Mao’s uninterrupted revolution (the name was ripped from Lenin’s article Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement, 1 September 1905)[5] contained the key assumption that the Chinese Revolution would pass through two stages. In the first stage, the bourgeois democratic revolution would be carried out by a ‘united front of all revolutionary classes’, including the national bourgeoisie, to overthrow the imperialists, feudal rulers and reactionary traitors. During this stage national independence would be achieved and agrarian reform implemented. Subsequently, after Chinese capitalism had developed separately from international imperialism to a degree that made the transition to socialism possible, the capitalists would peacefully (it was hoped) step aside and allow the revolution to move to a second stage in which the CCP would lead China to socialism. Finally, the new workers’ state would adopt the policy of Peaceful Coexistence, thus allowing the CCP to preserve its own narrow national power base.
The CCP always argued that the ultimate goal of the Chinese Revolution was to achieve socialism, and this would require the prior development of capitalism ‘to a certain degree’. It was supposed that during the New Democracy the social weight of the proletariat would grow, while remaining under CCP guidance and control, and this would allow China to carry through its bourgeois-democratic revolution while steering clear of imperialism and heading towards the realisation of socialism.
At the time he wrote On New Democracy in 1940, Mao hoped for a united front against the Japanese armies and a post-war coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek. It was expected that national bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties supporting capitalism would be an integral part of the revolutionary forces, since the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution would be achieved without challenging the principle of capitalist property relations. In underdeveloped countries such as China, the second stage, the proletarian revolution, would arrive at some time in the future in a quite separate transformation. The two stages were carefully compartmentalised and separated by ‘scores of years’ with the socialist revolution ‘a thing of the rather far future’.
Mao was not wedded to historical accuracy so when On New Democracy and The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party were re-published in 1951, having been tested against reality, the unity with “other classes” was downplayed by editing out offending phrases and inserting expressions such as “under the leadership of the proletariat” into the text.
The reason for these editorial additions is obvious. The stagist theory of New Democracy had been found wanting. During WWII the united front with the KMT was at best partial and temporary; after the war, instead of inviting the Communists to join him in government, Chiang launched an all-out military assault on them. The national bourgeoisie noticeably failed to rally to the united front and by the end of the civil war it was found that the national bourgeois elements that had remained in China had little substance. One of the main planks of the New Democracy was noticeable by its absence. On the other hand the hunger, poverty, unemployment, inflation and other problems facing the Chinese masses demanded solutions that were socialist in principle.
However, even as he confronted the fact that the national bourgeoisie in China after 1949 was, at best, economically weak, Mao continued to assert that China had to pass through all the necessary stages of a democratic bourgeois republic in order to achieve socialism. Just as Stalin would say one thing while doing the opposite, in 1958 at the 8th National Congress of the CCP, Mao reviewed his analysis:
I advocate the theory of uninterrupted revolution. You must not think that this is Trotsky’s theory of uninterrupted revolution. In making revolution, it should be like striking the iron while it is hot, one revolution to follow another … Trotsky advocated that socialist revolution be undertaken even before the democratic revolution was accomplished. We do not proceed like that.[6]
In fact, Trotsky said the socialist revolution would begin before the democratic revolution was finished and become entwined with it.
Mao was determined to show how his theory of uninterrupted revolution differed from Trotsky’s permanent revolution. Despite the experience of China 1949-1953 which saw the interpenetration of different stages of economic development, particularly the introduction of a national plan and wholesale nationalisation of industries to solve the crises the nation faced, Mao continued to assert that the different stages of development of the uninterrupted revolution were separate and should not be confused, the democratic revolution would be accomplished before the socialist:
The democratic revolution will undergo several stages of development, all under the slogan of a democratic republic, not that of a soviet regime. … We stand for going through all the necessary stages of a democratic republic in order to arrive at socialism.[7]
The historic current within which Mao has a leading position, Stalinism, has, ever since Stalin published Foundations of Leninism in April 1924[8], consciously and unswervingly counter-posed uninterrupted revolution to Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. However, Pierre Rousset (a leading member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, with responsibility for developing its strategy for the 21st century) has claimed the differences between Mao’s theory of uninterrupted revolution and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution are more apparent than real due to “lack of precision in the theoretical formulas.”[9]
It is not surprising, then, that Mao’s theory of uninterrupted revolution is still being touted as a strategy for victory in colonial and semi-colonial countries. The lessons of the October 1965 slaughter of one million Communists in Indonesia when the Indonesian Communist Party attempted to apply ‘uninterrupted revolution’ have not been assimilated, and Maoism continues to surface in different guises, as in the guerrilla movement in Nepal.[10]
-
Roberts,Op. cit. p182-183.
-
Star, J. Conceptual Foundations of Mao Tse-Tung’s Theory of Continuous Revolution, Asian Survey, 11(6)610-662, June 1971.
-
Schram, S. Mao Tse-tung and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution, The China Quarterly, No. 46 (Apr.-Jun., 1971), pp. 221-244.
-
Stalin, J. Foundations of Leninism, April 1924, w.m.org.
-
Rousset, P. The Chinese Revolution, International Institute for Research and Education, Number 3.
-
Conlon, B and Hulaki, K. Nepal: A Revolution Adrift, 2013, w.m.com.