Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Lao Tian: Reading Gramsci and Teacher Mao: What is the matter with leadership and how important is it?


 

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[1] 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".[2]

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[3], 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[4] 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[5] 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"[6]. In August 1925, when Zhao Hengxi sent troops to arrest the "Excessive Party"[7], 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"[8] struggle until 1952, and the end of the "five-antis movement"[9], 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[10], 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"[11]. 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.[12]

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"[13] 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"[14]) - 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'[15] 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[16], 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"[17] 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[18] 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[19] 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"[20] 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[21].

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[22], 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[23] 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"[24] 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”[25], 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)][26]

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)[27]

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[28]

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"[29] 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]

 



[1] 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).

[2] See Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843) where he writes: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” It means that it is not enough to criticize using words alone, and we must take practical actions.

[3] The Chinese expression for “turning over one’s body” is fanshen. It became a term that was synonymous with the great changes brought about by the Chinese revolution, and inspired William Hinton’s 1966 book of the same name. Although the power of the landlords was broken and land distributed to the peasants (fanshen), the Communists in the northern area encountered a continuing backwardness on the part of the peasants, and in 1946 advocated “turning over the heart” (fanxin) because “the first thing to do is to break the masses' ideological barriers, inspire class consciousness, and let them change their minds.” (The Chinese traditionally believed that the mind was located in the heart.)

[4] 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.

[5] Although he was frequently referred to as “Great Leader, Great Teacher, Great Supreme Commander and Great Helmsman” during the Cultural Revolution, Mao said he didn’t like  this and wanted only to be known as a teacher.

[6] A campaign in Mao's day: demanding that grain be sold to the people at fair prices, while preventing and forbidding landowners from shipping grain out of the area. In the summer of 1925, Shaoshan was in a severe drought. By August, just as the peasants were having a hard time, the local gentry took the opportunity to hoard and raise the price of rice. In order to reap huge profits, landlords such as Cheng Xusheng smuggled rice out of the country at night, and it looked as if Shaoshan would become a market without money. When Mao Zedong learned of this situation, he immediately organised the comrades of the Shaoshan Special Branch to discuss countermeasures and decided to adopt the strategy of "courtesy first and army later". The comrades of the Shaoshan Special Branch were divided into two ways: one way to negotiate with Cheng Xusheng face to face and ask for the pacification of the black market; the other way to mobilize hundreds of people, holding torches and carrying pike darts and short sticks on their shoulders, and quickly ran to the pier under the Zhang Gong Bridge at Yintian Temple in Yunhu River (now Shao River) to stop the grain and rice from being transported. The group was forced to open the warehouse to sell the rice. The other gentry in Yanglin, Ruyi and Yongyi also had to follow suit. Since then, they have also won the struggle to increase the wages of the hired farmers and reduce the rent.

[7] Excessism was a derogatory term for Marxism-Leninism used by the Chinese reactionaries during the May Fourth Movement, which began to spread widely in China after 1919 and caused alarm among the reactionaries.  They feared the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of class struggle, proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and did their utmost to oppose and denounce it. The term "excessism" was borrowed from the Japanese. The reactionaries of the time not only reduced Marxism-Leninism to "excessism", but also called those who believed in Marxism-Leninism the "excessive party". Mao praised the “exceeding of proper limits” and “going too far” in his report on the peasant movement in Hunan in 1927.

[8] A system of feudal control whereby the “head” of an organisation controlled everything. They opened warehouses, hotels, brothels, casinos, and theaters, and combined feudalism, capital, and spies, forming a feudal system of feudal separatism, feudal oppression, and feudal exploitation in the city.

[9] In 1950, Mao launched the “three-antis movement” (against corruption, waste and bureaucracy) and at the start of 1952, the “five-antis movement” (against bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, cheating on government contracts, and stealing state economic secrets).

[10] 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.

[11] "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.

[12] 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.

[13] 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.

[14] By 1947, these had been further developed for the PLA as the Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention. They were core principles of ethical leadership that helped win the masses to the Communist cause.

[15] 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.

[16] 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.

[17] This is an idiomatic curse. Its general meaning is to not be on the right track, to not know the proper rules or procedures, to not doing things the right way, etc. It is also known as "half-hearted", because if you miss a flame in cooking, you will end up with a meal that is not cooked properly.

[18] Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production, Verso Books, 1985

[19] Harry Braverman (9 December 1920 - 2 August 1976) was an American Marxist, political economist and revolutionary. From 1967 he was director of Monthly Review Press, where he worked until his death at the age of 55. He is mainly known for  Labour and Monopoly Capital - The Degradation of Labour in the Twentieth Century.

[20] From 29 September to 3 October 1927, Mao Zedong led the world-famous "Sanwan Reformation" in Sanwan Village, Yongxin County, Jiangxi Province. This was the earliest successful exploration and practice of the Party's efforts to build a new type of people's army, and marked the beginning of Mao Zedong's thinking on building a people's army. The Sanwan Reformation initially solved the problem of how to build the revolutionary army, which was mainly composed of peasants and old soldiers, into a new proletarian people's army, ensuring the absolute leadership of the Party over the army and laying the foundation for political army building. At the same time, the implementation of democracy, one of the three important elements of the Sanwan Reformation, also played a great role in uniting the masses of soldiers and disintegrating the enemy army. In this sense, the Sanwan Reformation also enriched the Party's early united front thinking and made a great contribution to united front work in theory and practice. Mao Zedong creatively established a whole set of new strategies for governing the army, such as "building branches on companies" and "equality between officers and soldiers". The Sanwan Reformation was one of the earliest successful explorations and practices of the Communist Party of China in building a new type of people's army.

[21] Metonymy is a figure of speech in which one object or idea takes the place of another with which it has a close association.

[22] 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.

[23] Perry Anderson is perhaps best known as the moving force behind the New Left Review.

[24] 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.”

[25] 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.

[29] The “three benefits” refer to whether they are conducive to the development of the productive forces of a socialist society, whether they are conducive to strengthening the comprehensive national strength of a socialist country, and whether they are conducive to improving the living standards of the people. It was proposed by Deng Xiaoping in early 1992 during his visit to the South when he delivered the Southern Talk, and was proposed by him as the criterion for people to measure the right and wrong of all work.

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