Beijing Review: "The Workers Are the Masters," July 6, 1973 This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Source: "The Workers Are the Masters," Beijing Review 16, no. 27, 6 July 1973, 11-14.

Transcribed by an HC, May 12, 2005


BEIJING REVIEW

July 6, 1973


Socialist Industry

The Workers Are the Masters [pt. 2]

The second in a series of three reports on a state-owned factory: its leadership, technical and managerial staff and trade union.

The Shanghai Watch Factory which has an annual capacity of 2.5 million watches is a socialist state-owned enterprise. As such, it belongs lock, stock and barrel to the state, hence to the whole people. But public ownership of the means of production alone does not make the workers the masters in their own factories. The all-important question is: Who holds the reins of power in a factory and what sort of a political line is carried out. If power is in the hands of revisionists instead of Marxist deputies of the working class, if a revisionist rather than a proletarian revolutionary line is followed, then public ownership would be empty talk and the factory would be a place where the proletarians would be oppressed and exploited by a handful in a privileged stratum -- new-born bourgeois elements.

Here is what we found at the Shanghai Watch Factory.

Party Committee Secretary and Factory Leadership

The working class, as the leading class, exercises leadership over the state and the government through its vanguard, the Communist Party. In the factories, the factory Party committees, the grass-roots organizations of the Party, exercise centralized leadership over all factory work.

We went to see Chang Chang-an, secretary of the Party committee and chairman of the revolutionary committee. He was recuperating from an illness at his home, a two-room flat in an old apartment building. The rooms were quite small, adding up to less than 30 square metres. We saw better accommodations for some of the older workers in the more recently built housing estates.

Sixty-four this year, Chang is no watch-making expert. He had only two years of schooling during his boyhood.

The son of a poor Shantung peasant before liberation, he still remembers how in his childhood the vicious landlords pressed his father for payment of debts on lunar New Year's Eve. As a young man he spent ten long years of back-breaking toil on the junks in Pohai Bay, a prey to the raging elements and a witness of tragic accidents to this mates.

At 32, Chang found the road to liberation. He joined the Chinese Communist Party. From then on, it was one long road of struggle ahead -- against the Japanese invaders, against the Kuomintang reactionaries, against the landlords in the countryside where he led the peasants in land reform. The first thing he did in liberated Shanghai was to organize the workers to expose the bribery, tax evasion and other shady dealings of the capitalist factory owners.

Chang had not been always right. Taken in by Liu Shao-chi's revisionist line, he made some mistakes. The storm of the Great Cultural Revolution overtook him, and he was severely criticized by the workers. For a period, he worked as a janitor to remind himself how to be a working man.

Meanwhile, he had begun to see his errors and sincerely criticized himself at workers' meetings. One day in November 1969, all the factory's 3,000-odd workers and staff members gathered in the auditorium to celebrate the birth of the new factory revolutionary committee. Still feeling sorry for his mistakes, Chang quietly slipped into a corner seat. Warm applause awoke him to the realization that the workers wanted him up on the platform and in the presidium. He was elected chairman of the revolutionary committee. Moved to tears, Chang secretly resolved from then on, as never before, to put all his trust in the working class. In 1970, he was elected the secretary of the factory's Party committee.

There was a shortage of watch-cases in summer 1971 and a big punch to do the job had to be installed. Because there was no time to build the required workshop, the workers suggested installing it in a makeshift shed. The plan was passed, and Party committee members joined in the construction. Chang, at 62, worked with as much alacrity as many a younger man in the three days it took, despite a driving rain.

Chang gets slightly higher wages than most skilled workers. The other 9 members on the Party committee, [p. 12] including 3 deputy secretaries and two women, were all production workers. Their salaries are all lower than veteran skilled workers.

[Two photographs]
Ordinary labourers: Watch factory Party committee secretary Chang Chang-an at home ( left ). Deputy secretary Lu Yung-chang in a workshop ( right ).

Chang enjoys free medical service in the same hospital as all the workers. With the other leading cadres, he takes his meals in the factory canteen like everybody else. Workers address the factory Party committee secretaries as Lao Chang (Old Chang) or Lao Kung or as shifu (meaning master), a term of respect for skilled workers and craftsmen. The watch Lao Chang wears is a 1968 factory model he bought: this has gone out of production and has been replaced by a better looking model.

The Party committee concentrates mainly on matters of fundamental importance -- ideological and political questions and questions of line -- as well as major production problems. Day-to-day production, administration and technical matters are handled by the factory revolutionary committee, of which Chang is concurrently chairman. Deputy secretary Sung Tsung-yung of the Party committee, up from the ranks during the Great Cultural Revolution, is concurrently vice-chairman of the revolutionary committee and chairman of the factory trade union. Four other Party committee members are on the revolutionary committee.

The Party committee was elected by secret ballot by the factory's 444 Party members. The list of candidates was announced to the non-Party members beforehand, who were asked for their frank opinions. Each candidate's strong and weak points came under open discussion, and some of the criticism was quite sharp.

The factory's 16-member revolutionary committee was set up in 1969. Besides the chairman, Chang, 14 are production workers and one is an engineer. The youngest man on the committee is 31-year-old Chou Kai-sheng, a bench worker before the Cultural Revolution. He is also a member of the Party committee and secretary of the factory Youth League committee. The youngest man on the committee is 31-year-old Chou Kai-sheng, a bench worker before the Cultural Revolution. He is also a member of the Party committee and secretary of the factory Youth League committee. The youngest woman member is Chou Mei-hu, also 31, who works in the hairspring workshop.

Technical and Managerial Staff

That "the workers are masters in their factories" is readily apparent in the new relationship between them and the engineering-technical corps and managerial staff. (In China the latter are grouped under the name of "staff members," while in the capitalist countries they are called "white collar" workers.)

We interviewed engineer Ho Shao-tseng, the technical director of the factory's central laboratory. An intellectual who had a college education, he also is on the factory revolutionary committee.

The idea of "white collar" workers does not exist in the watch factory literally. Engineers, technicians, accountants and other managerial staff dress no differently from the workers. There is no such thing as a special managerial stratum that does not take part in labour and lords it over the working people. On the contrary, particularly since the start of the Cultural Revolution, they have done their best to integrate with the workers in accordance with Chairman Mao's revolutionary line.

A young technician named Chi Teh-lin, a college graduate, was eager to make his contribution to socialist construction along with other young people. But the influence of the revisionist line pushed by Liu Shao-chih and his gang made him remain aloof from the workers, from labour and from practice both at school and in the factory. He hardly knew how to operate the instruments used to check the quality of the finished machine tools and other products, though he had drawn up the regulations for handling these operations. The leadership once told him to make a blueprint for a modern equipment. The piece had on it a screw hole [,] which, evidently due to an oversight by the makers, was completley superfluous. By copying the model [p. 13] without much thought, he retained this hole in the blueprint.

During the Great Cultural Revolution, Chi Teh-lin was put to work in a workshop along with many other technicians. At first he was rather bitter. What a waste, he would say, for a college graduate to have to sling a hammer. Soon he began to think differently. The selfless spirit of the working class and its rich experience impressed him and opened his eyes. Gradually changes in his ideology occurred, and they bore material fruit. Together with the workers, he improved a high-grade machine tool by simplifying the process for making an important cog-wheel. This time, his design was practical. Adopted, it raised both efficiency and quality. It was one of the factory's most important innovations in recent years.

Ho Shao-tseng himself worked in the workshops for nearly a year. Factory regulations stipulate that leading personnel at all levels as well as engineering-technical people and managerial staff must take part in physical labour, generally one day a week. Apart from this, they are required to take turns working comparatively long periods in the workshops.

Training technical staff from among the workers goes hand in hand with technical and managerial staff integrating themselves with the workers. Of the 97-strong engineering-technical force in the factory today, 22 come from the ranks of workers. Party committee member Yu Teh-tsai, a mechanic, was sent by the factory to the Shanghai University of Science and Technology to study. He is now in charge of all factory equipment. A factory-run technical school is attended by workers who get their regular pay while they study for a year. Workers have a big say in designing all new products, making changes to existing equipment or innovations in technological processes.

[A photograph]
Integrating with workers: Technician Chi Teh-lin ( 1st left ) and veteran workers working on an innovation.

In wages and living standards, the young technicians differ very slightly from the ordinary workers, while the older technicians' pay is somewhat higher. The senior engineer in the factory, Ho gets as much as a veteran craftsman. The technicians mix freely with the workers in work and study, at meals and on the sports grounds. Many technicians have married ordinary workers.

These and many other things we saw point to the fact that the gap between the workers and the technical and managerial staff is not widening but narrowing.

The Trade Union

Bright red paper posters announcing an auspicious event met our eye the moment we stepped into each workshop. A closer look showed them to be lists of workshop representatives to the factory workers' congress to elect a new factory trade union committee. How does the trade union contribute to making the workers "masters in their own factories"?

We were introduced to Sun Tsung-yung, chairman of the factory trade union elected at the congress.

Thirty-nine-year-old Sun is a member of the Communist Party. A a rank and file worker, he was the head of the factory workers' rebel organization during the Great Cultural Revolution. Now one of the three deputy secretaries of the Party committee, he told us his ideas on the role of the trade union.

With the liberation of the country, the working class has become the leading class and the dictatorship of the proletariat has been put into force. Where then does the trade union come in? Before the Cultural Revolution, under the influence of Liu Shao-chi's theory of "the dying out of class struggle," the watch factory trade union at times neglected to pay attention to class struggle. Sun said emphatically: "Now it's been driven home to us that class struggle is not over. If the revisionists got into power, where would we workers be? We'd be back at the bottom -- wretched and powerless. who would be the masters of the factories then? Certainly not us!"

During the Cultural Revolution, the workers organized a rebel organization which opened fire on the handful of class enemies and the [p. 14] revisionist line. This was one of the fundamental measures to ensure that the workers are masters of the factories.

[A photograph]
Studying Marxism-Leninism: Trade union chairman Sun Tsung-yung and young vice-chairman Yu Hsiao-ming ( 3rd and 2nd from right, facing row ) at a discussion.

So what exactly does the trade union do now, and how does it do it?

Sun told us: The Party, of course, is the vanguard organization of the proletariat, whereas the trade union is a mass organization of the workers. The trade union branch at every level -- from the factory down to the different workshops -- work under the leadership of the Party organization at the same level. The first duty of the trade union is to organize the workers in studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, and educate them in ideology and political line. Right now, the whole factory is studying the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels and Lenin's The State and Revolution . The workers take turns attending short-term study classes with full wages.

The trade union, according to Sun, must keep a tight grip on class struggle and the struggle between the two lines, and mobilize the workers to criticize the bourgeoisie and revisionism. The factory is currently in the midst of a campaign to repudiate the revisionist line of Liu Shao-chi and other political swindlers through such activities as holding all kinds of meetings and putting up wall newspapers.

The trade union also helps the workers do their production work well. It sees to it that the workers supervise and assist the leadership. It looks after the life of the workers. When an old worker retired not long ago, the workshop trade union branch gave him a big send-off, pinning a crimson flower on his jacket and taking him home in the factory care to the beating of gongs and drums. It put up a framed certificate of honourable retirement at the old worker's home. This is just one of many examples of the work done by trade union today.

Sun touched on another major aspect of trade union work -- to select worker-activists, train them to lead trade union work and recommend them for posts of responsibility in the administration.

One of the two trade union vice-chairmen is Yu Hsiao-ming, a young woman worker of 23. In the four years she has worked in the factory, she has studied diligently and worked hard and is an outspoken adversary of all kinds of bourgeois ideas. Following the Party's instructions on training worker-cadres, young cadres and woman cadres, the workers recommended her for her present post. Young and inexperienced, she was bashful in speaking with us. However, it was clear that a few years' training will give her the necessary assurance and ability to lead in trade union work.

Sun Tsung-yung told us that, last but not least, the trade union must persist in educating the workers in proletarian internationalism. In studying the Manifesto of the Communist Party , for instance, Marx and Engels' famous words "Workers of all countries, unite!" were discussed at length.

The newly elected trade union committee, the factory's leading trade union organization, has 24 members. Many continue on their jobs, including the vice-chairman Yu Hsiao-ming. Sun Tsung-yung still gets the same wages he used to get as a worker after the double responsibility of trade union chairman and deputy Party committee secretary fell upon him. Although he suffers from the serious stomach ulcers he contracted in former hard times, he frequently works overtime when necessary.

The leading comrades in the watch factory were very modest, constantly telling us that they still had a long way to go. Labour productivity, for instance, was not yet up to advanced international standards, nor was the degree of automation.

To our minds, these things can be quickly changed. For in this factory, we saw no privileged few riding on the backs of the workers. We saw no "managerial stratum" bossing the workers around. We saw no "labour aristocracy" keeping the trade union under their thumb. The workers here are really the masters.

[End]