27
Feb 2021 09:00:37 Source: Red Song Club.com Author:
Lao Tian
(Translator’s
preface: This article looks at the different circumstances for the development
of political leadership within the revolutionary movement faced by Mao in China
and by Gramsci in Italy. It tries to
define the factors that caused failure for both revolutionary leaders – in Gramsci’s
case by the crushing of the Turin
workers’ fight to protect their takeover
in the factories, and in Mao’s case, by the reemergence of bourgeois
hierarchical structures and the success of the capitalist-roaders. My translation is not as fluent as I would
like and I take responsibility for any errors.
I have added footnotes where I thought they would assist readers of Lao
Tian’s text.)
Gramsci, as leader of the Italian Communist Party, was
unsuccessful in leading the Turin workers' factory committee struggles, and he
later reflected on the reasons for his failure, raising the importance of
ideological leadership, as well as the question of the modern prince
and the organic intellectual, all three of which were directly relevant to how
a new political leadership could be established inside industries and cities.
By contrast, the countryside has a different spatial character from the cities.
During the great revolutionary trend in China in the 1920s, the peasants of
Guangdong and Hunan organised peasant associations on a large scale and
overturned all kinds of conceptual power in the countryside, creating a real
revolutionary change and change of leadership in the countryside, and it was
from these experiences that Teacher Mao developed the potential possibilities
and strategies for the Chinese revolution.
Differences
in conditions between Teacher Mao and Gramsci regarding leadership practices
and their "defect-filling design"
|
The theoretical level of leadership
|
Inadequate building of the theoretical side of the hierarchy and lack
of consensus and theoretical accumulation within the leadership team (which
led to the intellectual problem and the divergence of political views at the
top after the founding of the People’s Republic of China)
|
Workers and their organisers are both infiltrated by the leadership of
the other side
(thus envisaging modern prince, organic intellectuals and a strategy
of positional warfare to seize leadership)
|
|
|
The practical
level of leadership (Teacher Mao’s leadership
in the practice of building rural base areas)
|
Short-term disruption of rural social perceptions of power patterns
|
Trade union organisations tend to focus on short-term interest goals
|
Gramsci leads Turin's factory committee struggle
|
|
The Peasants’ Association is able to establish the overall
organizational advantage
|
The overall organizational advantage is in the hands of the management
|
|
Rural villages (with spatial conditions for building a base)
|
Urban factories (lack of spatial conditions to build a base)
|
Reading Mao's analysis in relation to
Gramsci's reflections on the failure of the urban revolution, it may be
possible to distil the central concept of articulating the revolution - what
the political leadership of the working masses is, how it is formed and how it
works, etc. - and from there, a relatively complete and systematic way of
articulating the revolution may be found.
I.
The
Chinese Revolution and the Initial Practice of New Democratic Political
Leadership
Where Gramsci failed, Mao looked directly at the
"fait accompli" of the peasant movements in Guangdong and Hunan that
in effect caused the overthrow of the leadership of the old rulers, and
envisaged a completely different kind of political leadership in the new
democracy. Any
leadership seems to have two components: the first is the organisation of the
peasants to achieve organisational superiority and the realisation of "all
power to the peasants' association", and the second is the overthrow of
all kinds of conceptual power (Mao's own choice of words is "political
power, clan power, religious power and patriarchal power"), which together
constitute a new democracy (leadership) that is different from the "old
democracy".
In contrast to Marx's analysis of the class in-itself
and the class for-itself, it can be seen that the total overthrow of the old
conceptual power is directly related to the removal of ideological fetters and
the achievement of general enlightenment; and when combined with the
organisational advantages of "all power to the peasants' association",
it creates the material power to engage in "weapons of criticism".
In his study of the northern agrarian reform,
Professor Li Fangchun reclaims the "turning over of the heart" and
quotes the peasant saying in northwest Jin, "To grub a tree, one must grub
its roots; to turn over one's body, one must turn over one's heart." The
aspects related to the "turning over of the heart" are at least as
important as the turning over of the body,
if not more important, both of which are embedded in this new leadership, and
are mutually causal with it, both as a path to creating it and as a sign of its
existence and functioning.
Apart from the coercive role of tangible power, the
rest of the influence and hidden power is related to the heart. In traditional
rural China, the important analytical position of the 'heart' lies in the fact
that tangible coercive power is rarely present, and it is more often the
intangible conceptual power that acts as a regulator everywhere. In his study
of the failure of state power to sink between the late Qing Dynasty and the
Republic of China, the American scholar Duara
defines an 'unregulated' form of power as a 'cultural network of power', which
he considers to be a reference to Foucault's postmodern conception of power. However,
it would be more accurate to say that the pre-liberation countryside was a
standard 'pre-modern society' in which the role of 'explicit' administrative
and judicial power was not sufficiently pronounced, and inequality and power
were achieved mostly through 'implicit' influence and 'psychological'
mechanisms of acceptance. Such rural social conditions are more in line with
Foucault's notion of diffuse power. It is here that the change in values,
influence and standards of legitimacy associated with the 'turning of the
heart' is extremely significant.
Leadership is an irreplaceable "material
force" for the revolution, and its role is not inferior to the national
political force that can be handled skillfully by conventional academics. But
until now, the observation of the path of leadership construction and the way
it works has remained a blind spot in mainstream scholarship. The failure to
understand the centrality of the question of leadership in the middle of the
revolutionary process and its decisive role in changing the contrast between
class forces is the focus of disagreement between Teacher Mao
and many of the party hierarchy, and is what Western scholars have been
referring to when they have been quick to accuse Teacher Mao of being
"voluntarist".
Second,
the construction path of the political leadership of the working masses and its
supporting role in the implementation
In 1917, when he was a student in Changsha, Teacher
Mao ran a night school for workers; after the establishment of the Party, he
also sent someone to work among the workers in Anyuan as an instructor of the
Association for the Promotion of Civilian Education, and in September 1922 he
organised the victory of the Anyuan General Strike. In the spring of 1923,
instructor Mao sent Liu Dongxuan and others to organize a peasant union in Hengshan
County, the hometown of Zhao Hengxi, and soon achieved success, but it was
suppressed in less than six months. Before and after that, with the help of
the "provincial constitution" of the vulnerable Hunan warlord Zhao
Hengxi, Teacher Mao organised a general strike in Changsha, including a general
strike of masons, and succeeded in "nine and a half" of the ten
strikes; in 1925, Teacher Mao returned to Shaoshan with his wife and he also
took the opportunity to seize the management of rural education, opened a
peasant night school to train cadres for peasant associations, and successfully
carried out the struggle to "pacify the black market and stop the
ban". In
August 1925, when Zhao Hengxi sent troops to arrest the "Excessive
Party",
Mao fled to Guangzhou, where he met Peng Peng and learnt about the peasant
movement in Haifeng County.
Based on this experience and experience, Teacher Mao's
writing in 1926 clearly recognised that, unlike workers, who often find it
difficult to organise their struggles beyond economic goals and short-term
interests, peasant struggles are political from the outset - with the implicit
goal and consequence of a change of hands of leadership. Gramsci's factory
committees organised at the Turin car factory failed, but the peasant movements
in Guangdong and Hunan were successful in achieving a change of leadership.
[See Appendix 1]
The peasant struggle was deeply political and its
consequences were often reflected in the building of a new leadership whereby
the leadership of the old rulers could be overthrown, as was extremely evident
in Haifeng County where the peasant movement was very deep. The reason for this
is that the particular geographical and spatial conditions of the countryside -
where neither the rulers nor the ruled have space to withdraw, and where they
have to live together and interact closely in a specific space for a long time
- make the consequences of the struggle long-term as soon as it begins, and the
pursuit of short-term goals carries its own long-term consequences. In a word,
the revolution and struggle in the countryside, from the very beginning, has a
long-term goal and a political character, and the question of leadership,
whether you are explicitly aware of it or not, becomes a bull's-eye of direct
struggle from the very beginning.
From the historical experience of the communist
revolution, there were four main historical moments and different political and
historical scenarios in which the political leadership of the new democracy was
established: first, the peasant movement during the Revolutionary period, when
peasant associations were organized and conceptual power was subverted; second,
the organization of the Peasant Anti-Japanese Salvation Congress and the
process of "turning over the heart" during the period of the North
China Base Area; third, the land reform campaign against the landlords and its
questioning of "who really feeds whom?"; fourth, in the city's
private factories to engage in "democratic reform" and "anti-feudal
head"
struggle until 1952, and the end of the "five-antis movement",
while combined with the promotion of Marxist common sense.
These four historical scenarios have an inherent logic
in common: working people organise themselves to create organisational
advantage and at the same time subvert the old conceptual power; often also
through struggle sessions, for example, it is possible in a short time to
achieve a hard rejection of the old rules and a simple affirmation of the new
rules. After the change of hands of influence in a specific space in a village
or factory, the 'private sphere', formerly controlled and monopolised by a few,
was 'made public' - there was a new centre of power with broad popular
participation and support, and the marginalisation of the influence of the old
bigwigs, with new power centers and rules replacing the old one.
In the process of building leadership in the rural
base areas, it was not necessarily the theoretical poor peasants or
proletarians who filled the high positions of influence within the grassroots
regimes that were subsequently formed; after the old landlords were defeated
and their influence purged, it was often the middle peasants who filled the
political positions. In the Xingguo Survey,
Mao found that in addition to the benefits of relieving "relative
impoverishment", the middle peasants supported the revolution and gained
the "right to speak" in the villages. This political promotion was
also a very important motivating factor. There was also a special
consideration: the villagers felt that middle-peasant families had more labour
and could afford to lose work as cadres (most of the grassroots cadres in the
base areas at that time were not paid and had very little allowance), so they
gave preference to them as cadres.
By "democratic centralism", Mao refers to
democracy as the "private sphere becoming public" through leadership
building - a substantive democratic programme that is not closely related to
formal democratic procedures such as "bean elections". Centralisation,
on the other hand, refers to the "empowerment" of grassroots
organisations, which are characterised by high executive power and low costs,
after they have emerged from involution.
By analogy with the physical 'transformation of
potential energy into kinetic energy', in the progressive ladder of
understanding of several generations of revolutionary teachers, Marx developed
more specifically the 'potential energy analysis' of the incompatibility of
capitalist society with the interests of the majority, the systemic conditions
of exploitation and oppression and the interplay of their class interests which
culminate in a long-term tendency towards the impoverishment of the proletariat
and a growing crisis of capitalism, with the gradual accumulation of potential
energy eventually sufficient to overthrow the old world. Lenin, on the other
hand, stood on Marx's shoulders, looking ahead to the process of criticising
the weapons of the old society and analysing the paths by which potential
energy could be successfully transformed into kinetic energy. People often talk
about Lenin's "indoctrination theory"
and "vanguard", which happens to be a new type of leadership. The two
major supporting points of power are the general consciousness of the masses
and the organizational mechanism. In the early days of the Soviet Communist
Party, Lenin had to engage in long debates with his party comrades on important
matters relating to the new leadership; Mao, on the other hand, went straight
beyond this barrier of perception and into the "existing leadership"
to find ways of maximising its internal and external effects.
Looking at it this way, the peasants are organized to
form a new leadership, and the internal political integration is obvious, and
there is also an overall overturning relationship - the old leadership can be
suppressed based on this. Or "reducing rents and interest rates" or
even "dividing fields and land." At the same time, the scale and
manner in which it worked externally was also a matter of judgment. The mistake
that occurred during the Jinggangshan period was to "hit the middle class
too hard", resulting in a large number of middle peasants following the
rich and the landed in revolt once the White Army arrived. The Red Army's
military discipline (the "Three Main Disciplines and Six Points of
Attention")
- to avoid infringing on the interests of the people and businessmen during
marching and fighting in order to establish the Red Army's image and trust -
was also emphasised, and this effort finally converged into a series of
policies and strategies for the "united front" (how to win and expand
allies), a direction of thinking that extended leadership and its role to
allies. In the midst of the serious "red-white confrontation" in the
base areas of south Fujian, Teacher Mao realised that they could not force the
landlords and rich peasants to a point where they could not survive, for they
would then take their guns to the mountains and turn into "green
guerrillas" and resist to their death. Therefore, in the process of dividing
up the land, a share of land was needed to support their survival and reduce
their will to resist. In this way, the practical form of leadership began with
the organisation itself and was extended to allies and enemies who laid down
their arms, thus maximising the scope and effect of leadership.
Roughly speaking, Marx established the principle of
"the existence of potential energy and its increase" and predicted
the eventual collapse of the old society; whereas Lenin envisaged the
conditions for the workers to become aware and organise themselves for the
criticism of weapons, dealing with the question of "how to smoothly
transform potential energy into kinetic energy". Mao, on the other hand,
looked to the reality of the new leadership already established by the peasants
in the peasant unions and envisaged the solution of 'maximising the effect of
kinetic energy'. During the Cultural Revolution, the term 'three milestones'
was used, but while it is true that they do not coincide in terms of the
'problem areas' dealt with by the three generations of revolutionary mentors,
and that they advance step by step, their proletarian positions and
revolutionary orientation are entirely consistent.
Such a new leadership, established through
struggle, forms a core of unity and solidity internally, and seeks allies and
intermediate classes externally, and then also seeks to minimise the will to
resist by members of the opposing classes, so that such a leadership, once
established from the bottom up, is able to occupy a stable advantage on its own
in a local geographical space, and unless destroyed by direct violence by the
superior military power of the enemy, such a base is then capable of sustaining
itself and operating stably. At the same time, the role of leadership
was not only to change the political balance of power, but also to have the
ability to support a huge increase in administrative capacity, and have the
ability of rural power organisations in the North China base areas to mobilise
far more than top-down unidirectional coercion in sharing the costs of the
revolutionary war and the burden of human and material resources with the
peasantry, thus breaking out of the KMT's dilemma of involution.
Third, The leadership of the working masses embedded
in the relations of production
The ability to build a new leadership was, in
Gramsci's view, crucial, and the various rapid victories in history all smacked
somewhat of what he called 'negative revolutions' - leadership that was too
small and not sufficiently supported from the bottom up, which forced too much
reliance on coercion and command, not to mention a hostile population, and too
many uncooperative people, which can backfire on the evolution of a regime and
lead to negative trends.
The rapid victory of the Soviet Communist Party, and
the extensive reliance on top-down administrative orders to transform society
afterwards, had a very different connotation from the results of the long
struggle won by the CCP in the countryside. After the Communist Party entered
the cities, it continued to organise mass struggles in the towns and villages -
the so-called "democratic reform" movement - through which the
political leadership of the working masses was generally re-established, and
the new regime was able to govern smoothly because it was reinforced by this
leadership from the bottom up.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including the
Lenin era, often suffered from a lack of implementation, and Lenin's design of
the New Economic Policy was somewhat a reflection of the dilemma of relying
solely on top-down coercion to govern. Stalin's later emphasis that
"cadres decide everything and technology decides everything" was also
"half-hearted thinking" constrained by the same dilemma, while
Khrushchev's era did not hesitate to promote the "Five Ones" ("a
lover, a dacha, a car, a piano, a television set"), engaging in naked
material incentives and inducements to personal gain, accompanied by
"reforms" that reinforced and monopolised management power. In the case of the Soviet Communist Party, because
there was no real building of leadership of the working masses to begin with,
the result was "path dependence" - a one-sided reliance on the few to
force the many to work more - and in the midst of this poor imagination, it was
never possible to see clearly the status and role of the political leadership
of the working masses. In March 1960 Teacher Mao used the Anshan Iron
and Steel Constitution to contrast and look down on the regularised management
programme of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine constitution,
and during the Sino-Soviet polemic criticised revisionism and dumped the blame
on Khrushchev (who was of course the worst and most blatant), a possible narrative
strategy to "narrow the target", while the Soviet Communist Party was
from the beginning to the end "short of a fire"
in terms of building the political leadership of the working masses.
In other words, the political leadership of the
working masses, both in terms of its construction and its operational effects,
is a unique effort in the entire history of the international communist
movement. There are few 'conscious' people in the CCP, but it is mainly
reflected in the political construction of the base areas and the experience of
general democratic reform after the move to the cities, as advocated by Teacher
Mao. This part of the practice and its theorisation is still incomplete.
In contrast to Burawoy's
concept of the productive regime and its connotations, the particular type of
'internal state' and 'internal ideology' within the unitary system that emerged
as a result of the mass struggles organised by the CCP after its entry into the
city, internalised to a considerable extent two aspects of the political
leadership of the working masses. The Soviet Communist Party, on the other
hand, because it never led the workers to establish a new leadership, fell into
a dependence on unilateral coercion in its quest to improve execution and
productivity, and by the Khrushchev era it had gone completely in the opposite
direction, completing the qualitative change.
Within the unitary system of the Maoist era, there was
a high level of communalisation of administration and its furthest boundaries
must not infringe on the employment and earnings of employees, and the ability
of managers to intervene forcefully in the actions of subordinates was lacking.
The administrative approach thus carries with it a high level of
communalisation: for example, wage and bonus assessment processes are based on
shift assessment as a starting point, and technical learning networks and overall
progress within the factory require that the costs of learning are shared
equally - technical learning and progress is universal learning based on job
responsibility, in contrast to what Breverman
saw as "separation of concept from implementation". Moreover, the
process of implementation of the administration also tended to internalise the
social tradition of propriety - not to sanction violations by forceful means,
but to solve the problems in question mostly by the method of persuasion. The
experience of the Cultural Revolution later showed that party organisations and
their methods of recruiting members were, on the contrary, more concentrated with
features of intrinsic negativity, and that within bad institutions there was
often encouragement of cliques or political opportunism. The status of the
trade unions in terms of procedural oversight, because of their funding, was
overwhelmed by the high level of administrative communalisation and they eventually
became a purely "money-spinning" welfare office.
The policy and practice of trying to strengthen
implementation from the top down by abandoning the path of mass leadership
building, inevitably leads to a monopoly of executive power by management,
while deliberately weakening the participation and initiative of the governed
and undermining or even abandoning the political leadership within the unitary
system that is based on the working masses. The instinctive choice to
"strengthen and monopolize management power" was defined during the
Cultural Revolution as a "capitalist-road" (which did in fact
undermine the political leadership of the working masses) and was said to
betray the "revolutionary line of Chairman Mao". The institutional
connotations of this revolutionary line were reflected in the attempts at "making
the private sphere public" affirmed from the "Sanwan Reform"
to the "Anshan iron and Steel Constitution". [See Appendix II]
Regarding the issue of leadership, there is no true
“pure left”, but only the “ladder” of cognitive progress consistent with the
level of public awareness and the stage of organized struggle. This may be the
only path for organic intellectuals in politics. This is the approach of understanding
and working with the enlightened masses to promote the gradual transformation
of social relations, and to achieve progress in understanding step by step. Thus,
Teacher Mao reflected on the mistakes of the Jinggangshan Land Law: it was
wrong to inappropriately impose state ownership of land when the majority of
the population could only imagine a path to improved benefits from private
ownership of land; and the interpersonal relations within the unitary system
after the founding of the state were a partial reconstruction of the
interpersonal environment based on the imagination of the "customary
society" by the revolutionary workers. The Communist Party, with its
strong support, began to transform and shape the workings of managerial power
in accordance with ritual social traditions, and factory management introduced
a large number of working methods such as "heart-to-heart" and
"home visits" that were hardly linked to normative legalistic social
rules or conventional management, but rather to the exhortatory mode of “elder
power” required of managers.
In contrast, the management practices of the Mao era
were still at an early stage of insufficient depth of practice and a low level
of institutionalisation - many changes in social relations and new rules had
not yet progressed to a later stage of stability. Most of the relevant
institutional practices took the form of “learning from and promoting advanced
models”, expressing the direction and need for institutional change in terms of
successful experiences - within which new directions of effort were certainly
combined, but more often as a product of compromise with the sum of old social
relations - in which the people's unobserved preferences and habits are often
the starting point and general platform for a new system.
Fourth,
Leadership-building dilemmas in industrial societies and their demonstrated
difficulties
It seems that the Chinese revolution has not yet
established its own finished expression and theoretical framework, and the revolution
is still at the stage of "being demonstrated". Therefore, even if
scholars are not lacking in sympathy for the Chinese revolution, their
expressions show various schemes of appropriation and metonymy.
Reading Gramsci with the empirical vision of Teacher
Mao, it seems that Gramsci's proposed strategy of positional warfare to seize
ideological leadership, and the organic intellectual path, lacks the conditions
for establishing a “physical base” in the concrete geographical space of rural
China, and looks instead to the virtual “ideological space” to establish a
base, where they could then begin the protracted process of accumulating power
and growing. However, this process of establishing a "virtual ideological
base" required, from the outset, that intellectuals be genuinely and
sincerely aligned with the workers and peasants, otherwise it would have been
difficult to take the first step.
The most obvious reason for the failure to organise
the factory committees at the Turin car factory was that the white collars in
management were not in agreement with the workers and tended to accept the
compromise terms of the management; while in the course of the development of
the factory committee movement the functions of the Socialist Party and the
trade unions came into conflict with the organisation, both of which were
indifferent to the class consciousness and organised struggle of the workers
and could neither lead nor even understand their demands; while the extreme
left within the Italian Communist Party could not even find the relationship between,
and relative position of, the party and the working class; with this internal
and external dilemma, the overall situation of the struggle quickly collapsed. All
these negative factors are reflected in the “alien heart” associated with the
various identities of the intellectuals - their subservience to and lack of
awareness of the rulers and their ideology, which made it more difficult for
this section of the population to awaken to the ideological infiltration of the
ruling class. [See Appendix III].
Perhaps, in his ten years of contemplation in prison,
Gramsci was constantly wondering how to avoid that part of the population
compromising on their own, and what were the reasons for their independently compromising?
Then, starting from learning the lessons of defeat, he looked forward to the
possibility of victory and what its realistic constraints were. In this way, he
identified a key problem: the persistent overwhelming willingness of the white-collar
class to compromise in the struggle against the rulers, and his thinking and
analysis then follows this path, continuing to explore to the way in which the
deeper ideologies work and their practical implications.
In contrast, Teacher Mao saw that the favourable
conditions for peasant leadership-building were the physical space of close
coexistence and the insufficiently secure role of the conceptual power
protecting the old rulers, and that the organisational advantage was so great
that it was in itself sufficient to subvert conceptual power directly; Gramsci,
on the other hand, found that in the concrete space of cities and factories the
organisational advantage of the ruling class was too great, and that as its invisible
leadership extended uniformly to the various dissenting actors they were less
likely to be effective. Gramsci turned to the question of whether there
was a struggle for leadership that could be accomplished by "building a
base in a virtual ideological space", the primary obstacle to this idea
being that the ideological leadership of the ruling class worked differently
for each class. According to Bourdieu,
the intellectuals, as the ruled among the ruling class, were less likely to
escape from the old leadership, while the workers, less shackled by ideology,
were less likely to gain ideological leadership over the intellectuals (recall
the series of entanglements between the workers' and peasants' cadres and the
intellectuals after the founding of the state), which raises a new question -
is it possible for the intellectuals to transform themselves to be closely
integrated with the workers and peasants? This is in fact what Gramsci
repeatedly thought about and envisaged.
Of course, Teacher Mao saw that the practice of
leadership in the revolutionary era was inherently "intrinsically
negative" and therefore precarious. It is clear that, precisely because
there was no conscious effort to engage in what Gramsci called the repeated war
of position, nor was there a clear consensus and rules on the issues involved,
as a result, when the external "pressures" and concrete spatial
conditions conducive to the formation of leadership disappeared, the
disapproval latent within the leadership team grew wildly and had the
opportunity to spread, finally bidding farewell to the spiritual heritage of
the revolution from within. For this reason, Mao once proposed a
"socialist revolution on the ideological and political fronts",
seemingly in an attempt to make up for this, but it lacked the motivation and
political conditions to advance the revolution in question. At the same time,
the worker and peasant cadres of the revolutionary era had severely beaten the
"bourgeois intellectuals" through the "expansion of the
anti-rightist movement", but the majority of the official circles had
gradually become subservient to a hierarchical social order and culture that
affirmed the special status of the dominant group, and when the right
opportunity arose, they found it necessary to reunite with each other to
achieve the common historical task of bidding farewell to the revolution.
When Perry Anderson
visited China in 2002, he asked the question at a small symposium on the first
floor of Beijing's Sanlian Bookstore, "I wonder how much of the spiritual
legacy of that great Chinese revolution remains today?" In retrospect, not
only is there not much left, but the mainstream intelligentsia, actively
engaged in the cause of bidding farewell to the revolution, has worked to construct
a "period of cultural reaction during the hot months of post-revolutionary
China", shaping the most reactionary intellectual and ideological
landscape in human history, and in so doing helping to give birth to and
sustain the system of predatory accumulation in peripheral capitalist
societies.
Five,
the conclusion
In a pre-modern society like rural China, the peasant
movement of the revolutionary period created a new leadership to replace and
subvert the leadership of the old rulers, and Teacher Mao strove to tap and
learn from this experience, to consciously enhance and extrapolate it, to
promote political construction in the base areas, to manage the tripartite
relationship with friend and foe during the revolution, and to creatively
establish the political strategy as well as the military strategy of the New
Democratic Revolution.
Although in specific rural social spaces, leadership has
emerged and played a decisive role in organising vast revolutionary armies and
in redistributing rural influence accordingly, and has even to some extent
revolutionised political or administrative rules, breaking the old dilemma of
involution and advancing the revolutionary process and the relations of
production in the new society, the style of leadership and its role in the
revolutionary era never reached the height of ideological self-consciousness
and consensus formation, and even the revolution itself never found its own
scheme of expression - often developing its narratives and recipes by
appropriation and metonymy. This shortcoming, which began to erupt the day
after the triumph of the revolution, became a key area of political
disagreement at the top of the Communist Party; not only did the two sides fail
to reach a consensus on it during the lifetime of Teacher Mao, but they even
lacked a clear exchange of views (the opponents mostly chose to "do but
not say" and to this day hold "no argument"
as their guiding principle). This shows that the practical form of the
leadership issue is not yet a substitute for its theoretical self-conscious
form.
The organic group of intellectuals that Gramsci
expected to operate in the upper ideological sphere was always absent in the
Mao era, and the problems were not solved. Teacher Mao had put forward the
slogan “turning the intellectuals into working people,
and the working people into intellectuals”, and had also envisaged and proposed “a
socialist revolution on the political and ideological fronts”, but these
problems were always difficult to solve and no social force or vehicle was ever
found on which to rely to fulfil this historical task. Not only in China, but
also in the West, where the radical left gradually fell into a bubble and
eventually turned to a post-modern path of deconstruction, both were hampered
by the same problem - intellectuals could not find a path to build a
"physical base" that could successfully integrate with the working
class, nor could they successfully build an "ideological base" to win
the "positional war" that Gramsci was counting on. The impotence of
resistance revealed by this dilemma gave rise to a wave of
"counter-offensives" by the anti-labour forces of capitalism - the
reactionary measures of Reagan and Thatcher, who took advantage of the
momentum, and the subsequent regression of global capitalism back towards the
barbarism of the 19th century.
If the dilemma of finding a base existed previously
only in Europe and the United States, it has now spread to China, and the
accumulation of related problems and their seriousness urgently require the
experience of those who came before us to find new ideas to break the
situation.
First draft, 7 February 2021
Amended on 15 February 2021
Revised on 20 February 2021
Appendix I: The
earlier peasant movement in Haifeng was already highly politicised, "It
has also taught us the nature of the Chinese peasant movement and has shown us
that the Chinese peasant movement is a movement of class struggle in which
political struggle and economic struggle converge. The most unusual
manifestation of this is the political struggle, which is somewhat different
from the nature of the urban workers' movement. What the urban working class is
fighting for at the moment is only the complete freedom of assembly and
association, not yet the immediate destruction of the political position of the
bourgeoisie. The peasants in the countryside, on the other hand, have come up
against the regime of the landlords which has been oppressing the peasants for
thousands of years (this landlord regime is the real basis of the warlord
regime). Since the establishment of the County Peasants' Association, with a
population of 250,000 people in 50,000 households, Haifeng County has been more
liberal than any other county in Guangdong - the county governor does not dare
to do evil, the levying officials do not dare to take extra money, there are no
bandits in the county, and there is almost no trace of the landed gentry
plundering the people. Therefore, we know that the situation of the Chinese
revolution is just like this: either the base of the imperialists and warlords
- the landed gentry and corrupt officials are suppressing the peasants, or the
base of the revolutionary forces - the peasants are rising up to suppress the
landed gentry and corrupt officials. There is only one situation for the
revolution in China, there is no second situation. The revolution can only be
considered a victory if all parts of China are like Haifeng, otherwise it will
not be considered a victory at all." [Mao Zedong: The National Revolution
and the Peasant Movement - Preface to the Series on Peasant Problems (1
September 1926)]
An examination of the path of building political
leadership of the rural working masses and the effects of its action is
concentrated in the article "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant
Movement in Hunan": “The
main targets of attack by the peasants are the local tyrants, the evil gentry
and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal
ideas and institutions, against the corrupt officials in the cities and against
bad practices and customs in the rural areas. In force and momentum the attack
is tempestuous; those who bow before it survive and those who resist perish. As
a result, the privileges which the feudal landlords enjoyed for thousands of
years are being shattered to pieces. Every bit of the dignity and prestige
built up by the landlords is being swept into the dust. With the collapse of
the power of the landlords, the peasant associations have now become the sole
organs of authority and the popular slogan "All power to the peasant
associations" has become a reality… The local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords have
been deprived of all right to speak, and none of them dares even mutter
dissent. In the face of the peasant associations' power and pressure, the top
local tyrants and evil gentry have fled to Shanghai, those of the second rank
to Hankow, those of the third to Changsha and those of the fourth to the county
towns, while the fifth rank and the still lesser fry surrender to the peasant
associations in the villages… Once the peasants have their organization, the
first thing they do is to smash the political prestige and power of the
landlord class, and especially of the local tyrants and evil gentry, that is,
to pull down landlord authority and build up peasant authority in rural
society. This is a most serious and vital struggle. It is the pivotal struggle
in the second period, the period of revolutionary action. Without victory in
this struggle, no victory is possible in the economic struggle to reduce rent
and interest, to secure land and other means of production, and so on.”
"These
four authorities--political, clan, religious and masculine--are the embodiment
of the whole feudal-patriarchal system and ideology, and are the four thick
ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants. How the peasants
have overthrown the political authority of the landlords in the countryside has
been described above. The political authority of the landlords is the backbone
of all the other systems of authority. With that overturned, the clan
authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin
to totter. Where the peasant association is powerful, the den elders and
administrators of temple funds no longer dare oppress those lower in the clan
hierarchy or embezzle clan funds. The worst clan elders and administrators,
being local tyrants, have been thrown out.” “In a word, the whole feudal-patriarchal
system and ideology is tottering with the growth of the peasants' power. At the
present time, however, the peasants are concentrating on destroying the
landlords' political authority. Wherever it has been wholly destroyed, they are
beginning to press their attack in the three other spheres of the clan, the
gods and male domination. But such attacks have only just begun, and there can
be no thorough overthrow of all three until the peasants have won complete
victory in the economic struggle. Therefore, our present task is to lead the
peasants to put their greatest efforts into the political struggle, so that the
landlords' authority is entirely overthrown. The economic struggle should
follow immediately, so that the land problem and the other economic problems of
the poor peasants may be fundamentally solved. As for the den system,
superstition, and inequality between men and women, their abolition will follow
as a natural consequence of victory in the political and economic struggles… It
is the peasants who made the idols, and when the time comes they will cast the
idols aside with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for
them prematurely." Mao Zedong: Report on an Investigation of the
Peasant Movement in Hunan (March 1927)
After the revolution, “the middle peasants still have
a political interest, which is the greatest of all. In the past, the middle
peasants were under the rule of the rich landlords and had no say in anything
and were at the disposal of others. About 40 per cent of the middle peasants
work in the soviets at the commune and district levels." "The real
proletarian peasants in the countryside, however, often remained on the
political margins because they ‘could not get things done’, and after the
revolution the peasants were not in power politically. The middle peasants and
poor peasants always thought that the peasants 'could not read, could not
speak, were not open and were not familiar with public affairs' and could not
get things done." Mao Zedong's Xingguo Survey (October 1930)
Appendix 2: In
retrospect, the model of political leadership of the working masses is often
invisible through the intensification of management to undermine the bottom
line of political equality of the leadership itself, i.e. the debate on the
subject of "bourgeois right", which is the focus of the divergence of
political views within the Communist Party. The main change before and after
the revolution is this: when the Red Army or the Eighth Route Army faced a
strong enemy during the revolutionary era, there was an urgent need for
conscious and voluntary organised support from the peasant masses, so top-down
political guidance and support were directed towards the formation of "political
leadership of the working masses"; after the founding of the state, it
became "fear of trouble" - no longer willing to reach out to the
masses to do the tedious political work of realisation, and also being in a
position to engage in top-down coercion - all kinds of imaginative efforts to
strengthen management gradually point towards the dismantling of the existence
and role of the implicit leadership within the unitary system.
During the Cultural Revolution, the organized critical
forces of the masses and their growth were supported, and the old tendency to
betray the "revolutionary line" was halted, but a new leadership had
not yet been formed to support the new system. At the First Plenary Session of
the Ninth Central Committee, Mao concluded: "Now we have entered the cities. It
is a good thing for us to enter the cities. Without entering the cities, they
would still be occupied by Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek]. But it is also a bad
thing for us to enter the cities because it has made our Party no longer pure. Therefore, some foreigners and reporters say that our party is
being rebuilt. Now, we ourselves have also put forward this slogan, that is,
Party-rectification and Party-rebuilding. The Party needs to be rebuilt.” “It seems to me that the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution must be carried out. Our foundation was not
solid and stable. According to my observation, not in all factories, not in an
overwhelming majority of the factories, but in quite a large majority of the
factories, the leadership is not controlled by true Marxists, or controlled by
the masses of the workers. Among those who led the factories in the past, I
cannot say that there were no good people. There were good people for sure.
Among party committee secretaries, assistant secretaries, committee members,
there were good people; and among party branch secretaries, there were good
people. But they followed Liu Shaoqi’s line, which emphasized material
incentives and put making profits as the top priority, while at the same time
failing to promote the proletarian politics, but instead pursued a system of
bonuses.” Mao Zedong: Speech at the First Plenary Session of
the Ninth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (April 28, 1969),
volume 13 of Mao Zedong's Manuscripts since the Founding of the People's
Republic of China, Central Literature Press, 1998, P36, 41
Even among the top echelons of the Communist Party,
many senior officials have long been in a state of ignorance about the
construction of leadership and its effect on supporting implementation, and
many have instinctively favoured the belief in "bourgeois right" -
wanting to learn from the "bourgeois experience" through profit or
money incentives. There is the "bourgeois experience" of top-down
inducement and coercion through profit or monetary incentives in an attempt to
improve implementation or efficiency, and the determination of others to say
that without coercion to make workers work more, it would not be possible to
develop the productive forces, increase comprehensive national power and
improve people's living standards. The "three benefits"
as a narrative strategy are mainly related to the concentration of power in the
hands of a few and the design of a propaganda "legitimisation scheme"
- although power is given to a few, it can be used to force workers to work
more, thus increasing productivity and overall national power. In this
narrative strategy, the monopoly of power by the managers is said to be the
only means to increase efficiency. To fill in the logical gaps in this design,
the People's Daily directly concocted the propaganda of "big pots of rice
for lazy people" - thus making the logic relatively tight - without the
coercive effect of power "lazy people" will not be industrious, and
power, concentrated in the hands of officials and its coercive effect on
workers, has now become the only means of improving the efficiency of
enterprises and the productivity of the country.
Appendix III: In
industrial and urban Italy, the ideological leadership of the bourgeoisie had
instead penetrated, through various agents, into the process of working class
struggle, and "civil society there had developed into a very complex
structure. The reasons for this were the rapid economic development, the high
degree of centralisation, the increasing number of socialised institutions and
the fact that the ideology of the masses had been gradually integrated into the
capitalist system by the hoodwinking and distorted propaganda of the
bourgeoisie; in addition, the emergence of a workers' aristocracy within the
working class and the establishment of a trade union bureaucracy as well as social
democratic groups provided sufficient conditions for the highly
institutionalised and internationalised ideology of the rule of capitalist
society. In this environment, the 'campaign war' of frontal attacks on the
state was no longer applicable, otherwise the revolutionary forces that had
temporarily won would have found themselves facing a large hostile population,
still bound in the hedge of bourgeois ideology." [Institute for the
History of the Communist Movement, Central Compilation and Research Bureau:
'Preface to the Editor', in Gramsci's Selected Writings (1916-1935), People's
Publishing House 1992, P9]
The idea of a factory committee system organised on
the basis of the power of the working masses, on the basis of the location of
labour and the principles of production, was built on the historical experience
of the Russian proletariat, using the present organisation, the "internal
committee", to develop into an organisation that would be both a genuine
workers' democracy at the present time and one that would be adapted to the
future as a socialist state. This organisation was the factory committee, and
the slogan "All power in the enterprise to the factory committee" was
envisaged. [Institute for the History of the Communist Movement, Central Compilation
and Translation Bureau: "Preface to the Editor", in Gramsci's
Selected Writings (1916-1935), People's Publishing House, 1992, p. 6].
"In April 1920, one of the most ambitious
movements in post-war Italy broke out under Gramsci's direct guidance in order
to crush the attempts of the entrepreneurs to sabotage the factory soviets.
This general political strike, involving the entire urban proletariat, lasted
eleven days. It was soon combined with the strikes of the peasants in the
neighbouring provinces and was supported by an increasingly large and
threatening solidarity movement. But this struggle was finally sabotaged by the
leaders of the reformists within the General Workers' Union who were supported
by the leading bodies of the self-proclaimed revolutionary Socialist Party, in
collusion with the government." At the time of the occupation of the
factories, the Turin workers made the most complex set of production
enterprises work continuously for a month without factory owners or managers.
[Palmiro Tauriati: Antonio Gramsci - leader of the Italian working class, in
Huang Yinxing's translation of The Life of Gramsci, World Knowledge Press 1957,
P21, 23-24]
Gramsci suggested an analogy between
Machiavelli’s Prince, namely the way that the Florentine thinker sought
the person that could function as the catalyst for a process of national
unification of the fragmented Italian space, and the modern political party. He
wrote: “The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete
individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a
collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent
asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already
provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell in which
there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and
total.” (Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, Foreign
languages Press, Paris, 2021, p. 129).
Prasenjit Duara, an Indian-American scholar,
received his PhD in history from Harvard University in 1983 and is currently a
historian at the University of Chicago. At least five of his books have been
translated and published in China.
In early October 1930, the First
Front Army of the Red Army conquered Ji'an in Jiangxi and entered the Yuanshui
Valley, at which time Xingguo County sent many peasants to become Red Army
soldiers. In late October, Mao Zedong approached eight peasants from the tenth
district of Xingguo County, namely Yongfeng District, in Luofang, Xinyu County,
and held a week-long investigation meeting, after which he compiled and wrote
the article "Xingguo Investigation". See /tardir/tiffs/a376350.tiff
(marxists.org) p. 243 (61) and /tardir/tiffs/a376350.tiff
(marxists.org) pp. 244-297 (1-54). Mao Zedong's investigation of Xingguo was
not only a basis for the ongoing agrarian revolution, but it also contains a
wealth of social research ideas that are still very relevant today, more than
70 years later.
"Bean elections"
eventually became an important democratic form and way for the Communist Party
of China to establish grassroots political power. The
Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border District Election Regulations enacted in May 1937
stipulated that elections could adopt a variety of voting methods: voters who
were more literate used the ballot method, voters who were not literate used
the circle method and the stroke method, and those who were completely
illiterate used the bean method of voting. Since more than 90% of the
masses at the grassroots level were illiterate and semi-illiterate at that
time, "bean elections" became the most important means of election in
the border revolutionary base areas. The masses in the base area used the
"bean election" method to elect 22-year-old Xi Zhongxun as the
chairman of the Soviet government in the Shaanxi-Gansu Border Region.
Involution, a buzzword on the Internet, refers
to the phenomenon of peers competing for limited resources with more effort,
which leads to a decline in the individual’s “benefit-to-effort ratio”. It can
be seen as "inflation" of hard work. It also refers to the phenomenon
that after a certain social or cultural model reaches a certain form at a
certain stage of development, it stagnates or cannot be transformed into
another advanced model.
Lao Tian uses a term which has an
entirely negative connotation in the West. He uses it to mean to inculcate, to
inject. In What Is To Be Done Lenin
stated that workers would not spontaneously understand the ideological
foundations of Marxism; these would have to be brought into, injected into, the
spontaneous mass movement from the outside. In this sense, “indoctrination
theory” is an important principle of Marxism, a rational understanding of the
relationship between proletarian revolutionary theory and revolutionary
practice, and a concept of ideological and political education. It mainly
refers to the continuous inculcation of Marxist theory and the Party's line,
guidelines and policies to workers and the general public through various
methods.
The drafting of the political report for the
9th National Congress was initially the responsibility of Chen Boda. After the
initial draft written by Chen Boda on 12 March 1969 was discussed, Mao Zedong
was not satisfied and later decided that Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan would
be responsible for redrafting it. The report originally described Mao Zedong
Thought as the third major milestone in the development of Marxism-Leninism,
but Mao said that Lenin was the Marxist of the imperialist era, and that since this
was still the imperialist era, there should be no mention of the three
milestones.
This refers to the Soviet one-man
system of management, represented by the experience of the Magnitogorsk
Metallurgical Combine, which was characterised by a "one-man system",
material incentives, reliance on a few experts and a set of cumbersome rules
and regulations, and a cold and clean running of the enterprise, without a mass
technological revolution. This is in contrast to the emphasis on democratic
management, the participation of cadres in labour, the participation of workers
in management, the reform of unreasonable rules and regulations, and the triple
integration of workers, cadres and technicians, i.e. the "two
participations, one reform and three integrations" system.
Pierre Bourdieu (1 August 1930
– 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist, philosopher and intellectual.
His work emphasized how classese,especially the ruling
and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations
despite the myth that contemporary post-industrial
society boasts equality of opportunity and high social
mobility, achieved through formal education.
When it comes to "no arguments",
one can easily think of Deng Xiaoping's classic statement in his Southern
Talks: "It is normal to have different views on reform and opening up. It
is not only the issue of special economic zones, but also the bigger issue of
rural reform, the introduction of joint production contracts for rural families
and the abolition of the people's commune system. At the beginning only one
third of the provinces did it, the next year more than two thirds, and only in
the third year did almost all of them follow suit, and this is speaking on a
national scale ...... not to engage in arguments, is an invention of mine. Not
to argue, is to buy time.”
After the founding of the PRC, Mao
Zedong sought to transform the intellectuals of Chinese society, the scholarly
class, which for thousands of years had been contemptuous of manual labour, by “turning the intellectuals into working
people, and the working people into intellectuals”. This was promoted in the Great Leap
Forward and strongly advocated during the Cultural Revolution. Mao was going
down a road that had never been taken before. In this painstaking process of ideological
remoulding aimed at the mainstay of the old ruling structure, Mao certainly
achieved great things. In choosing this path of developing socialist education,
it broke away from the shackles of the "Soviet model" and revolutionised
the situation in which cultural knowledge had been detached from production and
the masses in the feudal tradition for thousands of years, and truly realised
the requirements of linking theory with practice and "making the working
people knowledgeable and the intellectuals labour-oriented", creating a
model of national education that met the requirements of Marxist theory and
fully reflected the interests of the working people.
