MIM discusses New Zealand pamphlet on Cultural Revolution and China Workers' Party of New Zealand says it won't reply ____________________________________________________ [Here MIM's International Minister replies to an article by the Workers' Party of New Zealand on the Cultural Revolution in China. The Cultural Revolution is one of the four cardinal questions MIM is willing to split over in the movement calling itself "communist." The New Zealand party's article is titled "The Restoration of Capitalism in China." The Workers Party of New Zealand sent us the following message on November 25th, 1998 about the article below: "We are in receipt of your comments on our pamphlet 'The Restoration of Capitalism in China'. Relative to your suggestions for a discussion of the subject, we have to say that we are in disagreement with your views and lack the time to go into our differences. In due course we anticipate that ideological questions will find their solution in practice. We are content to await the outcome."] We would like to offer the following comments on "The Restoration of Capitalism in China." Our disagreements focus on the relatively small section on what you see as the Cultural Revolution's mistakes. The rest of the article we consider to be accurate if perhaps overly faithful to a certain interpretation regarding the Ultraleft. In particular, we do not see that your article puts the correct emphases on these questions including how the Right (literally Deng and Liu) disguise themselves as Ultraleft on occasion in order to discredit the proletarian camp. Nonetheless, we do not wish to dispute the general problem of ultraleft winds occurring in China during the Cultural Revolution. You seem to be saying Mao let the Cultural Revolution become too much of a "big deal." Why didn't he just use his prestige to bring pressure from the masses to bear on the capitalist gang? You say Lenin had to threaten to resign to handle the dawdlers like Trotsky unwilling to sign peace with Germany. You forget that Mao did threaten resignation. He had already given the party a choice--between himself and Peng Dehuai. Mao knew Lenin's tactics and applied them. Yet while Mao acted openly and aboveboard, his enemies attacked him by stealth. "On Hai Rui Dismissed from Office," was the subject that kicked off the Cultural Revolution, because intellectual and political elites were attacking Mao secretively. It was Yao Wenyuan's accomplishment to explain this to the masses with Mao's backing him to get published. It was the whole signal for the Cultural Revolution. The party's unity prevented Mao and the proletarian camp from squelching these attacks in the party presented in the public in guised forms understood by political and intellectual elites. It is exactly this reason that Mao believed--and not mistakenly--that the masses would have to learn to unmask revisionism directly for themselves. Your suggestion about how to conduct the struggle more along Lenin's lines boils down to this: the bourgeoisie in the party should be allowed to attack the proletarian camp in public, but the proletarian camp should rely only on its Central Committee majority to fight its battles. However, the Central Committee is not a fortress with no gates to the masses. What good is it to have a proletarian majority on a Central Committee if its hands are tied in attacking bourgeois reaction? Sooner or later that proletarian majority would be overthrown if the bourgeoisie were allowed to attack and attack without response. The organizational form is subordinate to the class content. For this reason the entire COMINTERN was abolished. Yet to seem to be "attacking the party" for a brief period in the eyes of the enemy seems unthinkable to you. It is not possible to be a party of Lenin without being a vanguard party and that is not possible without proletarian politics in command regardless of what organizational form or tactics the enemy adopts. And given what had happened in the Soviet Union, how was Mao to know in advance of struggle that he had a proletarian majority anyway? You ask too much to be summed up in advance when you say Mao's goals were too diffuse. Surely we communists needed to be scientifically humbled by Khruschev's coup, to be open to observing our own Central Committee scientifically? It was Mao's greatness to understand dialectically why the masses revered him. Yes, we believe the masses followed him, but we believe Mao understood the reasons the masses followed him with painstaking clarity. Even supposing the party organization was not squelching the Maoist articles as Mao said and even supposing Mao could overcome that problem within the bounds of the party bureaucracy, it would still remain that the masses followed him subjectively without being able to fight the way the bourgeoisie in the party was able to fight. That's why he was quite right to use the method of Cultural Revolution starting with the persynality cult and then puncturing it, so the masses would get a chance to fight the bourgeoisie everywhere. The Lin Biao event had such a deflating effect on the Cultural Revolution, precisely because the people subjectively sided with Mao but did not understand the nature of the fight ahead. The coup attempt by one or a handful of individuals like Lin Biao could not have had such an effect if the masses were not following the correct authority for the wrong reasons. Mao understood this. To this day, many who now revile Mao in China and outside do not. To be subjectively revolutionary is not enough. In effect being merely subjectively revolutionary guarantees defeat. We must be revolutionary in our impact, not just our intentions. The Lin Biao event was deflating, because Authority had said Lin Biao was Authority. Yet when Lin Biao turned against Mao, it proved that both had to be wrong by a certain pre-scientific thinking focussed on individuals and authority and not class. Individuals makes mistakes; they follow scientifically incorrect paths; they reverse themselves 100 percent; as we say now in a California-derived phrase, they "flake out"; they make deviations and even turn traitor, but applying all this knowledge to Lin Biao was the problem. Had Lin Biao worked out as a proletarian leader, it is possibile there would have been a basis for stability. In this the masses were correct: we communists do stand discredited if we can't show them how unity can be achieved yet on progressively more advanced bases. Hence, the real question boils down to whether Mao was correct to ask for more than unity based on persynality cult and reverence for military authority. Since the Cultural Revolution ended up taking 10 years with repeated mobilizations and no respite as you say, perhaps Mao should have settled at the stage in 1969 where unity was based on persynality cult and military authority--at least for a strategic length of time. If so then perhaps we can hold Mao and the Cultural Revolution to blame for the departure of Lin. Nonetheless, once Lin was gone, there is no doubt that this had to be explained to the masses. There would have to be campaigns on the question. To this extent we cannot blame the "length" of the Cultural Revolution. We can only blame Mao if he is really to blame for Lin's deparature from the proletarian camp in the first place. These questions are difficult to answer especially with individuals, but MIM likes to follow the trajectories of people who leave the party. The minority left the CP-USA after Stalin's pact with Hitler, but it did not go on to do something political, never mind politically superior. In the guise of Trotskyist-supplied rhetoric, the minority went into political inactivity satisfied with Roosevelt's making the labor aristocracy a partner with a bigger share of the imperialist gravy. Along these lines, Mao tried to give the masses the tools they needed to evaluate him even on this point. The fact that Lin died on the way to the Soviet Union seems to MIM to vindicate Mao. Under what circumstances could we forgive Lin for that? Certainly we turn the masses into enemies on occasion when we make mistakes, but supposing Mao had made severe mistakes with Lin, would Lin have been justified in going to the Soviet Union? This very same Lin was supposed to be not just another member of the masses, but the anointed successor to Mao. Even if he felt political or military threat from Mao, he should have stood the heat and not left the kitchen for the Soviet Union. Rather than conclude as you do that there was a "mistake," MIM concludes that indeed this struggle with the bourgeoisie in the party is arduous and not a matter as conceived in the past of brushing up against a few mistakes or attacking a revisionist line or executing a few agents brigbed by imperialist agencies. There is actually a bourgeoisie "nestling" beside us, regardless of our subjective intentions. The fact that even Lin could wind up going to the social-imperialists proves the need for a theory of continuous revolution. Reality is simply more difficult for the revolution than threatening resignation or ordering workers to support revolution. This theory of continuous revolution against a bourgeoisie in the party arising from a material basis within socialist dictatorship arose in the 1960s and had to be applied instantaneously. In the history of modern revolutions when has this ever happened before? When has it occurred that the reason for a new revolution appears and the revolution occurs simultaneously? This brings us to your point about students. You refer to your discussion with Kang Sheng, but Mao's words on the subject are published and correct. There is no modern revolution not preceded by intellectual ferment and there is no revolution where youth don't move first even as it is true that mature classes have to finish the job. The French Revolution aside from having the Amerikan Revolution 13 years prior also had a hundred years of intellectual ferment preceding it. The Enlightenment ideas had been circulating. Of course, Marxism had made the rounds for quite some time in Europe before the Russian Revolution. Even then Lenin and Stalin spent a long portion of their lives in exile and bitter struggle before 1917 and the masses only chose Leninism through a process of intellectual elimination. Your article mentions the May 4th Movement, and that too was the fermentation of intellectuals and students preceding the Chinese Revolution of 1949 by a generation. To rebut Mao on this point as you do would require your rebutting not just Chinese history, which you do not attempt. Simply ordering the workers to take up Cultural Revolution leadership was not the answer. It seems to be an economist-spontaneist interpretation of history underlying this criticism of Mao--a failure to recognize such things as the role of bourgeois intellectuals in the party, the failure to recognize the role of youth and the failure to see that what is important is proletarian thought in command. To expect the workers to instantly take up Cultural Revolution, a new revolution in the history of the world, without a long period of "undisciplined" struggle by students and intellectuals--such an expectation conforms to no revolution in history.