of capitalism. He paid attention to the great
initiative in the struggle of the workers and peasants and highly praised the
unpaid communist Saturday compulsory labour. In the revolutionary war years
before we seized power throughout the country, when material conditions were so
poor, there were no salaries, no Sundays, no eight-hour working day, the top
and bottom were united, the officers and soldiers were united, and the army and
the people were united, not by bourgeois right, but by the spirit of communism.
Why is it that after more than twenty years of socialist
revolution and construction after liberation, when China has had fourteen
consecutive bumper harvests in agriculture, when industrial production has
reached new levels and when the social productive forces have developed
considerably, it does not have the material basis for restricting bourgeois
right? Is this not a strange thing? In fact, the so-called "material
basis" theory is a genuine "productivity-only theory", which
denies that the relations of production have a negative impact on the
productive forces and the superstructure on the economic base. This theory is a
reactionary fallacy of the revisionists against the proletarian revolution and
the dictatorship of the proletariat. Before the proletariat seized power, the
old revisionists of the Second International, such as Bernstein and Kautsky,
opposed the proletarian revolution and advocated the reactionary theory of the
productive forces alone. They screamed that "socialism can only be won by
an increase in the wealth of society or by an increase in the productive forces
of society" and that the capitalist system "should not be destroyed,
but should be encouraged to develop further." Chen Duxiu, the earliest
opportunist leader in China, believed that "industrial, childish and
culturally backward China" could only develop capitalism first and then
carry out a socialist revolution, which was the infamous "theory of the
second revolution". After the proletariat had seized power, Trotsky and
Bukharin also advocated the "only productive forces theory" and
opposed socialist transformation and socialist construction, as well as the
socialist road.
After the transformation of the ownership of the means of
production was basically completed, Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao advocated that the
main contradiction in the country was "the contradiction between the
advanced socialist system and the backward social productive forces". They
opposed the consolidation and strengthening of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, the continuation of the revolution under the dictatorship of the
proletariat and engaged in the conspiracy to restore capitalism. The capitalist-roader
Deng Xiaoping, who has been criticised for adhering to the revisionist line of
Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao in the Party but refuses to repent, is now wielding the
stick of the " theory of productive forces " in a vain attempt to
bring down the struggle to restrict bourgeois right in order to achieve his
evil aim of restoring capitalism. Under the banner of developing the
"material base", he opposes the political leadership of the
proletariat and advocates "material incentives" to stimulate all
those who want to take the capitalist road and revive capitalism. What is alarming
is that the capitalists are always trying to provide material incentives in the
name of "caring for life". Liu Shaoqi said: "In order to care
about their economic life, the people must ask about their wages, housing, food
and transport, which shows the activism of socialist people's democracy. "
Lin Biao's group advocated "the relationship between man and man -
specifically self-interest". The unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng
Xiaoping was the same, screaming before the Cultural Revolution that "in
the past we also relied on material incentives" and that "after
socialism was built, it would be material incentives that led to
communism." After the Cultural Revolution, he again stressed the need to
"grasp profits".
The revisionist arguments of these capitalist-roaders are
the same, for they want to replace the socialist principle of "from each
according to his ability, to each according to his work" with the
so-called "material incentives", to expand bourgeois right and the
inequalities it brings without limit, to transpose the capitalist principle of
commodity trading into people's mutual relations, to replace equal and mutual
socialist mutual relations with money relations and employment relations, and
to achieve the goal of fundamentally changing the socialist ownership system
and restoring capitalism. It is easy to see what kind of communism is Deng
Xiaoping’s, who refuses to change his ways and opposes the restriction of
bourgeois right on the pretext that there is no material basis, and who relies
on material incentives to move towards communism. It is actually a synonym for
capitalism, a "goulash communism", Khrushchev's fake communism, the
reality of which is capitalism.
3.
The unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping attacked
our revolutionary measures to restrict bourgeois right as being
"fundamentally out of touch with reality" and "blowing the
communist wind". This is a fabrication with an ulterior motive, a vain
attempt to cut down the nascent communist germ in one fell swoop on the pretext
of "transcending the stage of revolutionary development".
The new socialist things that emerged from the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution narrowed the three major differences in every
aspect, violently attacked the idea of bourgeois right, and constantly swept
away the traces of the old society that existed in people's relations with each
other. In fact, what he called "reality" was the "traces"
left behind by the old society, from which we must not only gradually
disassociate ourselves, but also break away from fundamentally. In order to
defeat the bourgeoisie and capitalism, we must eradicate all traces of the old
society, restrict bourgeois right, and vigorously advocate, foster and promote
new things with a communist spirit. Deng Xiaoping, an unrepentant capitalist-roader,
saw new things that were conducive to limiting bourgeois right as thorns in his
flesh and wanted to get rid of them as soon as he could. He attacked the film Spring
Shoots[5],
which glorified the new socialism, as "ultra-leftist" and vilified
barefoot doctors for their low standard, and co-operative medical care as a
"communist wind". To put it bluntly, he wanted to blow up the wind of
assets that had left "the vast number of peasants without medical care,
without medical treatment and without medicine", and to maintain the rule
of the "urban lords of the Ministry of Health"[6].
He opposed the training of technicians from workers in the Shanghai Machine
Tool Factory, said that the July 21 University was "not the only form and
cannot replace the university", and attacked by saying that
"university students are still far from being like university
students". In fact, he was desperately trying to defend the old education
system which nurtured bourgeois slaves. He propagated the "stage
theory", attacked the leadership of the old, the middle class and the
youth, and said that "relying on the workers, peasants and soldiers is
relative", which means that he stubbornly insisted on the bourgeois
hierarchy of seniority.
In short, he opposed all revolutionary measures that were
conducive to narrowing the three major differences, and whoever insisted on continuing
revolution was scouring the "communist wind" and whoever restricted bourgeois
right was "ultra-left". Under the guise of opposing the
"communist winds" and criticizing the "ultra-left", he is
backtracking from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and trying to
revive the revisionist goods that were criticized in the past. His tactics are
nothing new. At the Lushan Conference in 1959, Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai
viciously attacked the three red flags under the banner of
"anti-leftism". The opposition of the unrepentant capitalist-roaders
in the Party to the so-called "communist wind" is just a repeat of
the revisionist tactics. Such rumours and sophistry must be promptly debunked
and discredited. We can answer clearly that it is impossible to demand the
immediate abolition of such "traces" of the old society as the
commodity system, money exchange and the distribution of labour, before the
social product has reached a level of great abundance, but that its harm must
be limited under the dictatorship of the proletariat. We are revolutionary development stage
theorists; however, we are also continuing revolution theorists. Socialism is
not our ultimate aim and therefore, to take the socialist revolution ever
forward, it is necessary to limit bourgeois right and gradually eradicate and
exterminate the traces left behind by the old society, which is a long-term
task in the socialist period. The deeper the socialist revolution goes, the
more important it is to put this task forward. Otherwise, the revolution under
the dictatorship of the proletariat will not be able to move on.
The unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping's
opposition to the new things that restrict bourgeois right is a desperate
attempt to prevent the gradual improvement of socialist relations of production
in line with the development of the productive forces, in a vain attempt to use
bourgeois right to regress from socialism to capitalism. We are dialectical
materialists who must see both the historical progressiveness and the
historical limitations of the socialist system of distribution and must not see
it as something that is set in stone. By dividing communist society into two
stages, Marxists are using socialism, the primary stage of communism, as a
transitional stage to communism. In the transitional stage the new gradually
grows and the old gradually disappears. In principle, there is a difference
between a socialist society, in which "each according to his ability,
according to his work", and a communist society, in which "each
according to his ability, according to his needs". In practice, however,
the two cannot be separated by a gap; they are two stages of one society. With
the transition from socialism to communism, the "from each according to
his ability and according to his labour" will gradually be replaced by the
"from each according to his ability and according to his needs".
However, in the view of the unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping,
"'socialism' is not something that keeps changing and progressing, but
something that is stable and unchanging." In his eyes, bourgeois right was
as sacrosanct as Confucius' "rites". Confucius was the defender of
reactionary slavery, and Deng Xiaoping, the unrepentant capitalist-roader, was
the defender of bourgeois right. By legal means, he is trying to use the power
he holds to solidify bourgeois right.
Chairman Mao said: "We oppose the stubborn faction in
the revolutionary ranks, whose ideas cannot move with the changed objective
situation and have historically manifested themselves as right-leaning
opportunism. These people cannot see that the contradictory struggle has pushed
the objective process forward, while their understanding still stops at the old
stage. All stubborn party thinking is characterised by this." Is this not
the character of the unrepentant capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping's attack on
revolutionary measures to restrict bourgeois right as being "fundamentally
out of touch with reality" and a "communist wind"? He is an
expert in defending the old, defending it when he sees it, and opposing it when
he sees the new. Bourgeois right, which represented the old, was their
lifeblood, and the new socialist things restricted bourgeois right, narrowed
the three major differences, destroyed the soil in which the bourgeoisie and
revisionism arose, and dealt a heavy blow to the capitalist conspiracy to
restore capitalism.
In the name of "rectification", Deng killed and
slashed the new things that had emerged since the Cultural Revolution, fully
revealing his reactionary stance of stubbornly adhering to revisionism and
opposing Marxism, and fully representing the interests of the overthrown
landlords and bourgeoisie, and the new bourgeoisie. His opposition to the
restriction of bourgeois right before the Cultural Revolution and his ugly face
of opposing the restriction of bourgeois right and the new socialism after he
came back to power are exactly the same. What is his "never to be
reversed"? It is simply unreliable. This is determined by the reactionary
nature of the bourgeoisie that he represents.
The more we restrict bourgeois right, the more rampant
will be their activities against restrictions, an objective law of class
struggle which does not depend on people's will. The facts tell us that the
struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie over restrictions and
counter-restrictions on the question of dealing with bourgeois right is
inevitable and long-lasting. The great struggle against the rightist
revisionist wind, which is currently developing triumphantly throughout the
country, is in essence a continuation and deepening of the struggle between the
two classes, the two roads and the two lines under the dictatorship of the
proletariat, and a continuation and deepening of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, which concerns the future and fate of the Party and the country. We
must take the class struggle as the platform, carry out the basic line of the
Party, persist in the struggle to limit bourgeois right, and fight hard to
create conditions that will make the bourgeoisie neither exist nor be able to
arise again.
See Chinese
original at marxistphilosophy.org/HistChinPhil1952_2005/101.htm
[1] This
place has no silver and three hundred taels (pinyin: cǐ dì wú yín sānbǎi liǎng) is
an idiom derived from a folk tale about a man who buried silver in the ground
and wrote on it a sign saying "This place has no three hundred taels of
silver"; his neighbour Li Si (or Wang Er) saw the sign and wrote on the
other side of it "Li Si (Wang Er) next door has not stolen it." Later
people used the phrase "there is no three hundred taels of silver here"
to describe a case where the truth is revealed instead of the intended
cover-up; it can be used as a subject and a clause in a sentence.
[2] In
September 1975, Mao encouraged a campaign to criticise the 14th
century Chinese novel Water Margin. Mao pointed out, "The merit of
the book Water Margin lies precisely in the portrayal of capitulation.
It serves as teaching material by negative example to help all the people
recognise capitulationists."
[3] Differences between mental and manual labour, between the towns and the countryside, and between industry ad agriculture.
[4] Feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism and
imperialism.
[5]
"Spring Shoots" is a feature film that tells the
story of Tian Chunmiao (the given name means “spring shoots”), the captain of a
certain production brigade in Jiangnan. The film was produced in 1975. It was
based on a stage play, “The Barefoot Doctor” written about a real life barefoot doctor, Wang Guizhen, who
performed advanced deeds in providing medical service for the poor and
lower-middle peasants. In the third issue of "Red Flag" published on
March 1, 1976, Chu Lan's article "Persist in the Revolution of Literature
and Art, Counter the Right-Deviationist Wind to Reverse Correct Verdicts",
disclosed for the first time that Deng Xiaoping repeatedly called the film "Ultra-Left"
and “extremely Left". In July 1976, it was rated as the most outstanding
feature film by the Ministry of Culture, but following the capitalist-roaders’
crushing of the Gang of Four, it was placed in cold storage. In recent years,
the film has been seen as dealing with the problem of the heavy burden of
access to health care in rural areas, and the demand for a solution to the problem
of poor access to health care has become a popular issue, and there has been a
nostalgia for the film.
[6] On June 26, 1965, Mao issued a
directive on public health, describing the Ministry in charge as “the Ministry
of Urban Gentlemen’s Health”. See: Directive
On Public Health (marxists.org)
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