(Translator’s preface: This article appeared on the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
Masses website on April 21, 2021 张角：论领导权与资产阶级法权——复辟与反复辟的理论依据
- 学习导引 - 马列毛群众
(mlmmlm.icu) . It is a website of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, who
operate under conditions of repression inside today’s capitalist and
social-imperialist China. This article explains Marx’ concept of “bourgeois
right” in the context of the struggle between adherents of the socialist and
capitalist roads in China. I have added
a couple of footnotes where I though they might be useful.)
I. Introduction
What are the causes of the restoration of capitalism under
the dictatorship of the proletariat?
Let us begin with a passage from Comrade Chunqiao, who
speaks of both bourgeois right and "leadership".
… it is incorrect
to give no weight to whether the issue of ownership has been resolved merely in
form or in actual fact, to the reaction upon the system of ownership exerted by
the two other aspects of the relations of production — the relations among
people and the form of distribution — and to the reaction upon the economic
base exerted by the superstructure; these two aspects and the superstructure
may play a decisive role under given conditions. Politics is the concentrated
expression of economics. Whether the ideological and political line is correct
or incorrect, and which class holds the leadership, decides which class owns
those factories in actual fact. Comrades may recall how we turned any
enterprise owned by bureaucrat capital or national capital into a socialist
enterprise. Didn't we do the job by sending a military-control representative
or a state representative there to transform it according to the Party's line
and policies? Historically, every major change in the system of ownership, be
it the replacement of slavery by the feudal system or of feudalism by
capitalism, was invariably preceded by the seizure of political power, which
was then used to effect large-scale change in the system of ownership and
consolidate and develop the new system. Even more is this the case with
socialist public ownership which cannot be born under the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie. Bureaucrat capital, which controlled 80 per cent of the industry
in old China, could be transformed and placed under ownership by the whole
people only after the People's Liberation Army had defeated Chiang Kai-shek.
Similarly, a capitalist restoration is inevitably preceded by the seizure of
leadership and a change in the line and policies of the Party. Wasn't this the
way Khrushchov and Brezhnev changed the system of ownership in the Soviet
Union? Wasn't this the way Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao changed the nature of a
number of our factories and other enterprises to varying degrees?--On
Exercising All-round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie", in Red Flag, No.
4, 1975.[1]
Chairman Mao's On Contradiction states: Some
people think that this is not true of certain contradictions. For instance, in
the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of
production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; in the
contradiction between theory and practice, practice is the principal aspect; in
the contradiction between the economic base and the superstructure, the
economic base is the principal aspect; and there is no change in their
respective positions. This is the mechanical materialist conception, not the
dialectical materialist conception. True, the productive forces, practice and
the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever
denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain
conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the
superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role.
When it is impossible for the productive forces to develop without a change in
the relations of production, then the change in the relations of production
plays the principal and decisive role.
Therefore, generally speaking, in socialist societies, power
changes hands and the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie because socialist societies have to retain a great deal of
bourgeois right, which is reflected in the repeated struggle for leadership in
the superstructure. On the other hand, however, only if the proletariat always
retains leadership can it gradually limit and even eliminate bourgeois right.
Should bourgeois right be extended? Or limit it until it is eliminated? This is
the true meaning of the repeated struggle for leadership. The struggle between
Chairman Mao and the anti-party groups of Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao and
Deng Xiaoping is a clear manifestation of this struggle. In this sense,
leadership determines the historical direction of bourgeois right. For related
historical material, see Sun Ling: Prelude to the Continuing Revolution - A
Sketch of the Struggle over Political Lines in New China 1949-1965
Therefore, in a socialist society, the basic contradiction
between the productive forces and the relations of production is reflected in
the contradiction between "bourgeois right" and
"leadership". On the one hand, we cannot hope that the development of
the productive forces will automatically eliminate bourgeois right; on the
other hand, we should not follow the opportunist's leftist but rightist
approach and try to abolish bourgeois right in one day. As an aspect of the
contradiction, "bourgeois right" contains within it the contradiction
of whether to "limit it until it dies" or to "expand it until it
is restored". The "leadership", as an aspect of the
contradiction, contains within it the contradiction of "who wins or loses
between the proletarian command and the bourgeois command". This picture
of the class struggle is thus expressed in the five fundamental judgements of
contemporary Marxist-Leninists-Maoists as follows:
Socialism is the transitional stage from capitalism to
communism. Socialism is a fairly long historical stage in which there are
always classes, class contradictions and class struggles, always the struggle
between the two paths of socialism and capitalism, always the danger of
capitalist restoration, always the threat of subversion and aggression by
imperialism. The socialist system (from the economic base to the
superstructure) is bound to retain the remnants of capitalism (bourgeois right)
for a considerable period of time, and this is bound to give rise to a new
bourgeoisie and to political forces that want to restore capitalism, the core
of which is the bourgeoisie within the Party (including bureaucratic groups and
capitalist groups). The proletariat must therefore continue its revolution,
must wage class struggle against the new bourgeoisie, and must do so through a
bottom-up revolutionary struggle led by the correct line of the proletarian
revolutionary party in order to gradually eliminate the remnants of capitalism
(bourgeois right) and eventually transition to communism.
II. "The concept of "bourgeois right”
The concept of "bourgeois right" was unearthed by
the great leader Chairman Mao. The grain of truth is found in the writings of
the old fathers, Marx and Lenin.
In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx,
analysing the principle of the socialist distribution of labour, states: "The
same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given
amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in
another form." "Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois
right," and " This equal right is
an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences,
because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes
unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural
privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every
right."
In The State and Revolution Lenin says: "…in the first
phase of communist society (usually called socialism) "bourgeois law"
is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the
economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of
production. "Bourgeois law" recognizes them as the private property
of individuals. Socialism converts them into common property. To that
extent--and to that extent alone--"bourgeois law" disappears."
"However, it persists as far as its other part is concerned; it persists
in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of
products and the allotment of labour among the members of society."
"In so far as the products are distributed 'according to labour',
'bourgeois right' still reigns." From this Lenin also drew an important
conclusion: “Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer
goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is
nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules
of law. It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only
bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”
In other words, Marx and Lenin were keen to identify
"bourgeois right" in the field of distribution, but they had to be
sorted out for posterity, because the practice of socialist society was not yet
sufficient.
The theoretical contribution of Comrade Zhang Chunqiao lies
in the fact that he began to study this subject. It is interesting to note that
in his "Do Away With the Ideology of Bourgeois Right"[2]
he also started with the "field of distribution", when he analysed
the contradiction between the "free supply system" and the "wage
system". This is even more vivid than Marx's and Lenin's theses, because
the old ancestors did not experience the Chinese New Democratic Revolution, nor
did they know that the "free supply system" had long been practised
in the ranks of the Red Army and in the revolutionary bases. " After the
liberation of the whole country, this kind of use of the "supply
system," which served as the distinguishing feature of a military
communist life, was still very popular. Referring to the "supply
system" is like speaking about the old revolution, the same as speaking
about the difficult struggles that people consider glorious. When some young
revolutionaries now take part in work, they expect a "supply system,"
to indicate their similarity to the old comrades, and that they genuinely and
sincerely come to the revolution. When comrades used to live under the supply
system they did not envy wage labour, and people liked this kind of expression
of a living institution of relations of equality. Before long, however, this
kind of system was attacked by the ideology of bourgeois right."
Assuming that our ancestors had access to the first-hand
materials of the Chinese Revolution, they would have been inundated with
treasure. But such time travel could not happen, so Comrade Chunqiao's exploration
was particularly valuable. But Chairman Mao, with an even sharper theoretical
eye, found great value in this concept, and he criticised Comrade Chunqiao's
thesis for "incompletely explaining the historical process", which
means that further research is needed on the formation and development of
bourgeois right, and on the evolution and direction of bourgeois right.
In November 1958, Chairman Mao organised a number of people
to study and discuss Stalin's book The Economic Problems of Socialism in the
Soviet Union. In the light of the problems in socialist construction.
Stalin discussed three prerequisites for the transition to communism.
1. it is not the mythical "rational organisation"
of the productive forces that must be effectively ensured, but the constant
growth of social production as a whole, with the growth of the production of
the means of production taking priority. The growth of production of the means
of production must take priority not only because this production should ensure
the equipment needed by its own enterprises and those of all other sectors of
the national economy, but also because without this production it would be
impossible to achieve expanded reproduction.
2. Collective farm ownership must be raised to the level of
universal ownership by means of a gradual transition that benefits the
collective farm and therefore society as a whole, and a gradual transition that
replaces the circulation of commodities by a system of exchange of products, so
that the central power or some other socio-economic centre can take control of
all the products of social production for the benefit of society.
3. The culture of society must be developed to the extent
that it is sufficient to ensure the full development of all its members, both
physically and intellectually, so that all members of society can acquire an
education sufficient to become active agents in the development of society, and
all are free to choose their occupation and are not tied to one occupation for
life because of the existing division of labour.
Chairman Mao's criticism of these three prerequisites was.
"The shortcoming is that a political condition has not
been stated and a set of methods has not been used to realize these three
conditions. Without political hang-ups, without regular rectification
campaigns, without the struggle to gradually break down bourgeois right,
without mass movements to run industry, agriculture and culture, without
several simultaneous actions, Stalin's three preconditions would not have been
easy to achieve." From this, Chairman Mao further clarified,
"According to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the relations of production
include three aspects: ownership, the interrelationship between people in
labour production, and the form of distribution. After the socialist
transformation, which basically solved the problem of ownership, equal
relations between people in labour production would not naturally arise. The
existence of bourgeois right must hinder the formation and development of such
relations of equality in every way." With regard to this aspect of
bourgeois right, Chairman Mao analyzed, "For example, the strict
hierarchy, the condescension, the detachment from the masses, the failure to
treat people as equals, the reliance on qualifications and power rather than on
the ability to work for a living, the cat-and-mouse relationship and the
father-son relationship between the cadres and the subordinates, all these
things must be broken down, completely broken down." Summing up these analyses,
Chairman Mao pointed out that Stalin's book "only talks about economic
relations, not about political hang-ups, not about mass movements. ...... does
not talk about bourgeois right, does not analyse bourgeois right, what should
be broken and how to break it, what should be restricted and how to restrict
it."
Chairman Mao's criticism went beyond the "realm of
distribution" to talk about bourgeois right, giving us a sense of
historical perspective that was of great help to Comrade Chunqiao in writing On
Exercising the All-roundl Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie.
This was followed by several major theoretical instructions
from Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution:
Lenin said to build a bourgeois state without capitalists,
in order to safeguard bourgeois legal power. We ourselves are building such a
state, much like the old society, with hierarchies, with eight grades of wages,
distribution according to labour and exchange of equal value. You had to get
money to buy rice, coal, oil and vegetables. Eight levels of wages, no matter
how few or how many people you have.
Why can't some people see the problem of contradictions in a
socialist society clearly anymore? Doesn't the old bourgeoisie still exist?
Isn't there a large petty bourgeoisie that everyone can see? Aren't large
numbers of unreconstructed intellectuals present? Is not the influence of small
production, corruption and speculation everywhere? Aren't Liu, Lin and other
anti-Party groups alarming? The problem is that one belongs to the petty
bourgeoisie and is prone to right thinking. One represents the bourgeoisie, but
says that class contradictions are not clearly seen anymore.
After the democratic revolution, the workers and poor
peasants did not stop; they wanted a revolution. And a section of the party
members did not want to move forward, some of them backed off and opposed the
revolution. Why? Having become big officials, they wanted to protect the
interests of the big officials. They have good houses, cars, high salaries and
waiters, and they are even better than the capitalists. Some people in the
Party had opposed the socialist revolution when it came to their own heads, and
they had resented the criticism of bourgeois right. The socialist revolution
was carried out without knowing where the bourgeoisie was, it was in the
Communist Party, the party in power who were following the capitalist road. The
capitalists are still going.
Comrade Chunqiao's "On Exercising All-Round
Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie" was therefore the most comprehensive of
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theories at the time, a milestone in the development of
theory. In this essay, Comrade Chunqiao spoke of both bourgeois right and the
"right to leadership", which is an important recapitulation for our
detailed discussion of bourgeois right and the "right to leadership"
today. We are, so to speak, standing on the shoulders of giants. We will be
drawing directly on the lessons learned from the blood of that generation of
revolutionaries.
Our enemies have done everything possible to discredit the
scientific concept of "bourgeois right". After the Restoration, the
"Bureau for the Compilation of the Works of Marx and Lenin", which
was revised in mid-1977, concluded that the word "juridical rights"
in bourgeois juridical rights, Recht in German and npaBo in Russian, can mean
"law" or "rights" respectively; translating it as
"legal rights" does not precisely convey its meaning and can easily
be misunderstood as "legal rights", or "rights". This is
not in line with Marx and Lenin's original meaning, thus causing theoretical
confusion and errors. So it was decided to translate it as "bourgeois
rights". This ludicrous retranslation is only an attempt to cover up the
mistake.
Even if our ancestors did not talk about the concept of
bourgeois right, our descendants could have invented it, not to mention the
extensive evidence in our previous article. For the sake of the victory of the
revolution, our descendants should be "better than blue"[3],
and Comrade Chunqiao is a good example of this. With these two famous essays he
can be ranked among the classical writers, whereas Kautsky and Plekhanov, who
wrote a lot of generalist left-wing works, do not deserve to be called
classical writers.
III. Bourgeois Legal Power and the Three Great
Differences
On Contradiction states that in every difference in
the world there is already a contradiction; the difference is a contradiction.
...... There are differences between workers and peasants, even in Soviet
social conditions, and their differences are contradictions, which merely do
not intensify into confrontation and do not take the form of class struggle.
This passage leads to the basic point that differences are contradictions.
We have already argued that bourgeois right, as an aspect of
the fundamental contradiction of socialist society, contains two completely
different directions of bourgeois right. If we look at socialist society
through the "social microscope" of historical materialism, we first
see three sets of contradictions, the "three great differences". In
the Soviet Union (1918-1953) and in China (1957-1976), these two specimens of
social history show: the difference between workers and peasants, the
difference between urban and rural areas, and the difference between manual and
mental labour. The latter specimen undertook the great experiment of narrowing
the three main differences.
The first set of contradictions: the difference between
workers and peasants
The realpolitik strategy for facing the
"industrial-agricultural divide" is to make agriculture the
foundation and industry the mainstay. This has remained the same in the
twenty-first century. In the Soviet Union (1918-1953), the strategy was to
develop collective farms and to give priority to heavy industry. In China
(1957-1976), the strategy was: agriculture on the basis of food and industry on
the basis of steel, dealing with the relationship between the weight of
agriculture, light industry and heavy industry.
The rationale for this strategy was that food was the first
thing to be taken care of, whether in armed struggle or in production and
construction. Some of the raw materials needed by industry also come from
agriculture, which in a sense means that industry needs "food".
Secondly, agriculture provides an extensive domestic market for industrial
goods and meets the basic conditions for expanding production. Finally, the
peasantry is a reserve of workers, and as agricultural productivity increases,
more labour can be drawn into industry.
The above is a discussion of the interconnectedness of the
two opposing sides of the contradiction between the "workers and
peasants", i.e. "sameness". The next point is about the
"struggle".
The bourgeoisie understands the ratio and balance between
"agriculture, light industry and heavy industry" and the importance
of "heavy industry". In the Soviet Union (1918-1953), the capitalist-roaders
advocated the development of heavy industry at the expense of people's
livelihoods, focusing unilaterally on heavy industry at the expense of
agriculture and light industry, resulting in insufficient goods on the market
and an unstable currency. In China (1957-1976) the capitalist-roaders advocated
a formula of "agriculture, light industry and heavy industry"
determined by profits. See the material:
Liu Shaoqi’s gang of renegades, hidden traitors and scabs has
always opposed the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture in China
for the evil purpose of restoring capitalism. First they raised the banner of
the reactionary productivity-only theory of the old and new revisionists,
advocated "mechanization first, then cooperatisation" and cut down
co-operatives in a bid to obstruct and destroy agricultural collectivization;
after agricultural cooperatisation had been achieved nationwide, they then
spread the rhetoric that "the more people and more land, the less need for
mechanisation" and that "intensive farming cannot be
mechanized". When the mass movement to reform agricultural tools was on
the rise, they appeared as extreme "leftists" again, shouting that
the reform of agricultural tools would require "several revolutions a
day", in a conspiracy to stifle the agricultural implement reform movement.
They took advantage of three years of temporary economic difficulties to kill
and slash the agricultural machinery industry and local industries. They also
pushed around such black goods as "dictatorship by the state and farming
by the peasants", "dictatorship by regulations" and "high
degree of monopoly"[4],
and were madly opposed to Chairman Mao's revolutionary proletarian line.
……………
It is necessary to criticize the erroneous tendency of
focusing on manufacturing while neglecting maintenance, focusing on the main
engine while neglecting supporting accessories, focusing on quantity but not
focusing on quality, and focusing on use, but not focusing on management, and
establish the view of serving the people wholeheartedly. A large number of
agricultural machines cannot function because of disrepair or lack of matching
sets. In order to repair a piece of agricultural machinery, some poor and
lower-middle peasants traveled to many cities and could not buy a spare part.
They said angrily: "The yellow ox can be cured, but the iron ox can't be
cured." I have to worry about repairing the machine." "Four heavies
and four lights"[5]
is a manifestation of irresponsibility to the party, the country, and the
people; it is a reflection of bourgeois ideas such as "profits in
command" and "the theory of supporting agriculture at a
disadvantage", and must be thoroughly criticized. (December 3, 1971
"Report of the State Council on Accelerating the Realization of
Agricultural Mechanization")
Both the "state pays and the peasants cultivate"
and the "four heavies and four lights" reflect the views of the
Chinese revisionist reactionaries on agriculture in its infancy (i.e. the
capitalist-roaders). They wanted to make profits from agriculture, and
"maintenance, spare parts, quality of farm machinery, and management of
farm machinery" were all obstacles to profits, which they had to cut out.
They wanted to turn peasants into hired labour (including agricultural
workers), to turn them into workers (temporary and contract workers) in
batches, to sow discord between workers and peasants, to sow discord between
new workers and old workers, to sow discord between the masses and to fight the
masses, and to achieve modern capitalist mass production.
The proletarian revolutionaries, on the other hand, advocate
that agriculture should be the starting point, that agriculture should be given
priority, that national economic plans should be arranged in the order of
agriculture, light and heavy, that industry should be developed around the
needs of agriculture, and that industry should obtain the conditions for its
own development by promoting the development of agricultural production. We
should combine the development of industry with the development of agriculture,
the modernisation of industry with the modernisation of agriculture, and the
strengthening of the leading role of the working class with the full play of
the role of the peasants as allies, so that the alliance between workers and
peasants can be further consolidated and strengthened on the basis of modern
socialist mass production.
To sum up, the question is not whether to attach importance
to "agriculture, light industry and heavy industry" or to the
"four modernizations", but whether to take the socialist road to narrow
the "difference between workers and peasants" or to take the
capitalist road to widen the contradiction between "workers and
peasants". So the "difference between workers and peasants" and
the "leadership" themselves interact with each other. This, in turn,
proves our "Introduction".
The second set of contradictions: the urban-rural divide
This group of contradictions is linked to the first group of
contradictions. Here it refers to the huge differences in the distribution of
resources between urban and rural areas, in areas such as education, health
care, public facilities and values orientation.
The difference between Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and Pol Pot
is that the former believe that the urban-rural divide should be gradually
reduced, while the latter formally abolished it by mechanically transferring
the urban population. The former believed that both urban and rural areas could
be a breeding ground for capitalism, while the latter believed that the city
was the only ground for breeding capitalism.
The realistic political strategy to face the
"urban-rural divide" was: the May 7th Road, which was modelled on the
base areas of the revolutionary war years, where the social division of labour
and functions of the workers, peasants, soldiers, academics and businessmen had
to interpenetrate each other. The people's communes were to be industrialised
and the countryside factoryised. The cities were to provide assistance to the
countryside. This included transferring small factories to the countryside,
sending intellectuals from the cities to the countryside, providing books and
teachers to spread scientific and technological knowledge, training people for
the countryside in the factories and schools in the cities, and sending
intellectual youth to work in the vast countryside.
Guided by this strategy, China (1957-1976) created a vivid
experience that the Soviet Union (1918-1953) did not have:
Firstly, the construction of a rural health care system. The
new rural health care system was mainly financed by local funds from communes,
brigades and production teams, but support from the central government was also
essential for its establishment and functioning. Since 1969, the training
programme for rural barefoot doctors has accelerated considerably and by the
mid-1970s such barefoot doctors had become the backbone of the rural health
care system.
Secondly, half of China's fertilisers were produced by rural
factories, and a significant proportion of the rapidly growing agricultural
machinery products were also produced by local rural factories. Many small
factories in the countryside also produce cement, pig iron, construction
materials, electricity, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and a wide range of small
consumer goods; more importantly, they had transformed nearly 20 million
peasants into full-time or part-time industrial workers in the countryside,
according to information.
Both of these were great creations of the
Marxist-Leninist-Maoists of the last century.
Yet the above is only one side of the contradiction: the
tendency for the urban-rural divide to narrow and the tendency for the
socialist factor to increase. The other side of the contradiction lies in the
tendency for the urban-rural divide to widen and for the capitalist factor to
increase.
Both the capitalist-roaders in the Soviet Union (1918-1953)
and the capitalist-roaders in China (1957-1976) sought to exploit the
urban-rural divide so that cultural knowledge, literary creation, medical
technology, etc. were seen as commodities that demanded high prices from the
people. Pursuing "three famouses" and "three highs"[6]
they sought the titles of "expert" and "authority",
competing for fame in the court and profit in the market. The rural masses were
shut out of the doors of cultural and educational positions. The field of
literature and art became a place where the poisonous weeds of revisionism
grew, schools became the "cradle" for the cultivation of bourgeois
spiritual aristocracy, and the health sector served only a few people in the
cities.
In response to this trend, Marxist-Leninists-Maoists in
China have worked tirelessly to gradually reduce and even abolish the
distinction between urban and rural areas. The Shanghai "July 21"
Workers' University, the Chaoyang Agricultural College in Liaoning, the Jiangxi
Communist Labour University and the Dazhai School are all examples of this. The
Chaoyang Agricultural College, for example, not only tilted its resources
towards the countryside, but also broke with old traditions and customs
("looking down on peasants and the countryside") in terms of values.
The Chaoyang Agricultural College went against the
revisionist educational line of the 17 years and trained more than 16,000
peasants in the form of scientific experimental teams, amateur universities for
peasants, short courses, mobile teaching courses, etc. More than 340 graduates
from three long-term classes "from the society to the society" went
back to the countryside to work as peasants. This new breed of peasants played
a great role in breaking the monopoly of knowledge of the bourgeoisie. In the
past, in order to improve the production of fruit trees, some communities
invited people from all around the country and paid them very well, and they
were also treated well with good food and drink. Now that there are graduates,
these people can no longer take advantage of the difference between urban and
rural areas to create a monopoly.
In other words: the capitalist-roaders advocate exploiting
the urban-rural divide to reap excessive profits, while the proletarian
revolutionaries advocate tilting resources towards the countryside. The
capitalist-roaders advocate using the difference between urban and rural areas
to "trap the peasants" and "trade high for high" in a vain
attempt to exploit them, while the proletarian revolutionaries advocate
gradually making reasonable adjustments to the prices of industrial and
agricultural goods and narrowing the "scissors difference". This
enabled the peasants to increase their collective accumulation and personal
income year by year through increased production and commodity exchange in a
normal year, thus further consolidating the workers' and peasants' alliance.
To sum up, the question is not about such empty ideas as
"the city feeding the countryside" and "urban-rural
integration", but about whether to take the socialist road to narrow the
"urban-rural gap" or the capitalist road. The result is the so-called
"Three Rural Problems"[7]
under the present Chinese government. So, the "urban-rural divide"
and the "leadership" themselves interact with each other. This, in
turn, proves our "introduction".
The third set of contradictions: the difference between
manual and mental work
This set of contradictions is linked to the second set of
contradictions. The capitalist-roaders are able to exploit the urban-rural
divide to gain a monopoly on knowledge because education, health care, public
facilities (including management) and values are the hereditary domain of the
bourgeoisie. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism teaches us that the proletariat must not
only "expropriate the expropriators" of the possession of material
wealth, (Marx: The Civil War in France) but must also "completely
deprive the bourgeoisie of its intellectual superiority". (Lenin: "The
Present Tasks of Soviet Power") Without this latter "dispossession",
the former "dispossession" will not be consolidated either. Chairman
Mao pointed out: "Traditionally in China only the landlords have been
cultured, the peasants have not. But the culture of the landlords is created by
the peasants, because what creates the culture of the landlords is nothing else
but the blood and sweat taken from the peasants." (Report on the Study
of the Peasant Movement in Hunan) The upside-down history of the spiritual
wealth created by the working people but seized by the ruling class must be
turned upside down. "The working people must be intellectualised",
this is the unstoppable revolutionary torrent.
In a socialist society, the difference between manual and
mental labour is reflected in the hierarchy between the leaders and the masses,
between the technical managers and the direct producers, and also among the
direct producers. In addition, the influence and corruption of the ideology of
the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes. This causes the former (leaders
and technical managers) to treat the masses of workers and peasants with
arrogance and to despise manual labour; it causes them to breed the idea of
hierarchy and privilege, not to treat the masses as equals, to act as lords and
to turn comradeship into a relationship of domination and subordination. That
is, as Chairman Mao pointed out, "hierarchical, condescending, detached
from the masses, not treating people as equals, not living on their ability to
work but on qualifications and power, cat-and-mouse and father-and-son
relations between cadres and the masses and between superiors and
subordinates." For more details, see Chapter 2 of this article (II. The
concept of "bourgeois right").
The political strategy to face the "difference between
manual and mental labour" was to implement two participations, one reform
and three combinations, insisting on the participation of cadres in collective
production work, workers in enterprise management, reforming unreasonable rules
and regulations, and implementing the combination of workers, cadres and
technicians.
Let us take the case of the "Beijing Printing and
Dyeing Factory" in China (1957-1976) as an example.
Before the Cultural Revolution, the leading cadres and
section cadres of this factory worked on an eight-hour day shift, and no one
was on duty at night. When night shift workers encountered urgent problems,
they had to knock on the cadres' doors in the middle of the night. Some cadres
were not happy when they were woken up and complained that the workers were "making
a fuss". In response, the masses were very critical and felt that
"cadres and workers are different". After the Cultural Revolution,
the factory implemented a system whereby leading cadres and section cadres took
turns to follow the three shifts, whether it was the morning shift, the middle
shift or the night shift, there were cadres working in the workshop while
working, so that many problems could be solved in time. What's more, the
majority of cadres have increased their consciousness of "no privilege in
politics and no special in life". In the process of working, the majority
of cadres constantly criticised and overcame the "superiority theory of
leadership", further saw the power of the masses and avoided subjectivism
and bureaucracy.
Before the Cultural Revolution, there were few workers among
the cadres at all levels in this factory; after the Cultural Revolution, a
group of outstanding workers, including mass representatives who did not take
off work, joined the factory leadership team and participated directly in the
leadership of the enterprise, so that the workers among the leading cadres of
the factory and workshops increased to 70 per cent. Before the Cultural
Revolution, workers had no right to interfere in the management of the factory;
after the Cultural Revolution, a three-tier mass management network was
established from the factory, workshops to the work groups, which was combined
with professional management, and there were more than 1,000 worker
administrators. Before the Cultural Revolution, decisions on important matters
in the factory could only be made by a few leading cadres, such as the
secretary and the factory manager; after the Cultural Revolution, the workers
took various forms, such as investigation groups, "Three Combination"
groups, large-character posters and seminars, to exercise revolutionary
supervision over the leaders and the factory's major events.
The plant implemented the "Anshan Iron and Steel
Constitution", striving to narrow the gap between manual and mental labour,
consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat and promoting the flourishing
of production. In 1975, the total industrial output value of the plant was more
than six times that of 1965, and the funds accumulated for the state in ten
years could have been used to build eight factories of the same size.
It is clear from the above cases that the distinction
between manual and mental labour cannot be automatically abolished, but can
only be restricted by certain institutions until it is extinguished. The capitalist-roaders
in China (1957-1976) took advantage of this difference to establish the
prejudice that only bourgeois "experts" and "authorities"
could manage enterprises, and used "control, cards, pressure and
punishment". This sharp confrontation between manual labour and mental
labour was the most suitable political ground for them to promote the
"profit-oriented" approach. This soil gave birth to a "class of
bureaucrats" who rode on the heads of the people and were the vast reserve
army of the capitalist-roaders.
In conclusion, the question is not whether the social
division of labour between mental and manual work is reasonable at a certain
stage in history, but whether the important question is the contradiction
between taking the socialist road to reduce the "mental-manual
difference" or the capitalist road to widen the "mental-manual
difference". What is important is the contradiction between advancing the
intellectualisation of the working people (not just intellectual and cultural
literacy, but the learning of the working people to run the country) or the
perpetuation of the intellectual superiority of the bourgeoisie (including all
kinds of management experience). So the "mental-manual difference"
and the "leadership" themselves interact with each other. This, in
turn, proves our "introduction".
The identity of the three sets of contradictions
In this section we provide an overview of the three sets of
contradictions mentioned above.
The three differences are homogeneous, i.e. they affect each
other and interpenetrate under certain conditions. Take the example of the oil
workers in the Dagang oilfield.
Learning from the fundamental experience of Daqing, the
Dagang oilfield firstly strongly advocated that the leading cadres and the
workers shared the hardships. At the beginning of the mass campaign, the
leading organs at all levels did not live in the towns, did not have buildings,
halls, pavilions, or places, but worked in cubicles and huts, and held meetings
in straw huts or in the open air. The cadres and workers ate from the same
stove, slept in a hut, and studied and talked around a campfire. Where the
workers were fighting, the leaders were in command, and what the workers were
asked to do, the leaders did first. These measures played a great role in
improving relations between the cadres and the group and in revolutionising the
thinking of the cadres. Through in-depth criticism of the revisionist programme
of building "oil cities" to serve a few people, and in accordance
with the principles of integrating workers and peasants, urban and rural areas,
and facilitating production and living, conditions were created for family
members to participate in agricultural and sideline production work. In doing
so, not only did they adhere to the "May Seventh" path guided by
Chairman Mao and narrow the differences between cadres and workers within the
enterprises, but they also sought to combine agriculture and industry and to
gradually eliminate the confrontation between urban and rural areas.
[2]
For the full text of Zhang’s article, see: BourgeoisRightWeb
(marxistphilosophy.org)
[3] This is a saying derived from the
ancient philosopher Xunzi’s Persuasion. It is often used as a metaphor
for students surpassing teachers or descendants surpassing predecessors.
[4] A complaint against the state’s
monopoly on grain purchases by those wanting to speculate in the market.
[5] This is a reference to the erroneous
tendencies mentioned in this paragraph’s opening sentence.
[6]
This is a collective name for famous writers, famous actors, famous professors,
and high wages, high remuneration, and high bonuses.
[7] This refers to the issues of
agriculture, rural areas and peasants. These had been successfully addressed by
the Party prior to the seizure of power by the capitalist-roaders who claim that
they are an “inevitable product of the transition from agricultural
civilization to industrial civilization”. They say that the three rural
problems are “not unique to China, both developed and developing countries have
had similar experiences, but developed countries have better solved the
"three rural problems". The issue of "three rural areas"
was proposed as a concept in China in the mid-1990s and has since been
increasingly cited by the media and officials. The problems are seen in the
fact that the number of Chinese farmers is large, and the solution is large; that
China's industrialization process has advanced unilaterally, and the
"three rural" problems have accumulated for a long time and are
difficult to solve; and that the negative impact and comparatively few benefits
brought about by China's urban policy design have been highlighted in a short
period of time, and the solution is said to be very complicated.
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