Mao is credited with a number of original theoretical contributions to Marxism. However, careful study of his writings confirms the observation that Mao was a premeditated Stalinist and many of his so-called innovations were simply the conscious transfer to China of manoeuvres that Stalin had developed empirically in response to the need to protect the bureaucracy.[87]
In Russia, social inequality was growing with the advance of a “new privileged layer, yearning for power, thirsting for the good things in life, fearful of their positions, mortally fearing the masses and filled with hatred toward any opposition.”[88] To defend its material interests this layer was turning the Soviet regime into a bureaucratic tyranny and smothering protest with ever-increasing repression. The Soviet state was becoming a mechanism for the protection of privilege while the ordinary citizen was overworked, under-fed and inadequately housed. The existence of a so-called socialist state which supervised its citizens so closely and was so clearly repressive had to be justified.[89] Stalin’s justifications would be taken up, one way or another, and developed and applied by the Mao regime.
Against the expectations of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Stalin declared the class struggle does not die away but becomes sharper in the period of transition to socialism. In 1933 Stalin argued that the bourgeois elements in the Soviet Union were “weak and impotent”, but (somehow) as their social weight declined and society progressed further down the path to socialism they became a bigger problem. This required increased state repression including imprisonment, exile and execution of “class-enemies”, suspension of democratic rights and further strengthening of the repressive mechanisms of the state for the common good.[90]
Later Mao would cite the danger of capitalist restoration (i.e. criticism of the excesses of the regime, especially by intellectuals) to justify the Anti-Rightist Campaigns and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In reality, the degree of repression and the strength of the police state reflected the fear of the bureaucracy of the working class and those remaining revolutionary Communists who might act as sparks in a political crisis.
Stalin prettified the bureaucratic regime by redefining socialism. The successes of the First Five-Year Plan and the steps made in liquidating the kulaks as a class marked “the final and irrevocable victory of Socialism in the Land of the Soviets.”[91] Property ownership (e.g. nationalised industries and collectivisation) was deemed of overwhelming importance in defining the stage of development of the Soviet Union. Ignored was the horrendous state of poverty in which the ordinary Soviet citizen lived in order to pay for the Five-Year Plans. Ignored were the millions who had died of hunger due to mis-management, the breakneck speed of industrialisation and forced collectivisation.
Ignored was the low level of productivity and technique relative to the capitalist countries (the Soviet worker produced about one tenth as much as the American worker at this time), the means of distribution (the gross social inequalities which existed) and, most importantly, the lack of any genuine Soviet democracy. Parallel concepts would underpin the CCP definition of Chinese socialism.
On 11 June, 1936, the Central Executive Committee approved the draft of a new Soviet Constitution. The first section, entitled Social Structure, concluded with: “The principle applied in the USSR is that of socialism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.’”[92] This would be a major consideration in the debates within the CCP on just when and how the Chinese workers’ state came into existence.
The formula was intended to justify the existing inequalities in the USSR. “From each according to his ability” was the extraction of the maximum labour by any means possible, including the whip of police intimidation; and “to each according to his work” meant the majority of the working population living in general want and on near starvation wages while preserving privileges and luxuries for the tops.[93] Stalin equated socialism in the USSR with the principle “to each according to his work” – a capitalist principle most obviously seen in piecework in factories.
In parallel, in the army, the hierarchy of officers was re-established, from lieutenant to marshal. The changes were not limited to the introduction of titles. There were also substantial material benefits for the officer corps: an accelerated building programme to improve living quarters and hefty increases in salaries (up to about 50%). These reforms had a purely political aim: to give a new social weight to the officers, to differentiate them from the ranks and to bind them closer to the ruling elite.[94]
Zhou Enlai proudly boasted that, in China, the socialist revolution in the ownership of the means of production was fundamentally completed by 1956.[95] How socialism was interpreted by Zhou and his co-thinkers is indicated by their introducing a formal system of ranks into the PLA just one year previously.
Stalin transformed the concept and theory of the revolutionary Party. In a series of iterations, the democratic centralist Leninist combat Party was transformed into a mechanism whereby the General Secretary controlled all aspects of political life within the USSR. From open and frank debate on the most important questions of policy (which took place even when fighting a civil war), through the replacement of free debate with slander and lies, through the use of bully-boy and hooligan tactics, through the anti-Leninist concept that the majority could never be wrong, through the use of the secret police to silence the opposition, Stalin moved step by step to a position where the Secretariat was everything and the Party purely subsidiary. This was also Mao’s understanding of the Party save that ‘Chairman’ replaced ‘Secretary’.
Stalin introduced anti-Marxist voluntarist concepts into Party work: he declared to the 17th Party Congress: “… the strength and prestige of our Party and (its) leaders, have grown to an unprecedented degree … it is their work that now determines everything, or nearly everything. … the part played by so-called objective conditions has been reduced to a minimum; whereas the part played by our organisations and their leaders has become decisive, exceptional. What does this mean? It means that from now on nine-tenths of the responsibility for the failures and defects in our work rest, not on ‘objective’ conditions, but on ourselves, and on ourselves alone.”[96] This puffed-up, vainglorious and anti-Marxist view was accepted by Mao and taken to extremes in the forcible imposition of Communes and the so-called Great Leap Forward.
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Grant, Op. cit. p301-303.
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Rogovin, V. 1937 Stalin’s Year of Terror. Mehring Books 1998, p140-141.
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Cohen, Op. cit. A. The Communism of Mao Tse-Tung. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966.
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Stalin, J. The Results of the First Five-Year Plan, Report Delivered to the Joint Plenum of CC and CCC on January 7, 1933. 13:215-216.
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Degras, Op. cit. 3:359.
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Stalin, J. Constitution (Fundamental law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 5 December 1936 w.m.org.
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Weaver, S. The New Soviet Constitution, w.m.org.
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Souvarine, B. Stalin, a Critical Survey of Bolshevism. 1939, w.m.org.
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Zhou Enlai, Report on the Work of the Third National Congress of the People’s Republic of China, Peking, 1965, p26.
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Stalin, J, Report to the 17th Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.) 1934, CW13:374.