Maoism and the Chinese Revolution Read online

  CCP leaders also established a set of standard work methods to implement throughout the party’s massive organizational apparatus. The most distinctive such innovation was the “mass line,” a technique employed by party cadres in mass organizations, which had first developed in CCP base areas in the south. Using the mass line, cadres were to

  take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action.9

  This exchange “from the masses, to the masses” was to be repeated continually, leading to ever more correct and effective policies. In practice, cadres used mass line techniques for a variety of ends: to resolve local disputes, investigate local conditions and concerns, or solicit adjustments to party policies as they were enacted.

  Today many groups consider the mass line a distinctive feature of Maoism, and argue it distinguishes the Maoist tradition from Stalinist authoritarianism. Yet Mao’s writings leave unspecified what kinds of ideas cadres are to extract from the masses, how they are to judge ideas “correct,” how cadres are to rework and “concentrate” ideas in combination with their own, and through what decision-making mechanisms the masses should “embrace” the results. Thus the concept admits a wide range of interpretations, some democratic and others coercive. For many contemporary groups, mass line practice simply entails identifying local problems to which the party offers overarching solutions, or polling local sentiment in order to craft slogans. The mass line is rarely used to investigate everyday self-activity but more often serves as a feedback mechanism for existing political lines. In this way, the concept can easily slip into a populist method of manufacturing consent.10

  Despite these shortcomings, the mass line and other work methods allowed the party to establish organizational roots in the Chinese peasantry throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Gender relations, however, remained a sticking point. Like most parties in the communist tradition, the CCP maintained control over the political line of its mass organizations and constrained their actions according to the party’s overall strategy. With the shift from city to countryside, the CCP leadership limited the party’s action on women’s issues, appeased the party’s predominantly male recruitment pool, and accommodated traditional family norms.

  In CCP base areas land was redistributed by family unit and thus placed into the hands of male heads of households. Single women almost never received land, aside from widows. Within this patriarchal structure, women were encouraged to fulfill domestic roles and contribute to the war effort through household textile production, and discouraged from raising independent demands. In a 1942 speech, P’eng Te-Huai (then deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army) argued that feminist slogans should only be raised if they didn’t conflict with other spheres of the peasant movement, and that slogans such as “freedom of marriage” should not be raised until the peasants were more fully mobilized. In other cases, slogans such as “equality between men and women” could be raised in word but not implemented in deed.11

  An opposition current criticized this approach. Most visible was Ting Ling, a party member who had been active in feminist and free love circles in the cities in the 1930s. In a 1942 article for International Women’s Day in Yenan’s Liberation Daily, Ting argued that party policy and the culture of Yenan held women to a double standard. On the one hand, they were expected to participate fully in political life and were criticized if they fell short; on the other, they were expected to fulfill traditional women’s roles and were criticized if they broke with gender norms. Against party leaders “who make fine speeches … about the need to first acquire political power” before addressing gender inequality, Ting argued that “if women want equality, they must first strengthen themselves.”12 Mao and other party leaders rebuked Ting’s article. Ting soon underwent self-criticism and was removed from political duties for two years.13 In February 1943, the CCP Central Committee reaffirmed that women’s liberation would come through participation in production rather than autonomous women’s demands. By 1944 around 60,000 women in the Yenan region were employed in weaving and 153,000 in spinning.14

  While the CCP’s approach to women’s struggles would vary over time, the party generally inherited the assumptions established during the Second International and maintained in most twentieth-century communist movements. In this view, women’s participation in wage labor would undermine economic dependence on men, thereby overturning patriarchal relations in private and public life. Socialist and communist parties thus aimed to turn women into waged workers before and after taking state power. Yet as many autonomist Marxist feminists have highlighted, this strategy fails to attack the distinction between waged work and unwaged reproductive labor, forcing a “double burden” on working women while guaranteeing that their labor power will appear of lower value on the market. Far from liberating women, this strategy ultimately reinforces the division of labor that reproduces gender categories, while incorporating women into capitalism as a reserve labor force.15 In China, the CCP applied this strategy by encouraging women’s waged labor while maintaining patriarchal families and suppressing autonomous demands that might upset production.16 As a result, women’s membership in the party remained extremely low for decades, hovering around 10 percent into the mid-1960s.17

  7. The United Front

  The concepts of the united front and the New Democratic revolution became central concepts for the CCP, and continue to be so for contemporary Maoist groups. The term “united front” itself has a long history in the communist tradition, starting with the Russian revolution and continuing through most strands of Leninism and Trotskyism. A united front is a tactic whereby a revolutionary party forms an alliance with reformist organizations in order to connect with their base and, by waging common struggles with them, gain credibility, influence, and leadership in the movement. The tactic was defined and popularized by the Comintern in 1921 as a way for communist parties to adjust to the global decline of the revolutionary movement and the retreat of many European workers into reformism.18 It was further tweaked in the late 1930s, when the USSR courted relations with Western capitalist governments against the rise of Nazi Germany. Now the Comintern expanded the notion of the united front to include alliances with bourgeois parties, in addition to social democratic ones, in a “Popular Front” against fascism.

  Mao crafted his own version of the united front in the late 1930s, as the CCP navigated its relationship to the KMT. In line with Stalin’s Popular Front strategy, Mao argued that an alliance was necessary not only between workers and peasants but also with progressive sections of the bourgeoisie, in order to guarantee China’s national liberation from Japan. In contrast to some applications of the Popular Front (and drawing lessons from 1927), Mao insisted the party retain its organizational and territorial independence. He refused KMT demands to reduce the numbers of the Red Army, admit KMT deputies into Red Army ranks, or submit the Red Army to a general command.19 Given these conditions, Mao was willing to accept the costs of an alliance. Yet to keep the KMT and other bourgeois forces committed to the nationalist struggle, the CCP would still have to ingratiate itself to the KMT’s class base. This required limiting class struggle in CCP base areas and protecting the interests of the nationalist bourgeoisie. In the process, the party positioned itself as a proto-state power, separate from the proletariat, and mediating its interests with those of its exploiters.

  In The Question of Independence and Initiative within the United Front, published in November 1938, Mao proposes that all classes in CCP-controlled territories must make “mutual concessions” in the interest of fighting the Japanese. For the time being, the party must “subordinate the class struggle to the present national struggle against Japan.” Factory workers may “demand better conditions from t
he owners,” but they must also “work hard in the interests of resistance.” While “landlords should reduce rent and interest … at the same time the peasants should pay rent and interest.” Current Problems of Tactics in the Anti-Japanese United Front, published in March 1940, further details how the party will gain the support of the national bourgeoisie, the nationalist “enlightened gentry,” and regional power brokers in conflict with Chiang Kai-shek. Winning them over, Mao notes, will require the CCP to “respect their interests” while demonstrating the Red Army’s military abilities. The same year, Mao also moved to integrate ruling class sectors into the base area governments, apportioning seats “one-third for Communists, one-third for non-Party left progressives, and one-third for the intermediate sections who are neither left nor right.”20

  Mass meeting in Yenan, 1937.

  Within this framework, the party limited itself to a “minimum program” of land reform rather than agrarian revolution. It sanctioned the seizure of comprador property in its base areas, belonging to “traitors” who had fled the area. But it prevented poor peasants from appropriating the land of “patriotic” middle and rich peasants, industrialists, or merchants. To soften the remaining inequalities, the party implemented progressive taxes, reduced rents by around 25 percent, and capped interest at a maximum of 15 percent per year.21 Many poor peasants in the CCP’s rank and file supported land seizures but were criticized or purged as “leftists” and “Trotskyites” as the united front policy was implemented.22 “The policy of the Party,” the central committee declared, “is not to weaken capitalism and the bourgeoisie, nor to weaken the rich peasant class and their productive force, but to encourage capitalist production and ally with the bourgeoisie and encourage production by rich peasants and ally with the rich peasants.”23

  Mao’s formulation of the united front improved living conditions and avoided subjugating the party to the KMT. But it did so at the cost of positioning the party as a mediating force that increasingly dominated over the proletariat and peasantry, as it had over women. While safeguarding CCP control over its army and territories, Mao agreed to subjugate class struggle in those territories to bourgeois interests, with the party acting as the latter’s enforcer. He thus constrained the “independence and initiative” of the proletariat and peasantry, even as he guaranteed it to the party claiming to represent them. This orientation would continue through the end of the war. Even after clashes between the CCP and KMT intensified in 1940 and the Second United Front collapsed, the party still maintained its moderate line, in order to curry favor with the national bourgeoisie under a transitional strategy known as “New Democracy.”

  8. The New Democratic Revolution

  If Mao believed the party could ally with bourgeois elements to gain a leading role in the war, his theory of “New Democracy” proposed to do the same thing on a national scale after winning state power. In The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party and On New Democracy, Mao proposes a conception of revolution in semi-colonial countries that combines Stalin’s earlier formulations with new distinct features. He argues that the party can carry out a revolution in alliance bourgeois classes, use those classes to develop the country economically after seizing power and peacefully expropriating them to establish a socialist society.

  In The Chinese Revolution, Mao argues that the Chinese Revolution will unfold in a series of distinct stages. The first will only aim to defeat Japanese imperialism and overthrow Chinese feudalism, “by means of a national and democratic revolution in which the bourgeoisie sometimes takes part.” This initial stage is “not against capitalism and capitalist private property” per se, and will inevitably take on a “bourgeois-democratic” character such that a “degree of capitalist development will be an inevitable result of the victory of the democratic revolution.”24 Yet Mao also argues that this “democratic revolution” will not be like the bourgeois revolutions of eras past. Under the party’s leadership, the new regime will practice “democracy of … a new and special type, namely, New Democracy.”25

  Under New Democracy, China will be ruled by a “joint dictatorship of several anti-imperialist classes” that will suppress pro-imperialist and feudal forces. With “the proletariat and the Communist Party” as its leading element, “the republic will neither confiscate capitalist private property in general nor forbid the development of such capitalist production.” Yet the party will also establish state-run industries, which “will be of a socialist character and will constitute the leading force in the whole national economy.” As political hegemon and captain of industry, the party will gradually phase out the bourgeoisie, and Chinese society will transition peacefully into the next stage, socialism.

  From Mao’s perspective, the socialist transition is assured by three historical conditions. First, he views all anti-imperialist struggles as objectively anti-capitalist. Mao accepts the Comintern orthodoxy built upon Lenin’s Imperialism, which argues that imperial domination is a necessary aspect of capitalism in its present stage of development, and that nationalist struggles thus weaken global capitalism and bring socialism closer. For Mao as for Stalin, every anti-imperialist struggle “inevitably becomes part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution.” Second, the political leadership and material support of the USSR helps anti-imperialist struggles move in a socialist direction. “The Soviet Union,” Mao argues, “has reached the period of transition from socialism to communism and is capable of leading and helping the proletariat and oppressed nations of the whole world.” Third, Mao believes the influence of the “proletariat and the Communist Party” and growth in “the state sector of the economy … and the co-operative sector” will ensure the displacement of capitalist relations.

  As we will see, Mao’s assessment of the USSR, his faith in party leadership, and his embrace of nationalized industry as a means of socialist transition were all misplaced; Mao himself would be forced to grapple with these shortcomings in the late 1950s. Far from transitioning “from socialism to communism,” the Soviet Union in 1940 was implementing state capitalist industrialization, premised on grinding exploitation of the working class. In this period Russian workers competed for piecework wages, while facing imprisonment for quitting a job. Stalin’s purges had executed the vast majority of the Bolsheviks who had helped bring the party to power, and the Soviet prison system housed upward of two million people for alleged “counterrevolutionary” crimes. In such an era, national liberation struggles allied with the USSR did not objectively weaken global capitalism but rather strengthened its state capitalist wing (what Mao would later call “social imperialism”).

  At the same time, Mao’s faith in the party rested on what some call “substitutionism.” Like much of the Leninist tradition, Mao considered the party the “brain” of the global proletariat, which possessed scientific knowledge about the nature of class society and the objective course the revolution would have to follow. Armed with such knowledge, the party could transparently represent the proletariat’s interests, in such a way that it could come to stand in for the latter, thus “substituting” party for class. Mao believed the party could lead the revolution through its inevitable stages, directing class struggle at will along the way—quelling it under the united front, subjugating it to capitalist development under New Democracy—while retaining a communist trajectory. Yet such a position must ultimately lapse into idealism. The concrete social relations in which a given party operates determine its relationship to the exploited, not merely its stated politics. Just as “progressive” CEOs are compelled to twist their egalitarian ideas in order to maintain their economic position, “communist” parties at the helm of capitalist economies can also render their own politics meaningless in practice. Regardless of whether party leaders believe themselves to be acting in the ultimate interests of the exploited, the latter will continue their daily struggle against class relations on their own terms, ultimately forcing such leaders to transform their conceptions, or else repress the
very class in whose name they speak—and thus the revolution itself.

  When implemented, the united front and New Democracy would help guarantee victory over Japan. But it would do so by constraining worker and peasant struggles, and replacing proletarian initiative with that of the party. Throughout the 1940s, Mao would repeatedly caution cadres against seizures of land or private property, for fear of alienating progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie.26 After the revolution the party would cultivate a friendly environment for capitalists, while preparing to put cadres in their place. In 1953, Mao assured a group of industrialists and liberal politicians,

  Some workers are advancing too fast and won’t allow the capitalists to make any profit at all. We should try to educate these workers and capitalists and help them gradually (but the sooner the better) adapt themselves to our state policy, namely, to make China’s private industry and commerce mainly serve the nation’s economy and the people’s livelihood and partly earn profits for the capitalists and in this way embark on the path of state capitalism.27