Mao’s New Democracy asserts that the bourgeois stage is necessary, that it is not possible to achieve socialism without passing through such a stage and the quickest and most efficient way of doing this is to join the national bourgeoisie in a bloc of four classes. Mao, of course, had the right to believe in any scheme he wished, but it is the responsibility of a political leader to test his/her ideas against reality. Unfortunately, just as Stalinism entered its death throes this argument has been revived by those who label Mao’s theory as the two-stage, uninterrupted revolution.[2]
The essence of this argument is that there was a clear and definite bourgeois-democratic stage in the Third Chinese Revolution (and the October Revolution), and that this is an indispensable pre-requisite in all socialist revolutions. This stage, it is argued, is necessary in order to carry through, for example, the agrarian revolution which has to precede the socialist. This is a shadow of Kamenev’s argument of April 1917, that because the agrarian revolution had hardly begun in Russia, therefore the bourgeois revolution had not been completed and thus a socialist revolution was premature. It is, of course, quite the opposite of Lenin, who argued consistently that the inability of the bourgeoisie to complete the agrarian revolution to the satisfaction of the peasants was the very reason a socialist revolution was possible, and that the bourgeois-democratic agrarian revolution in Russia took place only because it was preceded by the proletarian revolution.[3] Both Trotsky and Lenin (and Stalin, incidentally) agreed that the October Revolution was a socialist revolution which resulted in a workers’ and peasants’ government resting on the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In China it is obvious that such an intermediate, New Democratic, stage was not necessary at all. This is confirmed by six clear and undeniable facts:
- The CCP and the PLA assumed power in China without any need for an alliance with other forces. The CCP was the only party in the PRC with any real authority and the PLA was the power of the new state right from the start.
- On seizing bureaucratic capital, the properties of those at the top of the KMT, the PRC owned so much of industry and the banking system that it was in de facto control of the national economy. It could (and should) have had to hand, and immediately introduced, a pre-prepared national economic plan that included monopolising foreign trade and wholesale food distribution. If the CCP had proactively carried through these rational measures instead of waiting until they were forced to do so by inflation, sabotage, the US embargo and the needs of the Korean War, the regime would have been a workers’ state from 1949 and the Chinese people would not have had to undergo unnecessary privation and hardship.
- The specific weight of the national bourgeoisie that remained in China after 1949 was minimal, its growth and strength was artificial, enhanced by the advantages showered on it by the PRC. When the CCP withdrew its support the national bourgeoisie was rapidly, easily and almost entirely peacefully swept from the scene. This was because the balance of forces was so strongly in favour of the CCP/PLA, which demonstrated clearly that any base the bourgeoisie had in post-revolution China was more illusion than reality.
- The policy of “Land to the Tiller” was carried through, but artificially delayed while the CCP tried to build the ‘rich peasant economy’ instead of paying attention to the wishes of the vast majority of the peasants – the poor and middle peasants. The agrarian revolution could and should have been carried out more rapidly, more efficiently and more thoroughly. The New Democracy actually delayed land reform but, as in Russia, the transition to a workers’ state preceded the completion of land distribution.
- The duration of the bourgeois stage of the New Democracy could hardly have been any shorter. There was no time for the national bourgeoisie to significantly advance the economy before they were discarded and what they did achieve was largely due to their special treatment by the regime.
The contribution of the national bourgeoisie was, essentially, negative and corrosive. Its drive for profit made it ready to disrupt the government’s economic plans and its greed meant it bribed state officials on a grand scale. Because it was working with a Stalinist bureaucracy which saw perks as its right, and which pandered to the national bourgeoisie this corruption was all-pervasive. The most significant contribution of the national bourgeoisie to the New Democracy was the level of sleaze, bribery and dishonesty it generated.
However, the most irrefutable argument for the unnatural nature of the New Democracy is obvious when one recalls that the new Chinese state had a long border with the Soviet Union. Only the Stalinist nature of the two regimes and the false creeds of socialism in one country and the theory of stages prevented a union of the two states and the immediate progression of China to a workers’ state.
In both Russia and China the overthrow of the bourgeois regime took place before the agrarian revolution was finished. That both workers’ states existed with a substantial private sector in agriculture should not be surprising since ownership of the land is not a deciding factor in determining the class character of a regime. The Russian dictatorship of the proletariat, first with Lenin as leader and then bureaucratically deformed, continued until 1929 based on private farming. Without Stalin’s premature and forced collectivisation the situation could have continued. In China the 1st FYP which inaugurated the workers’ state rested to a large extent on private farmers.
The theory of the permanent revolution readily accepts the importance of democratic demands for the mobilisation of the urban and peasant masses. However, it argues that the common interests of the reactionary elements (e.g. compradors, landlords, big bourgeoisie) in so-called backward countries and their intimate links with imperialism, means the national bourgeoisie as a whole will oppose the carrying through of the bourgeois democratic revolution. To overcome this opposition, to implement popular democratic demands (e.g. achieving national independence, overcoming hunger and famine, equality for women, control of inflation, land to the peasant, planning to overcome natural and man-made disasters, etc.), it is necessary for the oppressed sectors of society to take governmental power. With this action the natural flow of events is inevitably in the direction of the overthrow of capitalist property relations, for the establishment of a workers’ state and the first steps towards socialism.
To appreciate such an analysis, and plan accordingly, was to develop a political line best matched to the actual forces that existed in China after WWII. Such an analysis is certainly not ultra-left as Stalinists have traditionally claimed. For example, handicraft workers and family shops would not have been dragooned into state controlled co-operatives, and the peasants would not have been forcibly collectivised. With Soviet democracy and workers’ control of production it would have been possible, if so desired, to incorporate a privately-owned light industry into a national plan.
The belief in the necessity of a bourgeois phase caused the defeat of the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution because it limited the mobilisation of the oppressed masses to demands acceptable to the landlord families of the officers in the NRA. But even after 1949, the disadvantages of this unnecessary stage were many, including: restraining the self-organisation of the working class, denying the poor and middle peasants the right to seize land, restrictions on women’s rights, waste of time, effort and money in pandering to the national bourgeoisie, and facilitating the development of widespread corruption throughout the Party and government.
History is littered with leaders such as Oliver Cromwell who held to one programme at first but carried out another under the pressure of events, Mao is another such. After 1949 Mao assessed the strength of the forces competing for a place in government, saw which way the wind was blowing and tacked accordingly. This is not surprising, it is characteristic of the petty-bourgeoisie.
Today, in late capitalism, surrendering a major gain of Marxist theory and retreating to the pre-Leninist argument that a socialist revolution must be preceded by the completion of the bourgeois-democratic stage, is openly and unambiguously counter-revolutionary. The irony is that the American SWP renounced permanent revolution in favour of uninterrupted revolution just prior to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and Russia. Just as these bureaucratic regimes tottered and began to implode the SWP declared itself in favour of one of the basic features of Stalinism. But one cannot compartmentalise political degeneration, sacrificing permanent revolution in favour of Stalinist ideology naturally led to political decay generally in the organisation. The latest development along this trajectory was the SWP leadership’s decision, during Israel’s slaughter in Gaza in the summer of 2014, to embrace Zionism.[4]