1949
26th May 2005, 03:39
Daring to Scale the Heights for the Emancipation of Humanity
In Tribute to Zhang Chunqiao: 1917-2005
Revolution #3, May 22, 2005, posted at revcom.us
by Raymond Lotta
On April 21 the international proletariat lost a great leader when Zhang Chunqiao died at the age of 88. Zhang was a close colleague and follower of Mao Tsetung and a prominent leader of the Cultural Revolution. He was arrested when the counter-revolutionary forces in the Chinese Communist Party staged a coup after Mao's death in 1976.
Zhang never wavered from revolution. in its brightest hours and in its darkest moments.
Zhang Chunqiao is not widely known to the fighters and dreamers of today. For decades the regime that imprisoned him hid information about his status from the people in China and the world. And even in his death, Zhang is slandered by reactionary forces and pundits the world over. But he had an immense impact on the course of revolution and the cause of human emancipation. His is a life to celebrate, to learn about and learn from.
Maoist China was a far cry from the corrupt capitalist China of today that is socialist only in name. It was a China of genuine socialism and all-the-way revolution. A revolution that ended exploitation, that was digging up the roots of oppression and class division, breaking tradition's chains and meeting the needs of the masses. It may be hard to imagine in today's world that on this planet there was a liberating society and economy in which the masses were ruling and increasing their collective mastery. That there was an inspiring example to the oppressed of the world and a base for promoting world revolution. But this was the reality of revolutionary China—beginning with the triumph of the revolution in 1949 and reaching unprecedented heights during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, until Mao's death.
That such a society existed was inseparable from the fact that the proletariat in power had Mao Tsetung as its leader and heroes of its cause like Zhang Chunqiao.
Zhang Chunqiao occupied high positions of authority in the party and state structures—he was a member of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party, a vice premier, and head of the political department of the People's Liberation Army. And he used these positions to lead the masses to challenge entrenched officialdom, the hierarchy and inequalities of class society, and the ideological deadweight of the past. This is quite remarkable.
Zhang was a communist leader who combined a sweeping grasp of Marxist theory with a living, developing sense of the contours and dynamics of class struggle under socialism. He fought for Mao's line of continuing the revolution until all enslaving relations and ideas are overcome on a world scale. Basing himself on the science of revolution, he dared to lead the masses to seize new ground and break new ground in emancipating themselves.
Zhang was intellectually alive, a rigorous and innovative theorist who had no taste for pale doctrine. He looked to the new and captured the imagination of China's new generation of revolutionaries who came forward during the Cultural Revolution. His revolutionary leadership and writings have influenced revolutionaries around the world.
The bourgeoisie would have us believe that revolutionary leaders invariably succumb to the privileges and corruptions of power. The life of Zhang Chunqiao proves otherwise.
The Cultural Revolution: Leading in the Trenches of Struggle
It was Zhang's role in the Cultural Revolution that marked his emergence as a major leader and standard- bearer of Mao's revolutionary line of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat to achieve classless, communist society.
Mao summed up the experience of the Soviet Union, where a new exploiting class, still calling itself socialist, had come to power. He was struggling against revisionism, the betrayal of revolution under the cover and in the name of Marxism. He analyzed that a neo-capitalist elite was arising within the political and economic structures of China, and headquartered within the Communist Party. A radical solution was required: to mobilize the masses to criticize and challenge bourgeois and reactionary authority, to wage mass political struggle to overthrow the new bourgeois forces in commanding positions of society—the "capitalist roaders"—and to carry forward the process of transforming the economic, political, social, and ideological relations of society. And through all of this to further empower the masses to be the masters of society. This was the Cultural Revolution Mao launched in 1966.
Zhang Chunqiao was drafted by Mao to join the Cultural Revolution Group in Beijing to give guidance and direction to the unprecedented "revolution within the revolution." Zhang was in the thick of some of its most complicated and breakthrough episodes—including the dramatic events that came to be known as the Shanghai January Storm.
In late 1966, rebel students and rebel workers in Shanghai mounted a challenge to the city's entrenched and oppressive ruling apparatus, raised criticisms of the local party leadership, and pressed demands for a new political order. Ferment and struggle intensified. Zhang followed developments in Shanghai with great attention and returned to the city several times, bringing support from the Cultural Revolution Group and assisting and providing leadership to the rebels. The revolutionary movement grew and an alliance of rebel forces took control of the city's vital communications and administrative centers in January 1967. This was the first "seizure of power" by the masses in the Cultural Revolution. It set an example and set the ideological tone for power seizures in other parts of the country during the Cultural Revolution.
Zhang helped systematize and spread the lessons of the Shanghai Storm. And he was deeply involved in summing up the experiences and experimentation of forging new revolutionary administrative and political institutions to replace the old order.
Advancing Socialist Theory
Zhang made an enormous contribution to the international proletariat's understanding of the nature of socialist society and its economics, and the character and goal of proletarian revolution.
Zhang further developed Mao's insight that the mere conversion of the means of production to state property does not guarantee that society is socialist. The true nature of ownership is determined by what political and ideological line is in command: are the economy and society being led and moving in the direction of restricting and eliminating the significant differences and inequalities left over from capitalist society; or is society on a road, and moving in a direction, that would bring back the old order even in the disguise of socialism? Ownership, Zhang emphasized, is a question of power: who is really running society, do the masses have the ability to continue to make revolution and transform society?
Zhang analyzed that there are still capitalist aspects in the production relations of socialism. The relations between people in production are still class relations. Do managers and leading state and party functionaries take part in productive labor with the masses; and more broadly, are the masses taking part in important spheres of administrative tasks and the spheres of education and culture? Or are differences hardening and the gulf between mental and manual labor widening? Zhang explained that the division of labor cannot be overcome all at once—but at every stage in the development of the revolution it must be restricted and transformed to the greatest degree possible.
Zhang's essay "On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie" explains that the proletarian revolution is a thoroughgoing revolution that must persevere in exercising all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. This means in all spheres and at all stages of development of the revolution. The proletarian revolution aims, with Zhang citing Marx's famous description, to eliminate "the 4 Alls": all classes and class distinctions generally, all the relations of production on which they rest, all thesocial relations corresponding to them, and all the ideas that result from these social relations. This revolution must continue until it banishes these "4 Alls" from the earth.
These were not theoretical issues for discussion by a small section of party leaders. These were questions put before the masses in China. And revolutionaries throughout the world also took them up.
The Last Great Battle
Zhang Chunqiao was a pivotal figure in the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution between 1973 and 1976. In the early 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and other revisionist forces in the Communist Party began mounting an offensive to overthrow proletarian rule. Mao relied on Zhang and a core of revolutionary leaders (including Jiang Qing, who was Mao's wife) to politically arm and mobilize the masses to wage a life-and-death struggle to preserve and advance proletarian rule. Zhang rose to the challenge with vision, with scientific understanding, and with indomitable courage.
Zhang had strategic confidence in the ability of the masses to grasp their role as the makers of revolution and to grasp the science of Marxism that would enable them to do so. He acted on the understanding that the key to the defense and advance of revolution was to arouse the conscious activism of the masses. And he and the other revolutionary leaders entered the fray and gave direction to sharp and complicated struggles on many different fronts: education, industrial management, economic strategy, science and technology, and other arenas. They were continually summing up experience, drawing lessons, and applying Marxism to new problems. They were hewing a path forward and politicaly and ideologically arming the proletariat worldwide. They kept to this orientation and maintained their resolve—even when they made mistakes, even when sections of people were influenced for a time by backward ideas, even as the balance of political and international forces turned more unfavorable for the revolution in China.
And so, when the revisionists in China's Communist Party staged their armed coup after Mao died in 1976, they moved, and had to move, decisively against the revolutionary headquarters within the Communist Party. The defining act of the coup was the arrest of Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing (and the two other members of the so-called "gang of four"). This set China on the course that would turn it into the sweatshop for world capitalism that it is today.
But isolation and threats of death could not break Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao. At the show trial organized by the revisionist regime in 1980-81, Jiang Qing confronted and exposed her inquisitors and Zhang sat in defiant silence. Zhang received a death sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment; and after more than 25 years in prison, he remained unrepentant.
With the coup of 1976, the revolution in China was defeated, but the revolutionaries were not defeated politically and ideologically.
****
The Cultural Revolution was the highest pinnacle reached so far by the proletarian revolution. And Maoism must continue to learn from this experience and from the example of leaders like Zhang Chunqiao. The proletarian revolution must sum up the great strengths as well as the weaknesses and limitations of the Cultural Revolution, in order to go further and do even better, to make and continue the revolution worldwide until the historic mission of the proletariat—a communist world free of exploitation, oppression, and class distinctions altogether—has been achieved.
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Chang Chun-chiao (1917-2005): Outstanding Maoist
leader
16 May 2005. A World to Win News Service. Zhang
Chunqiao (formerly spelled Chang Chun-chiao), one
of the most outstanding revolutionary leaders of
the late 20th century, has died. He was 88.
Zhang was a leader of the so-called “Gang of
Four,” along with Jiang Qing (Chiang Ching), the
wife of Mao Zedong. It should really be called
“the gang of five”, since they were Mao’s closest
followers in the leadership of the Communist
Party of China. They were arrested a month after
Mao’s death in 1976 as part of a military coup
through which Mao’s opponents in the party seized
power, put a violent end to the Cultural
Revolution he led against them, and overthrew
socialism.
The official Chinese Xinhua News Agency bulletin
issued 10 May said that Zhang died 21 April. His
death was kept secret for nearly three weeks,
perhaps to lessen the danger that it would
occasion a fresh round of pro-Mao disturbances.
At the very least, the delay indicates a fearful
indecision and contradicts the official idea that
his figure had lost all its power.
The “Four” were convicted in 1981 for what
China’s People’s Daily now summarises as “the
excesses of the Cultural Revolution” and “trying
to seize power after the death of Mao”. Jiang
Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were sentenced to death
(later commuted to life in prison), while their
co-defendants Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who
caved in at that trial, received 20-year terms.
Jiang died in prison in unclear circumstances in
1991, after 15 years in isolation. Wang was
released in 1998 and later died, while Yao, also
released nearly a decade ago, is said to be
alive. So much secrecy surrounded Zhang’s
imprisonment and subsequent location and
conditions that until the recent announcement,
most of the world thought he had died in 1998.
According to the terse Xinhua communiqué, he was
released from prison in January of that year “for
medical reasons”.
At the trial, Zhang, already reportedly ill with
cancer, refused to co-operate in any way with the
authorities or even to speak at all, except to
reject the indictments. His lethal glare at the
judges was unforgettable to all those who saw the
television footage, his eyes piercing through a
face outlined by a greying but sharply defined,
defiantly jutting beard.
Jiang powerfully defended herself and Mao’s line.
Zhang’s support for Jiang and contempt for their
captors was unmistakable. In response to the
accusations, Jiang shot back that there was
nothing wrong in overthrowing the party leaders
working to take China back to capitalism. Those
who were now persecuting her and many thousands
of other revolutionaries, she said, were not in a
position to complain that they had lost their
leadership jobs. Looking back today, it is even
more striking that regardless of any “excesses”
and mistakes in the Cultural Revolution, the
difference between the revolutionary headquarters
that led the mass debates and struggles that drew
many millions of people into political life
during the Mao years and the regime that
overthrew this socialism and later carried out
the Tienanmen Square massacre to terrorise the
people and silence all dissent is like the
difference between night and day.
One of the major specific charges against the
Four was that they had tried, from Peking, to
organise an armed rebellion in Shanghai against
the coup in a bid to rally resistance throughout
the country. Chiang Chun-chiao had been the party
leader there. Although the authorities were able
to forestall the attempt in Shanghai, in part
because of the vacillation of those who were to
spearhead it locally, there was armed resistance
in many cities for several months until the army,
arrests and executions put an end to it.
The military coup was ostensibly led by Hua
Guofeng, named Mao’s successor as head of the
party while he was still alive in a compromise
between the powerful forces opposed to Mao and
those fighting to continue implementing his aims
and policies. But the coup’s real head was Deng
Xiaoping, the leader of “the capitalist roaders”
against whom Mao had aimed the Cultural
Revolution. Deng quickly dumped Hua and openly
reversed China’s course, taking it overnight from
a socialist country where “serve the people” was
the basis for all decisions to one guided by the
watchword “to get rich is glorious”.
Deng put China fully on the capitalist road to
where it is today. Before his coup, China’s
working people were increasingly becoming the
masters of all society, beginning to be drawn
into administering power at every level and
deciding the country’s future course, studying,
debating and fearlessly criticising those in
authority and each other. Afterwards, China’s
cities were turned into sweatshops, where
21st-century machinery enslaves hundreds of
millions of people in 19th-century conditions,
working 12 hours a day seven days a week. Despite
the hardships, the people are left still unable
to ensure the well-being of their families or
even to be free of the fear of unemployment – a
situation abolished within a few years after the
Chinese revolution, more than a half century
earlier. Now millions toil their whole lives away
not to create the conditions for the emancipation
of mankind but to further enrich the capitalists
of the imperialist countries and their local
subcontractors. The peasants, still the vast
majority, fall ever deeper into poverty and
humiliation, groaning under the weight of feudal
taxes and often robbed of their land. Rural
development is gutted as resources are looted
from the countryside to develop the cities. Even
the middle classes are subject to the tyranny of
corporate magnates and party despots and deprived
of meaningful lives.
The filthy rich inside and outside the party dine
and preen in their gleaming skyscrapers
overlooking slums, while officials brag to the
media about their skills in “beggar management” –
making the hungry invisible by sending the police
to beat them off the streets. The whole country
is awash with newly unleashed diseases and social
plagues revived after decades of obliteration,
such as drug addiction, prostitution and the
killing of female babies.
China took a leap into the future with the 1949
victory of the long revolutionary war to
overthrow the representatives of the foreigner
powers and the feudal big shots and monopolist
businessmen in league with them who had ruled
China. Socialism made the factories and other big
production units into the property of the people,
and over the next decades and much struggle the
peasants developed collective ownership of
agriculture. But Mao, studying this experience
and that of the Soviet Union before, including
what he analysed as the restoration of capitalism
after Stalin’s death, saw that socialist
ownership was not enough – and it was certainly
not guaranteed. In the USSR and already to an
alarming degree in China, a new capitalist class,
a new bourgeoisie, had arisen within the
communist party itself. For them, now that they
were in power, the revolution had gone far
enough. Mao believed instead that if the
revolution did not move forward, it was in great
danger from these new would-be overlords.
In 1966, as these two trends locked in battle,
Mao blew the struggle out of the confines of the
top leadership by calling on party members and
the people to “Bombard the headquarters”. This
was a call to criticise and overthrow those party
leaders trying to take China down the capitalist
road, to take the initiative in creating
socialist new things that could move society
further in a revolutionary direction, and to
study Marxism and to get a deeper understanding
of the difference between Marxism and revisionism
so that increasing numbers of people would play a
greater role in running the society. Jiang Qing
and Zhang Chunqiao were part of the national
leadership core of this unprecedented “revolution
within the revolution”. While the party was in
perilous condition and some of its leaders had to
be overthrown, the complex struggles of the
Cultural Revolution needed to be guided and
summed up and the party rebuilt in the course of
this, or else the triumph of the
capitalist-roaders could not be prevented.
Zhang was a Shanghai journalist who had joined
the party in the late 1930s. He fought as a
guerrilla fighter behind enemy lines in the war
against the Japanese occupation. After
liberation, he became a party official in that
city. In 1967, as the Cultural Revolution surged
forward, he led an earthshaking event known as
the January Storm. After months of fierce debate
to clarify the issues, rebels from Shanghai’s
factories, as well as the neighbourhoods and
schools, threw out the old city administration, a
stronghold of the capitalist roaders. Led by
revolutionary party members, at first they tried
to establish the Shanghai Commune. This was based
on the model of the 1871 Paris Commune, the
first, short-lived working class revolution,
where there was no professional army and all
officials were elected and subject to immediate
recall at any time. Marx called the Paris Commune
the world’s first example of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, the rule of the working class.
Mao hailed this uprising, a turning point in the
Cultural Revolution. The working people had
stormed onto the political stage. However, after
studying the situation, he pointed out that a
commune was not a powerful enough way for the
proletariat to rule under existing circumstances.
Unlike the situation in which Marx envisioned
socialism would arise, China was surrounded by an
imperialist-dominated world and could not do
without a standing army. Likewise, it could not
do without a stable government – a dictatorship
over those who wanted to overthrow it – and a
leading party based on the most advanced class to
lead the masses of people in exercising that
dictatorship. Otherwise, representatives of the
old society would take advantage of the existing
inequalities in society, and their connections
and privileges and the superior abilities they
had developed on that basis, to get back into
power.
Mao suggested that the rebels set up something
that had already arisen elsewhere in a beginning
way, a citywide three-in-one combination of
representatives of the rebel organisations,
revolutionary party leaders and People’s
Liberation Army. In this way, as Mao later
explained, the masses of people, having exposed
what Mao called “the dark side” of the party,
would “seize power in an all-around way and from
below”. By late 1968, revolutionary committees
based on similar principles had been set up
throughout China.
This was not a magic solution. In fact, after a
decade of struggle, the army China couldn’t do
without eventually arrested Mao’s followers, and
the capitalist-roaders who took over the party
put an abrupt end to the revolution and imposed
their own dictatorship. Mao’s authority, too, was
not enough. He was to warn, not long before he
died, that afterwards some people would try to
use some of his words to set up a disguised
capitalist regime, while others would use
different quotations to arouse the people against
them. The Maoists understood that there was still
much fighting ahead and a lot of work to do.
Zhang became one of the party’s highest leaders
as the Cultural Revolution continued and moved
through different phases and circumstances. He
helped lead the complicated battles that kept the
capitalist-roaders out of power while working to
dig up the soil – the social conditions remaining
from the old society – they were grounded in and
drew their strength from. As part of that, on the
basis of the study and reflection on Chinese and
world experience and the problems at hand under
Mao’s leadership, he made major contributions to
working out the Maoist understanding of
socialism.
In 1975, as the struggle was reaching a new peak,
he published On Exercising the All-Around
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a short but
dense text that had an explosive political
effect. It analysed the contradictory nature of
socialism, the way it is characterised by the
contention of elements of the old society and the
new. Zhang developed Mao’s understanding of
socialism as a society in transition. First of
all, he wrote, socialist ownership had not been
completely attained, especially in the
countryside, ¬and it could be easily lost.
Secondly, the relations between people in
production also had to undergo constant
transformation – in other words, working people
had to be increasingly drawn into the management
of production and even more importantly, into the
administration of the whole society, including
deciding the key questions of what production is
for and all the major aspects of the aims and
organisation of society. Further, the relations
of distribution also had to change, so that step
by step society could begin to leave behind the
principle of paying people according to their
work. While this principle meant liberation from
exploitation it also represented a situation that
still perpetuates major and potentially
oppressive inequalities, because people do not
have equal abilities or needs. Instead, over time
society must move toward creating the material
and moral conditions for everyone to contribute
as much as they can – to fully realise their
potential collectively and individually – and
receive whatever they need.
Without constant struggle to advance in all the
relations between people and not just ownership,
and struggle in the realm of culture and ideas
against the outlook and habits inherited from the
old society, socialist ownership would be turned
into a hollow shell within which the old
relationships, instead of being gradually
overcome, would be perpetuated and brought back
with a vengeance.
The most important clash in socialist society is
within the party itself, between those promoting
ideas and policies representing the interests of
a new bourgeoisie, and the representatives of the
proletariat, the working class that cannot free
itself without revolutionising everyone
throughout the globe. This becomes concentrated
in a struggle between two ideological and
political lines within the party, two clashing
outlooks and sets of aims, strategies and
policies that would take society in opposite
directions.
“The class struggle between the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the
different political forces, and the class
struggle in the ideological sphere [ideas]
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will
continue to be long and tortuous and at times
will even become very acute,” Zhang wrote. “Even
when all the landlords and capitalists of the old
generation have died, such class struggles will
by no means come to a stop, and a bourgeois
restoration may still occur if people like Lin
Piao come to power.” The reference to people like
Lin Piao, a capitalist-roader who had died a few
years earlier, was meant very specifically as a
warning about Deng Xiaoping. As Mao sharply
pointed out the year after this essay appeared,
shortly before his own death, “You are making the
socialist revolution and yet you don’t know where
the bourgeoisie is. It is right in the Communist
Party – those in power taking the capitalist
road.”
The solution, Zhang wrote, was this: “Historical
experience shows us that whether the proletariat
can triumph over the bourgeoisie and whether
China will turn revisionist hinges on whether we
can persevere in exercising all-around
dictatorship over the bourgeoisie in all spheres
and at all stages of the revolution.” This means,
he said, quoting Marx, continuing step by step
toward “the abolition of class distinctions
generally, to the abolition of all the relations
of production on which they rest, to the
abolition of all the social relations that
correspond to these relations of production, and
to the revolutionising of all the ideas that
result from these social relations.”
“The only way to attain this goal,” he concluded,
“is to exercise all-round dictatorship over the
bourgeoisie and carry the continued revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat through
to the end, until the above-mentioned four alls
are banished from the earth so that it will be
impossible for the bourgeoisie and all other
exploiting classes to exist or for new ones to
arise; we must definitely not call a halt along
the path of the transition.”
Much of what this means in terms of concrete
political, social and economic policies was
spelled out in great detail by a textbook written
by a team Zhang led. Rooted in and developing
Mao’s understanding of the contradictions in
socialist society, the “Shanghai textbook” is a
unique and rich examination of the political
economy of socialism. It rescues and applies the
Marxist understanding that economics is, in the
end, about the relations not between things but
between people. The authors addressed their work
to “the youth fighting on the front lines in the
countryside and factories... To better engage in
combat, to become politically fit more quickly,
the youth must study some political economy.”
This work is a fine example of what the Cultural
Revolution was all about: rousing the masses of
people to fight for the highest goals of
humanity, advancing the science of Marxism by
striving for a better comprehension of what is
correct in it and discarding some wrong ideas
from the past, finding ways to broadly popularise
key points and making a deep understanding the
property of as many people from among the masses
as possible. It is also a breathtaking example of
dialectical materialism – rigorously materialist
in its examination of the reasons for the
division of people into antagonistic classes and
how, concretely, to overcome that division, and
no less rigorously dialectical in its
understanding of the contradictoriness and motion
of all things. In economic terms alone, Maoist
policies were at least as effective in promoting
growth as the capitalist policies that replaced
them, if not more so. Moreover, growth under
socialism moved China in a completely opposite
direction, in terms of creating the conditions
for human emancipation instead of perpetuating
slavery to capital and its representatives.
The Shanghia textbook underwent several editions
as its authors struggled to improve their
understanding as the back-and-forth political
battle with the capitalist-roaders approached a
showdown. The new capitalist ruling class banned
the book and confiscated all the copies at the
printer as soon as they took power.
The amount of abuse – and lies – the Western and
Chinese media heaped on Zhang when he died is
testament to his revolutionary stature. The
accusations against him were sharpest from those
who were the targets of the Cultural Revolution,
in China and the world. That revolution
represents the highest peak humanity has achieved
so far. The Maoist evaluation of Zhang’s life
and work is based on our understanding of why the
Cultural Revolution was absolutely necessary, and
of the aims of the dictatorship of the
proletariat it served. Those who believe that
there is some other path to the emancipation of
humanity need to present reasoned arguments and
not just slander.
The fact that socialism was overthrown in China
does not necessarily prove that mistakes were
made. As the Chinese revolutionaries pointed out
during this last battle, in past centuries the
rising capitalist class staged many revolutions
against feudalism and was thrown back again and
again until it finally triumphed. For the
proletariat, the first revolutionary class in
history that does not aim to substitute one
exploiting class for another and which cannot
succeed until “the four alls are banished from
the earth” and not just in one or several
countries, the road can only involve twists and
turns, victories and defeats, as the world’s
people rebel again and again against the chains
on humanity’s potential, until they finally
shatter them once and for all.
“‘There is no royal road to science,’” the
Shanghai textbook quotes Marx, “and only those
who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep
paths have a chance of gaining its luminous
summits.” It goes on, “The revolutionary leaders
of the proletariat devoted their entire lives to
founding and developing Marxist theory. Following
their shining examples and diligently reading
works by Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao, we should
struggle to study and master this Marxist
theoretical weapon for the socialist revolution
and socialist construction, and for the
achievement of communism worldwide.”`
Today, standing on the shoulders of these giants,
it is necessary and natural that we continue to
develop Marxism. The Maoists will go forward on
the basis of further synthesis of the experience
of socialism and the Cultural Revolution in China
and build on the truth that Mao and his followers
discovered and fought for.
(On Exercising the All-Around Dictatorship of the
Proletariat was reprinted in A World to Win
magazine, issue no. 14, soon to be available at
www.awtw.org. For more on the Cultural Revolution
and the issues involved, see AWTW nos. 17 and 19.
The Shanghai textbook was published in English as
Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to
Communism [Banner Press, New York, 1995] and is
available from AWTW.)
- end item-
A World To Win News Service (http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/AWorldToWinNewsService/)
----
Read "On Excercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie" in its entirety here:
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ARD75.html
In Tribute to Zhang Chunqiao: 1917-2005
Revolution #3, May 22, 2005, posted at revcom.us
by Raymond Lotta
On April 21 the international proletariat lost a great leader when Zhang Chunqiao died at the age of 88. Zhang was a close colleague and follower of Mao Tsetung and a prominent leader of the Cultural Revolution. He was arrested when the counter-revolutionary forces in the Chinese Communist Party staged a coup after Mao's death in 1976.
Zhang never wavered from revolution. in its brightest hours and in its darkest moments.
Zhang Chunqiao is not widely known to the fighters and dreamers of today. For decades the regime that imprisoned him hid information about his status from the people in China and the world. And even in his death, Zhang is slandered by reactionary forces and pundits the world over. But he had an immense impact on the course of revolution and the cause of human emancipation. His is a life to celebrate, to learn about and learn from.
Maoist China was a far cry from the corrupt capitalist China of today that is socialist only in name. It was a China of genuine socialism and all-the-way revolution. A revolution that ended exploitation, that was digging up the roots of oppression and class division, breaking tradition's chains and meeting the needs of the masses. It may be hard to imagine in today's world that on this planet there was a liberating society and economy in which the masses were ruling and increasing their collective mastery. That there was an inspiring example to the oppressed of the world and a base for promoting world revolution. But this was the reality of revolutionary China—beginning with the triumph of the revolution in 1949 and reaching unprecedented heights during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, until Mao's death.
That such a society existed was inseparable from the fact that the proletariat in power had Mao Tsetung as its leader and heroes of its cause like Zhang Chunqiao.
Zhang Chunqiao occupied high positions of authority in the party and state structures—he was a member of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party, a vice premier, and head of the political department of the People's Liberation Army. And he used these positions to lead the masses to challenge entrenched officialdom, the hierarchy and inequalities of class society, and the ideological deadweight of the past. This is quite remarkable.
Zhang was a communist leader who combined a sweeping grasp of Marxist theory with a living, developing sense of the contours and dynamics of class struggle under socialism. He fought for Mao's line of continuing the revolution until all enslaving relations and ideas are overcome on a world scale. Basing himself on the science of revolution, he dared to lead the masses to seize new ground and break new ground in emancipating themselves.
Zhang was intellectually alive, a rigorous and innovative theorist who had no taste for pale doctrine. He looked to the new and captured the imagination of China's new generation of revolutionaries who came forward during the Cultural Revolution. His revolutionary leadership and writings have influenced revolutionaries around the world.
The bourgeoisie would have us believe that revolutionary leaders invariably succumb to the privileges and corruptions of power. The life of Zhang Chunqiao proves otherwise.
The Cultural Revolution: Leading in the Trenches of Struggle
It was Zhang's role in the Cultural Revolution that marked his emergence as a major leader and standard- bearer of Mao's revolutionary line of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat to achieve classless, communist society.
Mao summed up the experience of the Soviet Union, where a new exploiting class, still calling itself socialist, had come to power. He was struggling against revisionism, the betrayal of revolution under the cover and in the name of Marxism. He analyzed that a neo-capitalist elite was arising within the political and economic structures of China, and headquartered within the Communist Party. A radical solution was required: to mobilize the masses to criticize and challenge bourgeois and reactionary authority, to wage mass political struggle to overthrow the new bourgeois forces in commanding positions of society—the "capitalist roaders"—and to carry forward the process of transforming the economic, political, social, and ideological relations of society. And through all of this to further empower the masses to be the masters of society. This was the Cultural Revolution Mao launched in 1966.
Zhang Chunqiao was drafted by Mao to join the Cultural Revolution Group in Beijing to give guidance and direction to the unprecedented "revolution within the revolution." Zhang was in the thick of some of its most complicated and breakthrough episodes—including the dramatic events that came to be known as the Shanghai January Storm.
In late 1966, rebel students and rebel workers in Shanghai mounted a challenge to the city's entrenched and oppressive ruling apparatus, raised criticisms of the local party leadership, and pressed demands for a new political order. Ferment and struggle intensified. Zhang followed developments in Shanghai with great attention and returned to the city several times, bringing support from the Cultural Revolution Group and assisting and providing leadership to the rebels. The revolutionary movement grew and an alliance of rebel forces took control of the city's vital communications and administrative centers in January 1967. This was the first "seizure of power" by the masses in the Cultural Revolution. It set an example and set the ideological tone for power seizures in other parts of the country during the Cultural Revolution.
Zhang helped systematize and spread the lessons of the Shanghai Storm. And he was deeply involved in summing up the experiences and experimentation of forging new revolutionary administrative and political institutions to replace the old order.
Advancing Socialist Theory
Zhang made an enormous contribution to the international proletariat's understanding of the nature of socialist society and its economics, and the character and goal of proletarian revolution.
Zhang further developed Mao's insight that the mere conversion of the means of production to state property does not guarantee that society is socialist. The true nature of ownership is determined by what political and ideological line is in command: are the economy and society being led and moving in the direction of restricting and eliminating the significant differences and inequalities left over from capitalist society; or is society on a road, and moving in a direction, that would bring back the old order even in the disguise of socialism? Ownership, Zhang emphasized, is a question of power: who is really running society, do the masses have the ability to continue to make revolution and transform society?
Zhang analyzed that there are still capitalist aspects in the production relations of socialism. The relations between people in production are still class relations. Do managers and leading state and party functionaries take part in productive labor with the masses; and more broadly, are the masses taking part in important spheres of administrative tasks and the spheres of education and culture? Or are differences hardening and the gulf between mental and manual labor widening? Zhang explained that the division of labor cannot be overcome all at once—but at every stage in the development of the revolution it must be restricted and transformed to the greatest degree possible.
Zhang's essay "On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie" explains that the proletarian revolution is a thoroughgoing revolution that must persevere in exercising all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. This means in all spheres and at all stages of development of the revolution. The proletarian revolution aims, with Zhang citing Marx's famous description, to eliminate "the 4 Alls": all classes and class distinctions generally, all the relations of production on which they rest, all thesocial relations corresponding to them, and all the ideas that result from these social relations. This revolution must continue until it banishes these "4 Alls" from the earth.
These were not theoretical issues for discussion by a small section of party leaders. These were questions put before the masses in China. And revolutionaries throughout the world also took them up.
The Last Great Battle
Zhang Chunqiao was a pivotal figure in the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution between 1973 and 1976. In the early 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and other revisionist forces in the Communist Party began mounting an offensive to overthrow proletarian rule. Mao relied on Zhang and a core of revolutionary leaders (including Jiang Qing, who was Mao's wife) to politically arm and mobilize the masses to wage a life-and-death struggle to preserve and advance proletarian rule. Zhang rose to the challenge with vision, with scientific understanding, and with indomitable courage.
Zhang had strategic confidence in the ability of the masses to grasp their role as the makers of revolution and to grasp the science of Marxism that would enable them to do so. He acted on the understanding that the key to the defense and advance of revolution was to arouse the conscious activism of the masses. And he and the other revolutionary leaders entered the fray and gave direction to sharp and complicated struggles on many different fronts: education, industrial management, economic strategy, science and technology, and other arenas. They were continually summing up experience, drawing lessons, and applying Marxism to new problems. They were hewing a path forward and politicaly and ideologically arming the proletariat worldwide. They kept to this orientation and maintained their resolve—even when they made mistakes, even when sections of people were influenced for a time by backward ideas, even as the balance of political and international forces turned more unfavorable for the revolution in China.
And so, when the revisionists in China's Communist Party staged their armed coup after Mao died in 1976, they moved, and had to move, decisively against the revolutionary headquarters within the Communist Party. The defining act of the coup was the arrest of Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing (and the two other members of the so-called "gang of four"). This set China on the course that would turn it into the sweatshop for world capitalism that it is today.
But isolation and threats of death could not break Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao. At the show trial organized by the revisionist regime in 1980-81, Jiang Qing confronted and exposed her inquisitors and Zhang sat in defiant silence. Zhang received a death sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment; and after more than 25 years in prison, he remained unrepentant.
With the coup of 1976, the revolution in China was defeated, but the revolutionaries were not defeated politically and ideologically.
****
The Cultural Revolution was the highest pinnacle reached so far by the proletarian revolution. And Maoism must continue to learn from this experience and from the example of leaders like Zhang Chunqiao. The proletarian revolution must sum up the great strengths as well as the weaknesses and limitations of the Cultural Revolution, in order to go further and do even better, to make and continue the revolution worldwide until the historic mission of the proletariat—a communist world free of exploitation, oppression, and class distinctions altogether—has been achieved.
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Chang Chun-chiao (1917-2005): Outstanding Maoist
leader
16 May 2005. A World to Win News Service. Zhang
Chunqiao (formerly spelled Chang Chun-chiao), one
of the most outstanding revolutionary leaders of
the late 20th century, has died. He was 88.
Zhang was a leader of the so-called “Gang of
Four,” along with Jiang Qing (Chiang Ching), the
wife of Mao Zedong. It should really be called
“the gang of five”, since they were Mao’s closest
followers in the leadership of the Communist
Party of China. They were arrested a month after
Mao’s death in 1976 as part of a military coup
through which Mao’s opponents in the party seized
power, put a violent end to the Cultural
Revolution he led against them, and overthrew
socialism.
The official Chinese Xinhua News Agency bulletin
issued 10 May said that Zhang died 21 April. His
death was kept secret for nearly three weeks,
perhaps to lessen the danger that it would
occasion a fresh round of pro-Mao disturbances.
At the very least, the delay indicates a fearful
indecision and contradicts the official idea that
his figure had lost all its power.
The “Four” were convicted in 1981 for what
China’s People’s Daily now summarises as “the
excesses of the Cultural Revolution” and “trying
to seize power after the death of Mao”. Jiang
Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were sentenced to death
(later commuted to life in prison), while their
co-defendants Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who
caved in at that trial, received 20-year terms.
Jiang died in prison in unclear circumstances in
1991, after 15 years in isolation. Wang was
released in 1998 and later died, while Yao, also
released nearly a decade ago, is said to be
alive. So much secrecy surrounded Zhang’s
imprisonment and subsequent location and
conditions that until the recent announcement,
most of the world thought he had died in 1998.
According to the terse Xinhua communiqué, he was
released from prison in January of that year “for
medical reasons”.
At the trial, Zhang, already reportedly ill with
cancer, refused to co-operate in any way with the
authorities or even to speak at all, except to
reject the indictments. His lethal glare at the
judges was unforgettable to all those who saw the
television footage, his eyes piercing through a
face outlined by a greying but sharply defined,
defiantly jutting beard.
Jiang powerfully defended herself and Mao’s line.
Zhang’s support for Jiang and contempt for their
captors was unmistakable. In response to the
accusations, Jiang shot back that there was
nothing wrong in overthrowing the party leaders
working to take China back to capitalism. Those
who were now persecuting her and many thousands
of other revolutionaries, she said, were not in a
position to complain that they had lost their
leadership jobs. Looking back today, it is even
more striking that regardless of any “excesses”
and mistakes in the Cultural Revolution, the
difference between the revolutionary headquarters
that led the mass debates and struggles that drew
many millions of people into political life
during the Mao years and the regime that
overthrew this socialism and later carried out
the Tienanmen Square massacre to terrorise the
people and silence all dissent is like the
difference between night and day.
One of the major specific charges against the
Four was that they had tried, from Peking, to
organise an armed rebellion in Shanghai against
the coup in a bid to rally resistance throughout
the country. Chiang Chun-chiao had been the party
leader there. Although the authorities were able
to forestall the attempt in Shanghai, in part
because of the vacillation of those who were to
spearhead it locally, there was armed resistance
in many cities for several months until the army,
arrests and executions put an end to it.
The military coup was ostensibly led by Hua
Guofeng, named Mao’s successor as head of the
party while he was still alive in a compromise
between the powerful forces opposed to Mao and
those fighting to continue implementing his aims
and policies. But the coup’s real head was Deng
Xiaoping, the leader of “the capitalist roaders”
against whom Mao had aimed the Cultural
Revolution. Deng quickly dumped Hua and openly
reversed China’s course, taking it overnight from
a socialist country where “serve the people” was
the basis for all decisions to one guided by the
watchword “to get rich is glorious”.
Deng put China fully on the capitalist road to
where it is today. Before his coup, China’s
working people were increasingly becoming the
masters of all society, beginning to be drawn
into administering power at every level and
deciding the country’s future course, studying,
debating and fearlessly criticising those in
authority and each other. Afterwards, China’s
cities were turned into sweatshops, where
21st-century machinery enslaves hundreds of
millions of people in 19th-century conditions,
working 12 hours a day seven days a week. Despite
the hardships, the people are left still unable
to ensure the well-being of their families or
even to be free of the fear of unemployment – a
situation abolished within a few years after the
Chinese revolution, more than a half century
earlier. Now millions toil their whole lives away
not to create the conditions for the emancipation
of mankind but to further enrich the capitalists
of the imperialist countries and their local
subcontractors. The peasants, still the vast
majority, fall ever deeper into poverty and
humiliation, groaning under the weight of feudal
taxes and often robbed of their land. Rural
development is gutted as resources are looted
from the countryside to develop the cities. Even
the middle classes are subject to the tyranny of
corporate magnates and party despots and deprived
of meaningful lives.
The filthy rich inside and outside the party dine
and preen in their gleaming skyscrapers
overlooking slums, while officials brag to the
media about their skills in “beggar management” –
making the hungry invisible by sending the police
to beat them off the streets. The whole country
is awash with newly unleashed diseases and social
plagues revived after decades of obliteration,
such as drug addiction, prostitution and the
killing of female babies.
China took a leap into the future with the 1949
victory of the long revolutionary war to
overthrow the representatives of the foreigner
powers and the feudal big shots and monopolist
businessmen in league with them who had ruled
China. Socialism made the factories and other big
production units into the property of the people,
and over the next decades and much struggle the
peasants developed collective ownership of
agriculture. But Mao, studying this experience
and that of the Soviet Union before, including
what he analysed as the restoration of capitalism
after Stalin’s death, saw that socialist
ownership was not enough – and it was certainly
not guaranteed. In the USSR and already to an
alarming degree in China, a new capitalist class,
a new bourgeoisie, had arisen within the
communist party itself. For them, now that they
were in power, the revolution had gone far
enough. Mao believed instead that if the
revolution did not move forward, it was in great
danger from these new would-be overlords.
In 1966, as these two trends locked in battle,
Mao blew the struggle out of the confines of the
top leadership by calling on party members and
the people to “Bombard the headquarters”. This
was a call to criticise and overthrow those party
leaders trying to take China down the capitalist
road, to take the initiative in creating
socialist new things that could move society
further in a revolutionary direction, and to
study Marxism and to get a deeper understanding
of the difference between Marxism and revisionism
so that increasing numbers of people would play a
greater role in running the society. Jiang Qing
and Zhang Chunqiao were part of the national
leadership core of this unprecedented “revolution
within the revolution”. While the party was in
perilous condition and some of its leaders had to
be overthrown, the complex struggles of the
Cultural Revolution needed to be guided and
summed up and the party rebuilt in the course of
this, or else the triumph of the
capitalist-roaders could not be prevented.
Zhang was a Shanghai journalist who had joined
the party in the late 1930s. He fought as a
guerrilla fighter behind enemy lines in the war
against the Japanese occupation. After
liberation, he became a party official in that
city. In 1967, as the Cultural Revolution surged
forward, he led an earthshaking event known as
the January Storm. After months of fierce debate
to clarify the issues, rebels from Shanghai’s
factories, as well as the neighbourhoods and
schools, threw out the old city administration, a
stronghold of the capitalist roaders. Led by
revolutionary party members, at first they tried
to establish the Shanghai Commune. This was based
on the model of the 1871 Paris Commune, the
first, short-lived working class revolution,
where there was no professional army and all
officials were elected and subject to immediate
recall at any time. Marx called the Paris Commune
the world’s first example of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, the rule of the working class.
Mao hailed this uprising, a turning point in the
Cultural Revolution. The working people had
stormed onto the political stage. However, after
studying the situation, he pointed out that a
commune was not a powerful enough way for the
proletariat to rule under existing circumstances.
Unlike the situation in which Marx envisioned
socialism would arise, China was surrounded by an
imperialist-dominated world and could not do
without a standing army. Likewise, it could not
do without a stable government – a dictatorship
over those who wanted to overthrow it – and a
leading party based on the most advanced class to
lead the masses of people in exercising that
dictatorship. Otherwise, representatives of the
old society would take advantage of the existing
inequalities in society, and their connections
and privileges and the superior abilities they
had developed on that basis, to get back into
power.
Mao suggested that the rebels set up something
that had already arisen elsewhere in a beginning
way, a citywide three-in-one combination of
representatives of the rebel organisations,
revolutionary party leaders and People’s
Liberation Army. In this way, as Mao later
explained, the masses of people, having exposed
what Mao called “the dark side” of the party,
would “seize power in an all-around way and from
below”. By late 1968, revolutionary committees
based on similar principles had been set up
throughout China.
This was not a magic solution. In fact, after a
decade of struggle, the army China couldn’t do
without eventually arrested Mao’s followers, and
the capitalist-roaders who took over the party
put an abrupt end to the revolution and imposed
their own dictatorship. Mao’s authority, too, was
not enough. He was to warn, not long before he
died, that afterwards some people would try to
use some of his words to set up a disguised
capitalist regime, while others would use
different quotations to arouse the people against
them. The Maoists understood that there was still
much fighting ahead and a lot of work to do.
Zhang became one of the party’s highest leaders
as the Cultural Revolution continued and moved
through different phases and circumstances. He
helped lead the complicated battles that kept the
capitalist-roaders out of power while working to
dig up the soil – the social conditions remaining
from the old society – they were grounded in and
drew their strength from. As part of that, on the
basis of the study and reflection on Chinese and
world experience and the problems at hand under
Mao’s leadership, he made major contributions to
working out the Maoist understanding of
socialism.
In 1975, as the struggle was reaching a new peak,
he published On Exercising the All-Around
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a short but
dense text that had an explosive political
effect. It analysed the contradictory nature of
socialism, the way it is characterised by the
contention of elements of the old society and the
new. Zhang developed Mao’s understanding of
socialism as a society in transition. First of
all, he wrote, socialist ownership had not been
completely attained, especially in the
countryside, ¬and it could be easily lost.
Secondly, the relations between people in
production also had to undergo constant
transformation – in other words, working people
had to be increasingly drawn into the management
of production and even more importantly, into the
administration of the whole society, including
deciding the key questions of what production is
for and all the major aspects of the aims and
organisation of society. Further, the relations
of distribution also had to change, so that step
by step society could begin to leave behind the
principle of paying people according to their
work. While this principle meant liberation from
exploitation it also represented a situation that
still perpetuates major and potentially
oppressive inequalities, because people do not
have equal abilities or needs. Instead, over time
society must move toward creating the material
and moral conditions for everyone to contribute
as much as they can – to fully realise their
potential collectively and individually – and
receive whatever they need.
Without constant struggle to advance in all the
relations between people and not just ownership,
and struggle in the realm of culture and ideas
against the outlook and habits inherited from the
old society, socialist ownership would be turned
into a hollow shell within which the old
relationships, instead of being gradually
overcome, would be perpetuated and brought back
with a vengeance.
The most important clash in socialist society is
within the party itself, between those promoting
ideas and policies representing the interests of
a new bourgeoisie, and the representatives of the
proletariat, the working class that cannot free
itself without revolutionising everyone
throughout the globe. This becomes concentrated
in a struggle between two ideological and
political lines within the party, two clashing
outlooks and sets of aims, strategies and
policies that would take society in opposite
directions.
“The class struggle between the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the
different political forces, and the class
struggle in the ideological sphere [ideas]
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will
continue to be long and tortuous and at times
will even become very acute,” Zhang wrote. “Even
when all the landlords and capitalists of the old
generation have died, such class struggles will
by no means come to a stop, and a bourgeois
restoration may still occur if people like Lin
Piao come to power.” The reference to people like
Lin Piao, a capitalist-roader who had died a few
years earlier, was meant very specifically as a
warning about Deng Xiaoping. As Mao sharply
pointed out the year after this essay appeared,
shortly before his own death, “You are making the
socialist revolution and yet you don’t know where
the bourgeoisie is. It is right in the Communist
Party – those in power taking the capitalist
road.”
The solution, Zhang wrote, was this: “Historical
experience shows us that whether the proletariat
can triumph over the bourgeoisie and whether
China will turn revisionist hinges on whether we
can persevere in exercising all-around
dictatorship over the bourgeoisie in all spheres
and at all stages of the revolution.” This means,
he said, quoting Marx, continuing step by step
toward “the abolition of class distinctions
generally, to the abolition of all the relations
of production on which they rest, to the
abolition of all the social relations that
correspond to these relations of production, and
to the revolutionising of all the ideas that
result from these social relations.”
“The only way to attain this goal,” he concluded,
“is to exercise all-round dictatorship over the
bourgeoisie and carry the continued revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat through
to the end, until the above-mentioned four alls
are banished from the earth so that it will be
impossible for the bourgeoisie and all other
exploiting classes to exist or for new ones to
arise; we must definitely not call a halt along
the path of the transition.”
Much of what this means in terms of concrete
political, social and economic policies was
spelled out in great detail by a textbook written
by a team Zhang led. Rooted in and developing
Mao’s understanding of the contradictions in
socialist society, the “Shanghai textbook” is a
unique and rich examination of the political
economy of socialism. It rescues and applies the
Marxist understanding that economics is, in the
end, about the relations not between things but
between people. The authors addressed their work
to “the youth fighting on the front lines in the
countryside and factories... To better engage in
combat, to become politically fit more quickly,
the youth must study some political economy.”
This work is a fine example of what the Cultural
Revolution was all about: rousing the masses of
people to fight for the highest goals of
humanity, advancing the science of Marxism by
striving for a better comprehension of what is
correct in it and discarding some wrong ideas
from the past, finding ways to broadly popularise
key points and making a deep understanding the
property of as many people from among the masses
as possible. It is also a breathtaking example of
dialectical materialism – rigorously materialist
in its examination of the reasons for the
division of people into antagonistic classes and
how, concretely, to overcome that division, and
no less rigorously dialectical in its
understanding of the contradictoriness and motion
of all things. In economic terms alone, Maoist
policies were at least as effective in promoting
growth as the capitalist policies that replaced
them, if not more so. Moreover, growth under
socialism moved China in a completely opposite
direction, in terms of creating the conditions
for human emancipation instead of perpetuating
slavery to capital and its representatives.
The Shanghia textbook underwent several editions
as its authors struggled to improve their
understanding as the back-and-forth political
battle with the capitalist-roaders approached a
showdown. The new capitalist ruling class banned
the book and confiscated all the copies at the
printer as soon as they took power.
The amount of abuse – and lies – the Western and
Chinese media heaped on Zhang when he died is
testament to his revolutionary stature. The
accusations against him were sharpest from those
who were the targets of the Cultural Revolution,
in China and the world. That revolution
represents the highest peak humanity has achieved
so far. The Maoist evaluation of Zhang’s life
and work is based on our understanding of why the
Cultural Revolution was absolutely necessary, and
of the aims of the dictatorship of the
proletariat it served. Those who believe that
there is some other path to the emancipation of
humanity need to present reasoned arguments and
not just slander.
The fact that socialism was overthrown in China
does not necessarily prove that mistakes were
made. As the Chinese revolutionaries pointed out
during this last battle, in past centuries the
rising capitalist class staged many revolutions
against feudalism and was thrown back again and
again until it finally triumphed. For the
proletariat, the first revolutionary class in
history that does not aim to substitute one
exploiting class for another and which cannot
succeed until “the four alls are banished from
the earth” and not just in one or several
countries, the road can only involve twists and
turns, victories and defeats, as the world’s
people rebel again and again against the chains
on humanity’s potential, until they finally
shatter them once and for all.
“‘There is no royal road to science,’” the
Shanghai textbook quotes Marx, “and only those
who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep
paths have a chance of gaining its luminous
summits.” It goes on, “The revolutionary leaders
of the proletariat devoted their entire lives to
founding and developing Marxist theory. Following
their shining examples and diligently reading
works by Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao, we should
struggle to study and master this Marxist
theoretical weapon for the socialist revolution
and socialist construction, and for the
achievement of communism worldwide.”`
Today, standing on the shoulders of these giants,
it is necessary and natural that we continue to
develop Marxism. The Maoists will go forward on
the basis of further synthesis of the experience
of socialism and the Cultural Revolution in China
and build on the truth that Mao and his followers
discovered and fought for.
(On Exercising the All-Around Dictatorship of the
Proletariat was reprinted in A World to Win
magazine, issue no. 14, soon to be available at
www.awtw.org. For more on the Cultural Revolution
and the issues involved, see AWTW nos. 17 and 19.
The Shanghai textbook was published in English as
Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to
Communism [Banner Press, New York, 1995] and is
available from AWTW.)
- end item-
A World To Win News Service (http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/AWorldToWinNewsService/)
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Read "On Excercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie" in its entirety here:
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ARD75.html