BobKKKindle$
21st September 2009, 15:23
Gao actually distinguishes a difference between Red Gaurds and Rebels (2008, p.132). The former were member loyal to party bureaucrats, the later were loyal to Mao.This is an important distinction, and one of the many good things about Gao's work (Walder in 'Joseph, Wong, Zweig, HUP, 1991' makes the same observation and describes the Red Rebels and their allies as "dissident radicalism" in contrast to "orthodox radicalism" and "heterodox radicalism") but I don't know if it's accurate to characterize the Red Rebels as being loyal to Mao. The Red Rebels were distinguished from the Red Guards not only by the fact that they were more likely to come from working-class and peasant backgrounds but also in that, whereas the Red Guards wanted to limit the revolution to the removal of certain officials, whom they deemed "capitalist roaders", whilst maintaining the basic political structure, including the leadership of the CPC, the Red Rebels argued that the problem was the structure of Chinese politics and society, and for that reason they aimed to overthrow the bureaucratic state, and replace it with a state based on the Paris Commune, involving instant recall, democratic control of the means of production, and so on - in other words, they wanted to carry out a socialist revolution. The logic of this position meant that even if these groups gave lip service to Mao in their proclamations (in the case of Sheng-wu-lien, discussed below, the activists were not openly critical of Mao when they published their manifesto, and Cliff speculates that this may have been necessary to avoid censorship) they were ultimately oppossed to the class interests of the bureaucracy, of which Mao was a member, and it's for this reason that they oppossed the creation of revolutionary committees under the control of the PLA, and were frequently the major targets of army repression, as occurred during the campaigns to "cleanse the class ranks" and remove "May 16 Elements" during the period 1968-1970. The most outstanding of the "dissident radicals" was the organization Sheng-wu-lien, comprised of 20 smaller organizations, which used the term "red capitalists" to refer to the bureaucracy, and was publicly denounced by Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, and Kang Sheng on January 26th 1968 at a rally of 100,000 people in Changsha, capital of Hunan, where the group was based, as a "counter-revolutionary organization" on the grounds that it had challenged Mao personally by attacking the revolutionary committees as an attempt to limit the scope of the revolution. Their manifesto can be read here (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm). Interestingly, Kang Sheng also asserted in a speech two days before the mass rally that the organization had received some of Trotsky's works, and on the same day as the rally, Hunan Daily published an editorial entitled 'Thoroughly Smash Sheng-wu-lien, a Counter-Revolutionary Big Hotch-Potch', and, on February 8th, Zhou Enlai personally instructed the Southern Daily (Nanfang Ribao) to reproduce the editorial. This suggests that the organization was viewed as a serious threat, at the highest levels of the Chinese state. The fact that the organization came under attack from Mao's closest allies indicates that whilst Mao may have been subjectively in favour of radicalism, his membership of the bureaucracy meant that he was ultimately forced to clamp down on a genuinely revolutionary force like Sheng-wu-lien in order to ensure that his class interests were not threatened. This same dynamic can also be observed in a number of other events, specifically Mao's decision to abolish the Shanghai People's Commune in 1967, and to initiate the Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages campaign in 1968. For me, as a Trotskyist who admires the Cultural Revolution, Sheng-wu-lien and other cases of radicalism occurred in spite of Mao, not because of him, and indicate that the Cultural Revolution moved beyond the purposes for which it had originally been designed, and only stopped short of challenging the bureaucracy because Mao and the Gang of Four turned to the PLA and authoritarian measures to control its participants.