On The Revolution In China
No honest and reasonably alert visitor to China can fail to be impressed by
the remarkable changes in the country and the people. The material advances
shown by the new system since so recent a year as 1952 leap to the eye. New
factories, mines, oil-fields, steel works, dams, co. operatives, roads,
buses, hospitals, schools, cultural palaces, theatres have sprouted
virtually overnight. Literacy is almost universal and the language is being
reformed. The rise in the general standard of living is equally remarkable.
The normal noonday meal even of the unskilled labourer now compares with
his rare holiday feast in the old days. Conditions of work have improved
out of all recognition. Coal mines in whose untimbered pits eight or ten
famished peasant labourers dropped dead, or were killed by accident every
day, have now death rates among the lowest in the world, and are decent
places to work in, with excellent automatic machinery for the bulk of the
production. The former, incredible stench and filth have disappeared from
the workers' slums. once the most dreadful in the whole world and even the
older hutments are free of vermin. But far more remarkable than all these
are the changes among the people themselves. The current Chinese standard
of honesty would have been astoundingly high in any country. Even in
pre-war Sweden. Shanghai. once notorious
for the incidence of pilfering in spite of the watchful eyes of the foreign
concession police has not had a single petty crime reported for over ten
months. After just two years of better living conditions, the children in
the new workers, tenements show what socialism can mean; they are
healthier. more cheerful and rush spontaneously to welcome the stranger
without the least trace of shyness or rudeness. The unshakable calm, inner
courtesy, love of culture, and fundamental good nature in all strata of
Chinese society cannot be written off as 'national character which has
nothing to do with the revolution.' The relaxed, well-adjusted Chinese of
the People's Republic are not to be found in Hong Kong, or Formosa. Yet the mainland is under
constant threat of attack from modern atomic bases scattered from Japan to Formosa, while the other two regions
have a perpetual flood of foreign gold poured into them to make them happy
bastions of genuine Western Democracy.
The intelligentsia of Peking also show a remarkable
contrast with those of great cities in other countries. Their enthusiasm
and animation, particularly among the younger intellectuals, compares
favourably with the lack of interest and rather fearful attitude that seems
to characterize their counterparts in New York, and the rather casual,
almost inert, and often lackadaisical approach to serious questions on the
part of so many Muscovites. They certainly do not manifest the concentrated
opportunism, thoroughgoing superficiality, and intolerable brag of the new
middle-class Indian. Yet China is by no means a paradise.
Serious new problems arise on every level, and have to be faced where other
countries manage to ignore them or to deny their existence. Under these circumstances,
why are the police so much less in evidence in new China than in most other
countries, including the USA and the USSR? Why is there no counterpart
to the un-American activities committee, no witch-hunting in any form? All
criticism is carefully studied and sincerely welcomed if useful. People are
now genuinely free to express any political opinion they like, including
the belief that capitalism is superior to socialism. If they wish to study
the speeches of Chiang Kai-shek, scrupulously accurate versions will be
provided so that the reader can judge for himself what Chiang's ideas of
democracy really meant. This freedom does not extend to certain types of
action. The possible lover of "free enterprise" is not free to
practice its most rapidly profitable aspects, to indulge in
black-marketing, adulteration of goods, opium smuggling, and such unsocial
activities. However, former Kuomintang generals are now employed in high
and responsible administrative posts, as for example Fu Tso-yi, at present
minister of water conservancy, in charge of important projects like the new
dam construction in Sanmen gorge.
Even Chiang Kai-shek will be given a similar position, if he
dares to make his peace with his own countrymen. At the same time, those
who fought against these two for so many bitter years are found in all
ranks of the army, and at all levels of the government, but do not have to
be coerced to agree to this strange return. Their position is not remotely
comparable to that of the best resistance fighters in Germany, France and Italy, who see the resurgence of
the most hated elements to power, and the recession of the goal for which
the anti-fascists had worked so long. Many enterprises function very well
under joint state and private ownership. There is no question of a
surrender to capitalism; yet the capitalists have not been '1iquidated' by
shooting, but converted into useful citizens.
These features of contemporary Chinese society must be, in some
way, traceable to the course of its revolution, which we proceed to
analyse, in order to explain this extraordinary new civilisation.
Ultra-Marxists find that the Chinese revolution had a peasant
basis and leadership and not a proletarian; hence, they conclude that the revolution
cannot be socialist, or communist. A view that need not be discussed
seriously is that it is just one of the periodic upheavals which begin
every three centuries or so in China as peasant revolts, to
settle down after a change of regime; since the last such change came in
1644, with the Manchus, one was astrologically due now! Nevertheless,
serious arguments are still heard that the Chinese revolution is only a
long overdue reform and modernisation of a backward semi- colonial country;
that socialism in China is merely a political
slogan, very far from realisation. This is the main question that will be
discussed here: Is the Chinese revolution socialist or has some other
description to be found for it? The discussion has to be in the context of
a given world situation and the specific situation in the country. The
answer will necessarily imply a great deal about imminent or necessary
changes in the rest of Asia and other under-developed areas. Some tacit
conclusions also follow about other methods of advance to socialism than by
armed insurrection.
To avoid misunderstanding, it is necessary to define the
fundamental terms. By revolution is meant the overthrow of a
government by a major group of the governed, by methods regarded as illegal
under the system existing before the overthrow. We have to exclude the mere
coup d'etat when the new group belongs essentially to the same
governing class, as happens so often in South America. Changes of this nominal
type are symptomatic of a large, passive, unresisting stratum among the
governed. In South American countries, the real Americans (strangely called
Indians) have hardly begun to figure on the political stage, and their very
languages have yet to be recognised to the extent of being taught in
schools. A genuine revolution, as distinguished from a change of regime,
takes place only when the governed will not submit to the old way and the
governing classes cannot carry on in the old way. This is the common factor
to the American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Sometimes, the
overthrow occurs in effect before its formal recognition, in which case the
revolution appears a comparatively peaceful transfer of power. This
happened in India and a few other British
colonies, where local bourgeoisies had developed under British colonial
rule, and it became much costlier to suppress their demand for political
power than to surrender it on condition that bourgeois property rights were
not to be touched. However, the struggle was, even then, regarded as illegal
and the attempts to suppress it employed outright violence. Our definition
excludes such developments as the Industrial Revolution, and the
pseudo-revolutions by foreign intervention.
Socialism is the system where means of production are owned by
society as a whole, not private persons; and where opportunity and the
rewards of labour are equitably proportioned under the slogan 'equal pay
for equal work'. Communism is a more developed form under which each
individual contributes to society according to his ability and receives a
share of the social product according to his needs. Both of these imply a
high degree of modern, mechanised, co-operative production before there can
be more than a redistribution of poverty; but co-operative production is
not by itself sufficient, for all factory production is possible only by
the highest degree of social co-operation, Similarly, most societies
recognise the needs of infants, the ill, and the aged even when people in
these categories can add little or nothing to the social produce; but that
does not suffice to make those societies communist. In the strictest sense
of the word, a "pure" socialist revolution is possible only when
the productive capacity (surviving after the revolution) suffices for the needs
of the whole population on the level that its citizens recognise as
equitable. The only country where raw materials, installed machinery, power
supply, and available technicians fulfil these conditions today is the USA, which has not had a
revolution since 1776, when these conditions did not prevail and socialism
was unknown. However, it is clear that the Soviet revolution at least is
fundamentally different from the French or the American revolutions. So,
let us agree to call a revolution 'socialist' when the new regime can, and
plans to, progress directly to socialism without the necessity of further
violent change in the government. In abstract theory, this would be
possible in the USA, while Britain and India have openly proclaimed
peaceful transition to socialism as their goal, The main question is
whether the class in power wishes it, and tallies its actions with
political declarations, or whether the socialist aim (if professed) amounts
only to a means of deceiving the electorate, by promises which cannot be fulfilled
by the methods adopted.
One of the necessary (though not sufficient) conditions for a
revolution to be socialist is that the power thereafter should not be in
the hands of a minority class. The reason is simply that such a class
cannot logically be expected to usher in a classless society. The Chinese
revolution satisfies this condition. However, Marx and his followers had
asked for a further condition, namely that the revolution should establish
the dictatorship of the proletariat. This conclusion was drawn from the
experience of the great French revolution, which had some hope of
progressing to socialist liberty, equality, fraternity as long as
Robespierre lasted. It turned into reaction and military dictatorship as
soon as the new urban bourgeoisie, and their rural counterpart the
peasants, had liquidated the privileges of feudal ownership and acquired
control over the new forms of property. The further experience of 1848 and
of the Paris Commune of 1870-71 did nothing to shake the conclusion. Nor
did the Tai Ping rebellion in China, which would only have meant
a change of dynasty but for foreign intervention. The Indian revolt of 1857
had nothing to offer but a renewal of feudal power.
The Paris Commune was lost precisely because the peasantry was
not drawn into the struggle on the side of the workers. The Russian
revolution was completed by the triple alliance of workers, soldiers and
peasants. The fundamental contradiction between (the essentially
co-operative) modern factory production and the essentially petty-bourgeois
peasant production remained. It could not be solved, as in the USA, by methods that led
ultimately to the creation of the Dust Bowl, price supports, and wanton
destruction or senseless hoarding of "surplus" food by the state.
The problem had to be solved quickly in the USSR, and a regular food supply
ensured which could not be shaken by famine, epidemics, or foreign
intervention. The solution was found in collectivisation of the land, but
under the guidance of people not themselves peasants, whose approach was
generally doctrinaire, and methods often coercive. The new productive basis
withstood the cordon sanitaire and the most deadly armed invasion of
World War II. The very existence of the USSR was encouragement to
socialist movements throughout the world, while new China could not have progressed so
rapidly without its protection against foreign intervention and its capital
aid. However, in conjunction with the antagonistic external pressures,
Soviet methods left the aberrant legacy of unhappiness, mistrust,
espionage, twisting of the national character, which has slowly to be
cleared out.
The Chinese revolution followed a totally different course. The
workers' commune of Canton was brutally suppressed. Shanghai fell quickly to the
Kuomintang forces only because of the great workers' rising planned and
organised by Chon En-lai. The reward was the unparalleled blood-bath of
1921 in which about 50,000 workers and left-wing intellectuals were
tortured and put to death by that pillar of Western Democracy, Chiang
Kai-shek, whose latest writings bemoan his own naive trust of communists
and his great leniency. Comintern theorists wrote many futile theses about
the workers' revolution. The sole effective action was organised by Mao Tse-tung
and Chu Deh, on the basis of armed guerrilla insurrection with peasant
bands. To survive, the centre of resistance had to be shifted, by means of
the famous Long March, to the extreme hinterland of China, very far from
any factory or proletarians. The communists did not enforce co-operative
production in the areas under their control. The land was redistributed for
petty, small-scale primitive production, and not all the land, but only
that portion owned by oppressive semi- feudal landlords who had run away
from the vengeance of the peasantry. The complete land-reform came in 1952.
From 1936-7, the communists actually put the revolution in abeyance to
co-operate in a common anti-Japanese front with Chiang. Impartial observers
like Stilwell and Evans Carlson have made it clear that they fought the
Japanese much more effectively than the Kuomintang. Does all this not smack
of reformism, of the will to abandon socialism at the slightest excuse?
Actually the armed insurrection made the political work effective.
The poorest peasant and landless agrarian worker had been psychologically
conditioned during two thousand years of misrule to being kicked around by
official, warlord, landlord, and merchant. He now learned that his destiny
rested in his own hands. Re-division of landlords' property united all the
peasantry, rich and poor, behind the regime. The new leaders lived a life
of the utmost simplicity. Taxes were very light, and there was no
speculation. As the Chinese workers were hardly a step removed from the
peasants, they backed the communists solidly whenever they had the chance.
The united anti-Japanese front drew all patriotic intellectuals and
petty-bourgeois into the struggle, and showed them that no other leadership
could be effective. During the course of the struggle, the Red Army
performed a feat that exceeds even the Long March in importance. It proved
that a guerrilla force starting with the poorest weapons, but correctly
based upon the people as a whole, and properly led, could convert itself during
the very course of the war into a full-fledged modern army, supplied with
weapons and technicians taken over from the far better-equipped opponents.
This, in fact, symbolises the entire course of the Chinese revolution in
its uninterrupted advance towards socialism.
The peasant in a capitalist environment has necessarily to
be a petty-bourgeois, but not necessarily on, in an ancient, backward,
pre-bourgeois country which is overpopulated relatively to the available
food supply. In such a country, it is absolutely futile to wait for a full
development of the bourgeois mode, the creation of a large and strong
proletariat, then a strong workers' party, and finally a socialist
revolution in our sense of the word. The new bourgeoisie in such a country
will fall very far behind the creative role of the first bourgeoisies such
as in England. Specifically, China had simultaneously the worst features of
the old feudalism on land, imperialist- colonial intervention by foreign
powers, and an indigenous fascism based on strong internal monopoly of
weakly developed capital. The monopoly, in fact, was of the notorious Four
Families (Chiang, Soong, Kung, Chen), who reduced all other private
capitalists to their servants and the whole administration to their
lackeys. The heaviest profits came directly from bleeding the people,
without industrialisation.
The essential point is very simple. No revolution (as defined
above) today in a backward country has any chance of effectiveness, or even
of survival, unless it is planned and carried out as a socialist revolution.
Industrialisation is not a prerequisite of socialism in such countries, as
so many theorists continue to believe, but the very converse is necessary.
The advanced non-socialist countries (taken together) are over- producing,
in the sense that their markets lack the purchasing power necessary to
absorb the full-capacity product. The existence of cheap (but inefficient)
labour and raw materials in the underdeveloped areas cannot but aggravate
this fundamental economic contradiction. Technical advances like automation
increase the stress. The strong possibility that the USSR can and will
supply capital goods to all backward countries, socialist or not, to
develop without the domination of foreign capital also brings the crisis
nearer. The only solution is to begin with a socialist revolution so
that effective demand rises indefinitely, and planning makes overproduction
impossible. One lesson that might be drawn from China is the correct
socialist approach to the cult of mere bigness in a backward country. The
USSR, with its different historical background, and the urgent need to
establish the first base for socialism, without external aid and in
the face of a deadly, unremittingly hostile environment, had to industrialise
regardless of cost. This meant human cost, in the absence of capital aid,
but the viability of socialist production was proved. In China, the same
pace of industrialisation would have meant intolerab1e shortage of consumer
goods at a time when immediate relief had to be shown from the incredible
misery into which the Kuomintang and the Four Families (with US aid), had
plunged the country. It would also mean serious unemployment, at least an
'excess of manpower', in the interim period, not to speak of heavy waste of
capital assets in short supply. So, their immediate plans are being
modified so as to encourage co-operative handicraft production and un-
mechanised agriculture in tune with basic industrialisation. They can
utilise the stored experience of the remarkably successful Gung Ho
industrial co-operatives set up during the anti-Japanese war in the
remotest hinterland. This contrasts with the heavy opposition aroused by
even the trifling, slap-dash co-operation announced by the Indian
government. Certainly, the Chinese would not set up the Ambar Charkha
hand-spinning scheme, had they so powerfully developed a textile industry
as India and such ample foreign aid. The dam in the gorges of the Yangtse
will be bigger than those in most Indian schemes. But in a country that has
a monsoon, the essential is to hold the rain- water back as long as
possible, to prevent quick erosion of valuable top- soil. That is, flood
control and efficient food production in India would be far better served
by a hundred thousand, properly coordinated, small dams rather than a few
big ones costing more. The Chinese have their own schemes for atomic energy
research, but for use, not empty prestige. In India, the money poured out
could have been much better utilized in harnessing the decidedly more
abundant solar energy which only blasts the country over eight months or
more of the year. All we have achieved so far is a remarkably useless
sun-cooker. Both countries have to cope with a dense population and high
birth-rate, but birth control propaganda catches on quickly in China,
because the people know that in old age, they will have comfortable
maintenance from their co-operative group, even when there are no children.
To plan the population without planning how the population is to make a
reasonably decent living is as ridiculous as it is futile. Thus, when one
speaks of many different paths leading to socialism, it is necessary to
ask, "what sort of socialism?" Germany produced National
Socialism under Hitler; the socialist government in France attacked Egypt
for the sake of the Suez Canal Company, and did not hesitate to continue
the brutal war of colonial repression in Algeria.
The Chinese method had one advantage over all others, including
the Russian, in that the confidence of the food producers, with accurate
knowledge and full control of the food supply, were assured from the start
over an increasingly larger area. The arts of genuine persuasion were
mastered by the technique developed in the Yenan days, when not more than a
third of the local councils and committees were allowed to consist of
communist party members. Co-operation has caught on very well, without the
least show of force on the part of the state among the peasants. For
example, during the lean months at the end of winter, peasant co-operatives
about Peking (which have not enough land for the necessary surplus) send
many of their members out to work at transport, carpentry, and odd jobs.
Till last year, the individual kept 15 out of the average monthly wages of
50 Yuan earned by such labour, and put the rest into the cooperative. Now,
without any suggestion from the government, all the money is voluntarily
put into the common fund, and each family assigned enough (by the co-
operative) for its needs during those three hard months of the year.
Contrast this with other countries in Asia. The Indian five-year plan
allots about 11% of the total plan budget to heavy industry, and
effectively spends less. The rest goes in services, ancillary plant,
transport, power supply, irrigation and the like, which does not touch
private monopoly in food production (which can be broken only by a tax in
kind and efficient grain storage); nor in most consumer goods, nor some
very important heavy industry. The Indian State has absolute power and uses
it to settle questions like the linguistic division of Bombay state by tear
gas and bullets instead of the logical, democratic plebiscite and ballot.
It is openly admitted that this all-powerful state is powerless to collect
evaded taxes, to curb inflation, to control food prices, or to raise money
by expropriation of the primitive accumulation of money- lender, landlord,
and profiteer, in place of sales and consumer taxes. This amounts to a
confession that the classes in power have not the least desire for
socialism, and will not allow their profits to be touched even if it means
the failure of industrialisation. The remaining Asian countries, including
those in the Middle East, and Turkey have found insurmountable obstacles of
every type on the road to industrialisation. The moral should be reasonably
clear.
Monthly Review (New York), 1957. M. N. Roy, writing on Revolution
and Counter-revolution In China (1946) to justify those actions of his that
had led to his expulsion from the Comintern, reached the conclusion that
the Chinese revolution did not follow a pattern which could be approved by
Marxists. He said that the 'so-called Communist Party' of China 'preferred
to base itself on the village paupers, necessarily inclined towards banditry'.
'Having learned from experience, the Communists in China today are
communists only in name'. The refusal to learn anything from experience,
and the insistence upon keeping the name unsullied by effective action are
characteristic of Roy's type of OM. While accusing the communist leaders in
China of 'relapse into opportunism which may be justified as clever
strategy', Roy had not discovered the existence of Mao Tse-tung in 1930,
and even in 1946 dismissed Chairman Mao's united national front as another 'doctrinaire
preoccupation.' 'The task of the revolution in colonial and semi-colonial
countries now (1946) is to establish Radical Democracy' -a task in which
Roy himself failed dismally on his return to India while the bourgeois,
colonial struggle was being fought out and won under the leadership of the
Congress, without benefit of Roy. As late as 1951, the CPI portentously
reserved final judgement upon the Chinese revolution, on the grounds that
the whole affair might turn out to be reformist in character as compared
with the purity of the struggle in India. Other Indians, formerly OM, continue
to ignore China, and devote their energies to such urgent problems as the
woes of Yugoslavia or Hungary. Therefore it might be of use to re- examine
the content and meaning of a socialist revolution. Otherwise, it is fatally
easy to slip into a form of socialism which is socialism in everything but
name. It is to be feared that recent developments in India and frantic
appeals for dollar aid imply this trend in the ruling class and its party.
It does require a peculiar genius to undercut socialism while supposedly
building it by peaceful methods, but the country might be happier if such
talent were more innocuously utilised.
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