This book has shown how the specific circumstances existing on an international and national scale enabled the Stalinist CCP to take power – both state and governmental power – at the head of a peasant army. Today we have access to material which allows us to plot the course of events and demonstrate that the pressures on the CCP hierarchy to create a nation state, to feed the Chinese people and to maintain its authority and privileges, pushed it in the direction of a (deformed) workers’ state.
Citing the events in their historical context allows us, today, to readily answer the apparent contradictions between certain long-held theoretical postulates and the actual course of events. Before about 1949 there had never been any serious dispute over the following:
- The peasantry as a class could not lead a social revolution through to a successful conclusion; this could be achieved only by the proletariat.
- The proletariat could do this only with the leadership of a revolutionary Marxist Party.
- Stalinism does not represent revolutionary Marxism; in essence it was, and is, counter-revolutionary.
At the time, the clash between these postulates and actual events posed serious questions for socialists. Unfortunately, the bizarre answers provided by many, even within the world Trotskyist movement, were based on a-priori schema, impressions and wishful thinking which substituted for a Marxist analysis. However, all had the same aim, to prettify Maoism and present it as a genuinely revolutionary force – desperately cuddling up to the Maoists and trying to shortcut the hard work necessary to build the revolutionary Marxist Party. The political vitality of the CCP and PLA was often overestimated and the degree of disintegration of the KMT underestimated. Failing to recognise that the CCP had filled a vacuum left by the collapse of the KMT too often led to the conclusion that the CCP was truly revolutionary and that, possibly, the Chinese peasantry could have acquired a proletarian consciousness.
The latter point was posed as a two-part question; How was it possible for petty-bourgeoisie forces to undertake an armed struggle of over twenty years duration? This argument, advanced by leading figures on the left, showed an ignorance of the history of the Chinese peasantry and their remarkable ability to form huge armies which overthrew governments and set up new regimes. The Taiping rebellion lasted fourteen years (1850-1864), established control over some 30 million people in southern China and was overthrown only when imperialist armies intervened. The simultaneous Nien rebellion lasted 17 years and conquered substantial areas in northern China. We have already quoted Marx on this and seen that he never suggested a socialist or working-class content in these rebellions or doubted that a petty-bourgeois leadership could mount such impressive and lengthy struggles. The duration of the struggle and the taking of power by a peasant army posed no challenge for Marxists.
This led to the second part of the question: If a deformed workers’ state existed in China after October 1953 and the regime was based on the peasantry, did that mean the class nature of the peasant armies which had fought a long civil war under Stalinist leadership had undergone a qualitative change? Had the character of the Chinese peasantry been mis-judged? Perhaps Chinese peasants had achieved a proletarian or even socialist consciousness because the armed struggle they had fought was against not only the KMT but its imperialist backers.
The position of the CCP was clear and simple, peasants and intellectuals who joined the Party changed their original class character and became “Marxist-Leninist fighters of the proletariat.”[32] After the creation of a (deformed) workers’ state many on the left toyed with the idea that there may be something in this claptrap.
Lenin considered the existence of a democratic, centralist, Marxist party an essential requirement for a revolutionary victory. If that were true, some argued, could the CCP really have degenerated into a peasant party in the 1930s? Was the flow of workers from the towns into the Soviets sufficient to maintain the CCP’s revolutionary and proletarian character? Others posed the alternative that the CCP could have changed back into a proletarian organisation after taking power in 1949.
After the defeat of the second Chinese Revolution, from about 1930, the CCP gave up building an urban workers’ movement and turned its face toward the countryside. It threw its whole strength into creating peasant Soviets and as it absorbed ever greater numbers of peasants its composition became almost exclusively peasant. The tiny stream of workers from the cities was not enough to maintain either the party’s working class composition or outlook. Living with peasants, working with peasants, fighting alongside peasants with the perspective of peasant guerrilla warfare for an extended period, Party cadres even those from the factories, assimilated a peasant, that is petty-bourgeois, outlook.
More importantly, the ideology and actions of the CCP were petty-bourgeois; the logical extension and continuation of the political line contained in Mao’s 1927 Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan. The key elements in the CCP programme, the bloc of four classes and the New Democracy were petty-bourgeois, class collaborationist strategies. The Three People’s Principles in the CCP programme, of which Mao appeared very proud, were taken directly from the programme of the KMT and were written by Sun Yat-sen.[33] In this way Mao Zedong confirmed the CCP as a petty-bourgeois party not only because of its peasant composition but also because of its petty-bourgeois programme.
An important factor in confirming the petty-bourgeois nature of the CCP was that it did not attempt to mobilise the urban masses into revolutionary action during the PLA’s rapid advance southwards, choosing instead to rely solely on peasant armies to conquer power.[34]
At the time it took power, the CCP claimed about 3.5 million members of which not more than 5% were workers. It is true that from June 1950, after entering the cities and taking power, the Party temporarily suspended its recruitment of peasants and made a big effort to recruit workers. But a political party cannot change its composition in 24 hours, especially when, as in the case of the CCP, it had an almost exclusively peasant base. By 1951, 6.3% of CCP members were workers; in 1952, 7.2%; in 1956, 14% – that is 1.5 million workers out of 11 million members.[35]
It can be pondered whether these membership figures are a serious indicator of the re-proletarianisation of the CCP. We are talking of one member in seven who, as new recruits, would have had little or no weight at Party meetings. Grant pointed out that even when the CCP prioritised the recruitment of workers they did so in a Bonapartist manner, workers were recruited and unionised not to give them control over their working lives and Party policy, but the better to control them.[36]
Another line of argument was that Stalinism was the dominant ideology of the Russian workers state so could the Stalinist nature of the CCP have given it a proletarian character? The argument that the CCP could not be Stalinist and petty-bourgeois at the same time identifies Stalinism with the workers’ state. But Trotskyists have always argued that Stalinism stood in contradiction to the workers’ state, that it was a cancerous counter-revolutionary growth.
In the Russian Revolution only the bourgeoisie and the big landholders were expropriated. The peasantry, sectors of the urban petty-bourgeoisie and even some of the technical intelligentsia remained property holders. The Soviet proletariat existed as a class quite distinct from these elements. As the Stalinist regime progressed, the Soviet bureaucracy became ever more petty-bourgeois in its composition and almost entirely petty-bourgeois in its spirit, a parasitic growth concerned primarily with its own privileges.[37] The ideology and methods which this bureaucratic caste generated to preserve itself and its privileges were in essence counter-revolutionary and were fully absorbed by the CCP so that by 1949 they were an integral part of its practices and ideology.
Of course, capitalist restoration in Russia (of which Trotsky had warned in 1936 – that as the Stalinist bureaucrats in the USSR increasingly adopted bourgeois norms of distribution for their own benefit they were preparing a capitalist restoration) brought this discussion to an end and buried any idea that Stalinism was revolutionary. Yes, the bureaucracy had defended the nationalized property relations but in its own peculiar way – its privileged position came first. It was a considerable error not to see that the privileges of the bureaucracy must eventually conflict with nationalised property relations.[38]
To avoid mistaking the appearance for reality it is necessary to analyse the development of the Third Chinese Revolution via historical materialism which sees the process in China as part of the developments that brought the second generation of workers states into the world in its historical and international context (in addition to China there was North Korea, North Vietnam, and Eastern Europe). Any consideration of the events in China must always bear in mind four major consequences of WWII: (a) the weakening of world capitalism both as a whole and in its constituent parts (though this was short-lived), (b) the victory of the Soviet Union, (c) the resulting temporary strengthening of Stalinism, and (d) an upsurge of revolutionary struggles on a colossal scale in both the imperialist centres and the colonial areas.
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Hinton, W. Fanshen, Pelican 1972, p210.
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Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940, FLPH, p362, www.marxists.org.
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Grant, T. The Unbroken Thread, Fortress books, 1989, p282-289.
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Rousset, P. The Chinese Revolution, International Institute for Research and Education Number 3.
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Grant, Op. cit., 1989, p282-289.
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Hansen. J. The Problem of Eastern Europe, Feb. 1950, w.m.org.
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Trotsky, L. The Revolution Betrayed, w.m.org.