After 1949, with access to state resources, the tops of the CCP went on a spending spree (see Section 10.2). The Chinese bureaucracy did not view privileges and salary differentials as temporary, imposed by the isolation of the Revolution and the underdeveloped nature of the economy as the Bolsheviks had done, but as their natural reward for running the country. Inherent in such a situation was the possible restoration of capitalism at some stage. Trotsky had warned that if the bureaucracy was not overthrown in a political revolution, the bourgeois norms of distribution would inevitably become a key factor in determining the class nature of the state: “Privileges have only half their worth, if they cannot be transmitted to one’s children … The victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive area would mean its conversion into a new possessing class.”[42] As would later be found out in the scandal around the murder of Neil Heywood in a Chongqing hotel in 2011, tops in the CCP were sending their sons to English public schools such as Harrow.[43]
The bureaucracy defended the state’s economic plans in order to defend their own interests, their own privileges. As Trotsky explained in In Defence of Marxism:
The bureaucracy is first and foremost concerned with its power, its prestige, its revenues. It defends itself much better than it defends the USSR. It defends itself at the expense of the USSR and at the expense of the world proletariat.
However, Mao failed to identify these material and socio-economic conditions, rooted in the Stalinist nature of the CCP as a chief cause of capitalist restoration. Instead he blamed the strength of bourgeois ideas in art, literature, and science. He maintained his belief that incessant appeals to the spirit of sacrifice and idealism as demonstrated by the CCP cadres during the darkest days of the civil war, were enough to overcome the material backwardness of the productive forces in China. Instead of motivating the Chinese people by moving towards greater workers’ democracy, Mao revived Stalin’s anti-Marxist theory that in the transition from socialism to capitalism the class struggle intensifies, and added the flourish that this could endure for hundreds of years. Just like Stalin, Mao erected and then justified a repressive state apparatus to protect the bureaucracy.
It is true that to an extent, the GPCR was an attack on the excesses of a section of the bureaucracy that was threatening the interests of the entire bureaucratic caste. Mao was following Stalin who had individual, excessively corrupt bureaucrats shot to better preserve the bureaucracy as a whole. Mao combined the attack on the capitalist roaders (to consolidate his own position) with the curbing of the more extreme forms of corruption (to maintain the bureaucracy as a whole). For the privileged bureaucracy, the GPCR was three-years of chaos that had done nothing to halt the growing irreconcilable contradictions between them and the disfranchised and abused worker-peasant masses.
The Cultural Revolution is important in understanding the later progress of the CCP under Deng who inherited the problem of developing the economy. The majority of the bureaucracy breathed a sigh of relief when the Cultural Revolution was brought to an end – they wanted to return to stability and enjoy their privileges within the system. Deng and his supporters drew the conclusion that mass action was a threat to their privileged existence and began their economic and social analyses with the clear condition of involving the Chinese masses as little as possible in decision-making. Introducing genuine workers’ democracy was the last thing these bureaucrats would do.
Despite claims to the contrary, the GPCR was never widely supported by the proletariat because of two key factors: the Red Guard took the voluntarism of the GLF into the factories and other work places and demanded the ending of bonus schemes and pay differentials, and a lowering of safety standards. The workers were to increase production by working harder and undertaking unpaid overtime for no other reason than their love of Chairman Mao. Another important factor was that the GPCR was taken into the factories largely by factory chiefs and party bureaucrats anxious to preserve their privileged positions or by students who, for all their good intentions, knew little or nothing about factory work.
The Cultural Revolution did impact on the factories but not in the way the Maoists had hoped. Factory workers took advantage of the situation to protest at the appalling conditions in which they worked; demanding a safer, healthier environment, higher wages and an end to the privileges of the managers and their replacement by elected persons. As the industrial workers began to voice their own demands and take independent action, Mao drew back and in 1969 put the genie of the GPCR back into the bottle of bureaucratic control. The main slogan, “The masses are right, what the people say is right,” became, “What is right is what is in the mind of Chairman Mao.”
One cannot fight the bureaucracy with bureaucratic means. This explains why both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution failed, ultimately adding to the social and economic disruption caused by the bureaucracy. The Maoist wing of the bureaucracy could not go so far as to give power to the workers because to do so would mean turning their own world upside down. This meant the outcome of the struggle between the Maoists and their opponents would be determined within the Party, but the GPCR had been launched precisely to avoid such an outcome. Party and state officials at all levels had been given an object lesson that to eagerly implement present policies made one a hostage to fortune and future shifts in policy. The result was excessive bureaucratic timidity.
The CCP leadership and the Party itself had suffered a severe loss of legitimacy. Millions of urban Chinese had recognised the GPCR as an obvious power play between competing factions that had taken place in the name of political principle resulting in a steep decline in living standards. The scarcity of goods created by the GPCR meant a leap in corruption within the CCP and the government, as people fell back on personal relationships and bribery to get things done.
Mao’s strategies of the GLF and the GPCR had meant a near collapse of agricultural production, the closure of all the schools and universities and finally, severe disruption of industrial production. The wing of the CCP led by Deng Xiaoping (the majority of middle and higher level cadres) was horrified at what had happened and began drawing its own conclusions from these experiences, a process which was accelerated by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.