(Translator’s preface: La Tian explores how the failure
to restrict bourgeois right leads to capitalist management systems and to
capitalist restoration.)
Who determines the amount of labour in the process of
distribution according to labour? The bifurcation of political power between
the regulator and the regulated becomes apparent in this question. And the
regulation of the many by the few inevitably leads to a lack of managerial
impartiality. In the past, however, debates on this issue have been conducted
under the conceptual framework of bourgeois right, and with the wrong
roots, the edifice is naturally unstable.
The author believes that the solution to the problem of
polarisation of political power is to make the private sector public and allow the
participation of the regulated in the process of regulation, which reduces the
cost of regulation and is compatible with the requirements of impartiality of
the majority.
As a means of distribution, the distribution of labour has
both political and economic connotations, and the economic connotation of
"exchange of equal amounts of labour" is a "reasonable
solution" that can easily be approved by managers. This bottom-up approval
can easily achieve a functional function - it becomes a legitimising tool and
ideological strategy to justify the monopoly of management power. The political
content is a polarisation of political power: one group of people can rate the
efficiency of the other as a tool of labour and then arbitrarily impose
management measures such as incentives or controls. In this way, the
polarisation of politics is inherently clear - one part holds management power
and the other is passively controlled by management measures, and the way in which
management power is accepted or agreed upon by those being managed is through
the apparent equality of "equal labour for equal labour".
As soon as workers lose their political vision and simply agree
to the fairness of getting paid more for more work, they are potentially
affirming that they are subject to a superior power to monitor and evaluate the
results of their work, and then an acceptance of political polarisation is
established. Of course, the illusion may also include a 'fairness of
management' component. The problem is that in the real world, where the cost of
information and the cost of monitoring and enforcement are not zero, the
willingness to pay for management costs is far below the high cost threshold
required for impartiality. Therefore, in order to save on management costs, the
capitalist's right to manage can only ever remain at the level of arbitrary
brutality, and the fairness of management can only ever remain rhetorical. The cheapest
pursuit of the goal of impartiality cannot be obtained under the conditions of
a monopoly of managerial power by a few dedicated managers, but can only exist
in the middle of a process of making managerial power public, through which a
programme of making the private sphere public, would stimulate the broad
participation of workers, save huge
amounts of the costs of managerial information and supervision, thus allowing
the relevant costs to fall significantly, so that they can finally be
compatible with the majority impartiality required by that threshold level.
So the programme of a few dedicated managers managing the
majority by various means was always strenuously opposed by Mao, who in March
1960 proposed a contrast between the constitution of Anshan Steel and that of
the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, rejecting the Soviet Communist Party's
practice of managerial power within the factories, and even earlier he had
internally criticised Stalin for overestimating the role of cadres and
technology. Dissent on this issue was the cornerstone of the socialist system,
and by taking away this cornerstone the system could not function well and, in
the end, could not survive. On his deathbed, Mao Zedong recalled the divergence
of political views at the top of the Communist Party, and two major differences
in political views were most important to him personally: there was opposition
within the Party at the time of co-operatisation, and they had an aversion to
criticising bourgeois right.
After Deng Xiaoping came to power, Yu Guangyuan and others
wrote that "distribution according to labour is the socialist principle of
distribution". This is not acknowledging its political connotation,
especially the non-socialist orientation of its political connotation. The aim,
of course, was ultimately to dismantle the way management power operated in the
Mao era - making the private sphere public - which was precisely the legacy of
the revolutionary spirit that was to be affirmed from the Sanwan reorganisation[1]
to the Anshan Steel constitution.
The subsequent evolution shows that as soon as the
revolutionary line of making public the private sector is ended, the
identification of the managed with the managerial objective collapses instantly
and the level of voluntary effort falls to an unacceptably low level. At the
same time, the rise of coercive power based on the monopoly of managerial power
cannot be accomplished within the
history and memory network of state enterprises. No matter how much
reform is made to strengthens managerial power and weakens the position of the
managed, the rise in the level of coercive effort is difficult to achieve in a
concrete society of acquaintances and inevitably leads to private property
rights and the restoration of the wage labour system.
The reform finally reverted to the wage labour system, with
Deng making a start in 1979 and Zhu Rongji wrapping up twenty years later. To
change the public management method in the private sphere among public-owned
enterprises is tantamount to completely destroying the political and
ideological conditions for the survival of public-owned enterprises. That
beginning determined the end, and the choice of such a direction of reform was
sure to open the door to a doomsday in which the public sector would destroy
itself.
During the Maoist era, the debate on the political and
ideological conditions necessary for public ownership was placed within the
conceptual framework of bourgeois right, and centred not on the exchange of
equal amounts of labour, but on the political polarisation based on it - this
was reflected in the return of hierarchy or material incentives based on the
monopoly of management power, which would completely destroy the ground rules
for the functioning of the public ownership. Therefore, in 1969 Mao Zedong said
in the middle of his speech at the First Plenary Session of the Ninth Central
Committee: "It seems essential
that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution should still be carried out. Our
foundation has not been consolidated. According to my own observation I would
say that, not in all factories, nor in an overwhelming majority of factories,
but in quite a large majority of cases the leadership is not in the hands of
true Marxists, nor yet in the hands of the masses of the workers. In the past
the leadership in the factories was not devoid of good men; there were good
men. Among the Party committee secretaries, assistant secretaries and committee
members there were good men. There were good men among the branch secretaries.
But they followed the old line of Liu Shao-ch’i. They were all for material
incentives, they put profits in command and did not promote proletarian
politics. Instead they operated a system of bonuses, etc." [1]
Many people in official circles and among enterprises unconsciously followed Liu Shaoqi's lead, preferring to engage in material incentives and profit-attraction, which Mao asserted would surely eventually lead to a final restoration. The opportunity for change or the internal logic underlying Mao's talk of material incentives and profit-motivated development seems to be comparable to the relevant theories of David Coates and his school of the social structure of accumulation (SSA)[2]. The various institutional clusters of accumulation needs in the middle of this SSA theory, the system of employment of labour and the goal of production in the service of profit, can be intrinsically salvaged from the expansion of material incentives and profit orientation, and there is a close intrinsic connection between the two that has not yet seen any academic sorting out.
From the intrinsic rationale of bourgeois right and the
judgement that "the bourgeoisie is within the Party", as well as the
political status quo of "building a capitalist state without
capitalists", Mao had Premier Zhou commission a political essay, "On
the Social Basis of the Lin Biao's Anti-Party Group" (1975), which
accurately foresaw the subsequent "three-step strategy of
restoration": first expanding bourgeois right and then turn public
ownership into an empty shell and then turn public into private. The third step
was to establish a bourgeois republic. The conscious manipulation of the
"political disapproval" of society in general, and their promotion of
universal values and capital, served the need for the third step - the building
of a bourgeois republic.
What is even more bizarre is that Feng Lanrui, who followed
Yu Guangyuan's article and criticised Mao Zedong severely, later followed the
"three-step strategy" predicted in that article, and went all the way
to present herself and verify the predictions of her own enemies. She herself
wrote that: initially she desperately defended distribution according to
labour, then she advocated the participation of all factors in the distribution[3],
and finally she advocated the establishment of a labour market and the setting
of wages according to market prices, which would not be distributed according
to labour at all. Then she herself became a complete publicist, and now she
often writes articles on the Internet about the so-called constitutional democracy,
which she does not understand at all, and starts to openly call for a complete
bourgeois republic.
Starting from the political and ideological conditions
necessary within the economic base, the re-establishment of political
polarisation is a move that takes the bite out of the socialist economic base.
It is from this key area that it is possible to see clearly how the core
pillars of a system can be dismantled, leaving the entire edifice of the system
unsupported, and thus to anticipate precisely the three-step strategy that the
restorationists of the future will surely follow.
December 21, 2018
[1] From
29 September to 3 October 1927, Mao Zedong led the "Sanwan
Reformation" in Sanwan Village, Yongxin County, Jiangxi Province. This was
the earliest successful exploration and practice of building a new type of
people's army by the Party, and marked the beginning of the formation of Mao
Zedong's thinking on building a people's army.
The Sanwan Reformation initially solved the problem of
how to build a revolutionary army with peasants and old soldiers as its main
components into a new type of proletarian people's army, ensuring the absolute
leadership of the Party over the army and laying the foundation of 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 new set of
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.
[2] David
Coates is an academic based at the Department of Political Science, Wake Forest
University, North Carolina. He has argued that capitalist models are to be
differentiated by the character and balance of class forces embedded in their
social structures of accumulation.
[3] Factor-based
distribution is a bourgeois form of distribution, common in China, in which the
users of production factors pay the owners of production factors corresponding
remuneration according to a certain proportion according to the size of the
contribution played by the factors in the production and operation process
under the conditions of market economy. The distribution by factors is divided
into distribution by land factors, distribution by capital factors,
distribution by labour factors, distribution by technology factors,
distribution by management factors and distribution by information factors.
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