A Few Thoughts on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Capitalist Restoration

I’m reading a lot about the Chinese Cultural Revolution at the moment and plan to write a paper on it at some point. So, you can expect the occasional post on the subject, starting with this one.

Mao was aiming to avert a capitalist restoration but as we know these efforts came to naught when the capitalist roaders took over within a month of his death in late 1976.

In the early 1960s Mao was confronted with the fact that China was looking much like the Soviet Union and its eastern European offspring. This was the work of Liu Shaoqi and his team who had been in direct charge of running the country for some years.

The aim of the cultural revolution was to mobilize the people to overthrow those in authority following the Liu line in their workplaces, schools and regional government, and to struggle for the adoption of the radical Maoist line. In industry and government, revolutionary committees replaced mayors and one-person enterprise managers. These comprised a combination of young rebels, the hopefully more corrigible old cadres plus representatives of the military. In industry they endeavored to get line workers, technocrats and cadres working togethers in ways that broke down the old division of labor and cultural separation, and tapped the initiative of workers while at the same time getting rid of piece rates and other material incentives.

In the universities they made the courses more connected with production and enrolled students who were going to rejoin the workers and peasants rather than the ranks of the new bourgeoisie.

Then we had Mao's wife Jiang Qing taking the lead in developing art and culture that supported and celebrated the revolution.

The business of overthrowing the capitalist roaders was made very painful and less effective by the sabotage efforts of various forces. You had the Liu team who until they were overthrown were still in charge of administering everything at the national and regional levels and were able to get up to all kinds of underhand skullduggery. They stirred up divisions among the masses and staged phony power seizures that sacrificed a few scape goats. You had red guard groups made up of the children of capitalists roaders who attacked everyone who did not have their "pure" class background. You had the ultra-left who wanted to overthrow most old cadres and army commanders, a policy that would have lead to the overthrow of nobody. Then you had "petty bourgeois factionalism" as the leaders of rebel groups became focused on their own personal ambitions and saw other rebel groups as the main enemy.

At the end of the day, Mao had to rely very heavily on his personal prestige, ultimate power as party boss and his control of the security apparatus to keep the enemy at bay. Also in this battle with the party and government leadership he had to rely on the army boss Lin Biao who he started to think was part of the problem rather than solution, which was then confirmed when he tried to assassinate Mao and then died when he tried to escape in a plane that ran out of fuel.

The scant level of support in the higher levels of the government and party is reflected in the fact that not many big name leaders were removed when the right took over. It was mainly just the "Gang of Four". It would appear that a lot of people had just pretended to abandon the Liu line and become good Maoists. So the Revolutionary Headquarters was mainly just Mao.

At the time, Mao's talk of capitalist restoration struck people as odd. He was saying that the Soviet Union at al. had restored capitalism and there was the threat of the same thing happening in China. This prompted much guffawing and head scratching. Brezhnev and co. had not recreated what we normally think of as capitalism. There were no people who were obviously capitalists. There were no stock exchanges. The state pretty much still owned everything. They called their systems socialism and the people running the place still called themselves communists and denounced capitalism.

I think the term capitalist restoration was apt at the time because the restorers had done what you would expect reactionary bourgeois turds to do if they seized the reins of power in a socialist country. They had created a social, political and economic malaise for which capitalism was seen as the remedy or at least an improvement. This lead to some efforts to marry their 'socialism' with capitalists mechanisms such an increased role for profits and "material incentives".

Of course, when we get into the late 1980s and beyond, and well after Mao had gone to meet Marx, the matter becomes a lot clearer. In the Soviet Union and eastern Europe they did the full Monty and stopped pretending to be communist and let their regimes collapse. China, which by this stage had "caught up" with the rest of the pack adopted, adopted a different arrangement. While quite overtly restoring capitalism they retained the pretense and referred to their unambiguous capitalism as socialism with Chinese characteristics and continued to call the ruling party the Chinese Communist Party rather than rebadging it Guomindang (Mainland Branch).

The Chinese reactionaries say that their society is at the primary stage of socialism where the emphasis is on developing the productive forces. At some stage in the misty future they will revert to something that looks more like socialism. I look at this hilarious idea in an earlier post.

The primary reason for looking at this whole episode is to draw lessons for future revolutions. These will occur under very different condition but will still face the same basic problem, to wit, the emergence of a new bourgeoisie when the working class has still to overcome the old division of labor in production and politics, and to gain the strength of character to readily deal with bad eggs.