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From The New International, Vol. XXIV No. 2–3, Spring–Summer 1958, pp. 90–103.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The seizure of power by the Chinese Communists is one of the most important events of the twentieth century. For Communism has triumphed in a land populated by over 500 million people during an era of epochal colonial upheavals and, more than that, China offers the colonial world a disguised alternative to capitalist-imperialist exploitation – totalitarian industrialization.
What kind of a power is this that looms so large in our time? What are its prospects for the future?
On the one hand, there are those who distinguish sharply between Maoism and Stalinism, who believe that the Chinese path of totalitarianism will be less brutal, temporary and more democratic than the Russian. A recent study, The Political Economy of Growth by Paul A. Baran (Monthly Review Press, 1957; $5), can be taken as a comprehensive and serious statement of this point of view. And on the other hand, there is the attitude which maintains that the dynamic of totalitarian industrialization, with its emphasis on heavy industry and its restrictive control of the consumption of the masses, will lead toward a new form of class society. This view was recently argued in Yegael Gluckstein’s Mao’s China.
It is the thesis of this article that the latter analysis is correct, that China under Communism represents the bastion of bureaucratic collectivism in Asia, that it is one of the most powerful forces against socialism, against democracy, in the modern world. In order to document this, let us turn first to the way in which power was seized by the Chinese Communists and the resultant class relations, and then to the actual policy of the Government, the grim reality which contrasts so much with the statements of hope and of socialism.
IN 1932, LEON TROTSKY MADE a remarkable prediction – the full implications of which he himself did not understand. He wrote:
The absence of a strong revolutionary party and of mass organizations of the proletariat renders control over the commanding stratum virtually impossible. The commanders and commissars appear in the guise of absolute masters of the situation and upon occupying cities will be rather apt to look down from above upon the workers. [And] In old China every victorious peasant revolution was concluded by the creation of a new dynasty ... Under the present conditions, the peasant war by itself without the direct leadership of the proletarian vanguard can only pass on the power to a new massacre of the workers with the weapons of “democratic dictatorship.” [1]
Half of Trotsky’s prediction came true. The Chinese Communists did take power without the intervention of the urban working class and on the backs of the peasantry. After the disastrous Stalinist policies of the Twenties produced a crushing defeat of the revolution, the workers turned decisively away from the Communists and were not to come into contact with them until the late days of the Civil War in the Forties. [2] Indeed, even in the last stages of the rise to power, an observer quite sympathetic to the Communist cause wrote:
The Chinese Communists were quite weak in the cities; the Chinese proletariat did not represent a sufficiently strong force; and this is why a movement for the general strike could not provoke a rebellion in the army. [3]
But Trotsky was mistaken in his prediction that such a conquest of power would lead to the establishment of a bourgeois regime. This error followed, of course, from his general characterization of Stalinism as a “centrist” force with strong tendencies to capitulate to capitalism. In reality, as we shall see, the Communists, once they seized power, established themselves as a new class force, hostile to bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. The crucial point is that Chinese Communism came to power without any major intervention on the part of the working class. Its motor force was the action of the peasantry. And once in power, its policy conformed perfectly to Trotsky’s analysis in one basic respect: the commanders and commissars appeared in the guise of absolute masters of the situation and “looked down” upon the workers – or rather, established a repressive regime against the workers, against the entire nation.
In a very perceptive comment, Harold Isaacs characterized the Chinese Communist movement in this way:
During the decades following 1927. the CP had become a party of de-urbanized intellectuals and peasant leaders whose main strength lay in the military force which they created and with which they ultimately won power. Apart from its broadly agrarian character and preoccupation, this party and this military force had no consistent class base through the years ... it shifted from one section of the peasantry to another, now seeking the support of the lower strata, now of the upper strata, at times adapting itself without difficulty even to the landlords. It came as a force from the outside, bringing its program with it. [4] (Emphasis added)
And yet, when the Chinese Communist Party entered the cities, a certain prestige still adhered to it. It had, after all, led a victorious struggle against the hated Kuomintang; during various periods of its turn toward the lower peasantry, particularly after 1946, it had carried out a program of land reform. In the period immediately after the Communist conquest, there was activity on the part of the working class in some areas – up to the confiscation of factories in the case of the Liench’ang iron works in Tienstin. These revolutionary manifestations were, of course, immediately put down. In their place, the workers were given the “fight” to have “Factory Committees.” But, as the regulations made plain:
“If a decision passed by a majority of the Factory Committee shall be judged by the Head of the Factory (or the Manager) to be in conflict with said Factory’s best interests, or when the said decision shall be in conflict with the instructions of higher authority, the Manager or Head of the Factory is empowered to prohibit its implementation.” [5]
Thus it was that this “socialist” force maintained an “All China Federation of Trade Unions”, which defined its purpose in the following way: “to ensure and consolidate labor discipline, correctly organize labor, fully and rationally use working hours, raise labor productivity and turn out quality products.” Any reference to the defense of the rights of the workers was, of course, omitted. More recently, Chung Ming, chairman of the Shanghai Trade Union Council, told Walton Cole of Reuters that “the trade unions are organized to enable the workers to accomplish the state plans and observe the laws promulgated by the state.” [6]
Nevertheless, the camouflage of “workers’ rights” is still insisted upon by the Chinese Communists. At the eighth All-China Trade Union Congress held in Peiping in December 1957, Lai Jo-yu, President of the Federation, announced a wider basis for the shop committees. After outlining all the rights of “suggestion” enjoyed by the workers, he carefully stipulated that all this was to be “under conditions that the rights of the management given by the state in carrying out its work are not infringed upon.” [7] And on May 13, 1957, the People’s Daily, official organ of the regime, stated its horror at the fact that workers had ... gone on strike. This followed, by some two or three months, Mao’s affirmation of the right of the workers to strike.
In short, the Chinese Communists turned upon the workers as soon as they took power. They disarmed whatever revolutionary committees there were; they denied the right to strike; they established fraudulent unions whose real function was to maintain labor discipline and to increase productivity. In all of this, there is not the least shred of evidence to suggest that we are dealing with a state representative of the working class in any way.
The peasantry fared no better. The Chinese Communists had a long history of a zig-zag policy with regard to the peasants. In the period immediately after the destruction of the Revolution in the Twenties, there was the establishment of peasant “soviets.” But this experiment was short-lived. In the years that followed, the fundamental mechanism which determined Communist land policy was the course of the struggle with the Kuomintang. In Mao’s famous pronouncement on “New Democracy” in 1940, he stated that the new republic:
... will adopt certain necessary measures to confiscate the land of big landlords and distribute it among peasants ... This is not to build up socialist agriculture, but to turn the land into the private property of the peasants. The rich peasant economy will also be allowed to exist in the rural areas ...
And indeed, in the period of the final phase of the Civil War, the Communists were quite successful in appealing to the masses of the peasantry. After some hesitation, they announced a program for land reform in 1946, and it was this act (coupled with their previous work among the peasants) which secured them a wide basis of support. Thus, when power was taken in 1949, the standard line was that the task of the government was to carry out the bourgeois revolution as a stage on the way to socialism.
For that matter, during the period of consolidation of power (roughly 1949 to 1955), there were continued reaffirmations of the right of peasant property. On February 15, 1953, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party stated,
On the basis of present economic conditions, the individual economic system of the peasants will necessarily continue to exist and expand for a long time to come. It is even necessary to permit the continued development of the economic system of the wealthy peasant. Moreover, the Common Program states that the peasants’ ownership of land will be safeguarded wherever the agrarian reform is carried on. [8]
But this line of accommodation toward the peasantry lasted only until 1955 (and it was often contradicted before then). On July 31st of that year, Mao announced the massive swing toward collectivization. In his report, he emphasized that
socialist industrialization cannot be separated from the development of agricultural cooperatives, not be undertaken by itself. For one thing, everyone knows that in our country the production of marketable grain and of raw materials for industry is at present at a very low level, while the country’s needs in this respect are increasing every year ... During the period covered by the three Five Year Plans, we must manage to arrive at some radical solution of the problem of agricultural cooperatives. [9]
In other words, the determination of the regime to industrialize was the main factor forcing the decision to engage in large-scale collectivization. In Mao’s report, it was made clear that this was done against considerable opposition within the Party itself (which is, after all, overwhelmingly peasant in social composition).
The result of this policy was a massive flight from the land into the cities. [10] It resulted in such a crisis of the regime that Mao made his speech of February 1957, On Contradictions, in which he tried to mollify the opposition. This, as is well known, failed and was followed almost immediately by the violent campaign against the “rightists,” i.e., against anyone who raised his voice in minimal criticism of the regime. But of this development, more a little later on.
In summary, then, the Chinese Communist policy toward the peasant has been dedicated to a line of super-exploitation in order to obtain surpluses for investment purposes. This has been met by violent resistance, and has strengthened all the totalitarian aspects of the state power. For that matter, this totalitarianism is inherent to Communist China, since it is the only way in which such a program of forced industrialization can possibly be carried out. But even here, we must be careful not to simplify for the totalitarian power itself is, wracked by its own crises. Bureaucratic planning has resulted in enormous waste, and this has introduced an element of instability into the regime. In 1956, for example, a general overestimation on the part of the planners, coupled with a series of natural calamities, led to a lop-sided development. Consequently, 1957 was a year of cut-back and repression, and the “anti-rightist” campaign was inextricably linked with this fact. Nevertheless, the Communists have maintained their power, and done so, even with their disastrous mistakes, by fighting against the peasantry, by exploiting them through terror. In one brief period, over half a million peasants were rounded up in a single Chinese city and sent back to the countryside!
THE CHINESE BOURGEOISIE HAS, of course, been completely subjected to the power of the state apparatus. This has not, however, meant total control. In part, Mao’s policy toward the capitalists is historically conditioned. During the last days of the Civil War, the Kuomintang regime had become so corrupt and repressive that it had even alienated a good sector of bourgeois opinion. [11] Gluckstein quotes a leading capitalist weekly in Hong Kong on the eve of the Communist seizure of power:
The remaining foreigners in Shanghai are looking for an improvement when the Communist-appointed administration will assume control; as it has been for the last three-and-a-half years, life appeared to many as intolerable in chaotic Shanghai. [12]
But this policy of concessions toward the bourgeoisie, like the similar attitude taken toward private peasant property, was to be a temporary affair. Having established the regime and achieved some economic order, the Communists launched the “Five-Anti” campaign. Hundreds of thousands of private holdings were investigated, and the state announced that it had discovered illegal profits of over two and a half billion dollars. After this campaign, and the resultant fall in production, there were other attempts to conciliate the capitalists, but all within the context of tight state control. Moreover, the commanding heights of the economy are completely statified. As early as 1952, the regime announced that
nationalization extended to about 80 per cent of the heavy industry, and 40 per cent of the light industry; the government operated all of the railways and about 60 per cent of the steamships plying the home waters; it controlled 90 per cent of all loans and deposits through the People’s Bank; finally state companies were responsible for about 90 per cent of imports and exports, for about half the wholesale trade and for about 30 per cent of the retail trade. [13]
At the Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a program of continuing statification was laid out. Typically, it was proposed that the old capitalist apparatus in a factory should be assimilated into the state management upon nationalization. [14] And even now, the “joint” state-private companies, and the state power of taxation and investigation (as in the “Five-Anti” Campaign) mean that bourgeois enterprise is on sufferance, that it has a temporary lease on life, and will be tolerated as long as it maintains a certain efficiency of production. To see in such a pattern (as some socialists do) a capitulation “to the right” is truly an incredible feat of theory.
In other words, the Communist regime of China has carried out a war against the three major and non-ruling classes of the nation: against the peasants, the workers and the bourgeoisie. Each class has, in its own way, felt the lash of state power. At the same time, the growing totalitarian might of the state has provided a position of privilege for the Communists themselves. These have not yet reached the level of the Russian bureaucrats – the wealth of the nation being exploited is not as great as that of Russia – but it is growing. Indeed, the path of privilege in China has been made easier because of the Russian experience. In 1952, the People’s Daily was able to editorialize on The Incompatibility of Socialism and Equalitarianism.
During the period of criticism which operated after Mao’s speech on letting “a hundred flowers bloom,” Chang Po-cheng, assistant director of the Teachers’ College Propaganda Department, and Hwang Chen-lu, editor of the college review, made a joint statement at the Teachers’ Training College of Shenyang. In part, they said:
The Communist Party having set itself up as a privileged class, we find worthless Communists at all the important posts ... Certain militant Communists are drawn to high salaried public offices like flies to a dish of honey, and these activists set up barbed wire fences and an iron curtain between the Communist Party and the people. [15]
All of this gives us a picture of the regime which emerged from Mao’s conquest of power in 1949. After winning a victory on the basis of peasant support, the Chinese Communists turned against the peasants; turned on the workers and bourgeoisie; embarked on a program of forced heavy industrialization; and began the work of creating a series of class privileges for the members of the Party. In short, we have a near classic case of bureaucratic collectivism, of the power of a bureaucratic class resting upon its control of statified industry.
OUR DISCUSSION, SO FAR, relates to Paul Baran’s recent book, The Political Economy of Growth. For Baran has developed an image of underdeveloped societies pursuing the path of totalitarian accumulation (and therefore, one would assume, of China above all) which is sharply at variance with the interpretation in the first section of this article. His study is a serious one (and by no means confined to this one subject), and deserves careful treatment and analysis. In dealing with it, we will initially be concerned with Baran’s generalizations and then relate them to the actual experiences of the Chinese Communists.
Technically, Baran’s book is not addressed to totalitarian regimes like China, but nations like India. And yet, the real heart and soul of this study is the author’s commitment to a Communist-type accumulation of capital. That, obviously, is the guiding principle of his theory which is much more than a simple economic critique of waste under capitalism; it is a program for Communism in Asia, a justification for it.
Here are the main points of Baran’s thesis:
... contrary to the commonly held view that receives a great deal of emphasis in Western writings on underdeveloped countries, the principal obstacle to their development is not shortage of capital. What is short in all of these countries is what we have termed actual economic surplus invested in the expansion of productive facilities. The potential economic surplus that could be made available for such investment is large in all of them. [16]
The principal obstacle to rapid economic growth in the backward countries is the way in which their potential economic surplus is utilized. [17]
And if Professor Mason ... objects to the “extraordinary rapid rate” of increase of national income that can be attained in a socialist society because it would depend on a “totalitarian regime exercising the weapons of terror (and) ... squeezing standards of living ... that no democratic state could possibly accomplish,” he does not note the fact that such terror as has taken place in the course of all social revolutions – frequently excessive, always painful and deplorable – represents the inevitable birth pains of a new society, and that such squeezing of living standards as has occurred has effected primarily, if not solely, the ruling class whose excess consumption, squandering of resources and capital flight had to be “sacrificed” to economic development. [18]
There can be doubt that such a revolutionary break with the centuries-old backwardness of the antediluvian Russian village could not have been achieved with the consent of the irrational, illiterate and ignorant peasantry ... What is decisive ... is whether the changes that do take place actually correspond to society’s objectivity extant and objectively ascertainable needs. [19]
From these representative quotations, it is clear that Baran stands for a totalitarian (if necessary) mobilization of the considerable resources of underdeveloped societies for the purpose of creating socialism. And the specific points which I would like to emphasize by way of analysis are: the extent, and the source of the economic surplus which Baran believes is available; the difficulties of even a totalitarian mobilization; the fact that such a technique cannot lead to socialism.
First, there is Baran’s confident assumption that a considerable surplus already exists in these societies – that they are not short of capital – and that the only problem is rational mobilization and investment of the existent surplus. On this point, we can do no better than to heed an analysis made by one who is in sympathy with Baran’s general friendliness toward Communist industrialization. The following quotation is from Number 3 of The New Reasoner (an English publication which is the organ of a group of ex-Communists, almost all of whom still regard Russia and China as some kind of a socialist formation), and was signed by “A Contributor.” It is a devastating critique, and, in its second paragraph, considerably more frank than anything in The Political Economy of Growth.
The chief criticism is that a rather facile view is taken of economic growth once the socialist revolution is accomplished. This appears to stem in part from Professor Baran’s own qualitative estimates, and from Dr. H. Oshima’s unpublished quantitative estimates, of the potential surplus available even at the current level of output of backward countries, but wasted by their present economic and social systems. According to Dr. Oshima’s estimates, which Professor Baran quotes, the wasted surplus was, in Malaya (1947) 23 per cent of gross national product, in Ceylon (1951) 20 per cent, in the Philippines (1948) 16 per cent, in India (undated) 10 per cent, and in Thailand (undated) 26 per cent. No indication is given as to how these estimates have been compiled. But if the same conceptual basis has been used as that adopted by Professor Baran, then they substantially overestimate the potential available for mobilization in the service of economic growth. In the first place, Professor Baran includes in the potential surplus all military expenditure. But the socialist revolution will not bring the backward countries into some hypothetical world united in a socialist commonwealth which will enable them to dispense with armies and armaments. Secondly, Professor Baran’s potential surplus involves some double counting. He includes not only the excess consumption of the upper income groups, but also of the output of workers engaged in manufacturing “luxury articles of all kinds, objects of conspicuous display and marks of social distinction.” But the latter are what the rich consume all over again.
The tremendously high rates of economic expansion in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe have been achieved not merely by the mobilization of Professor Baran’s potential surplus, but also by freeing resources through an initial reduction in standards of living of the bulk of the population, which is excluded from Professor Baran’s concept. [20]
Clearly, I do not share the general political attitude of this critic, and his sympathies for Communism in particular. But this is exactly what makes his overall analysis the more telling – for he does agree with Baran.
Now, let us turn to the actual situation in China and attempt to give flesh to a more extended criticism of Baran’s statements. According to the Political Economy of Growth, we should expect to find in China:
To begin with, Chinese Communist sources themselves contradict Baran’s point of view. The major source of extracting surplus, if we are to credit Mao’s speech of July, 1955, is through the collectivization of agriculture, i.e. through the exploitation of the peasantry. This, as we shall show, does not simply mean the allocation of the old profits to social investment, but rather it is achieved through decreasing the share of the peasant (and the worker) in the increased productivity of the nation – that is, through the restriction of the consumption of the masses.
In terms of real wages, our problem is complicated by the difficulties attendant upon obtaining valid statistics. It is possible, for example, to make a favorable comparison between a post-1949 year and various years during the Civil War. By December of 1949, the inflation had reached such a level that, if the period of July 1936 to June 1937 is taken as the base of 1, prices were: food, 11,600; agricultural foodstuffs, 12,293; animal products, 10,089 and so on. [21] Even making allowances for this situation, we can definitely establish that it is the peasants who have, in the main, paid for the new investment, and paid in living standards; and that the workers have also been tremendously constricted by the regime.
There is, for one thing, a “scissors” between countryside and city, that is, an economic mechanism which puts the peasant at an enormous disadvantage. Communist sources indicate that the prices of manufactured articles were increasing at a much faster rate than those of agricultural products. [22] And a year after the collectivization drive was begun by Mao, one correspondent reported that the People’s Daily
declared that the situation was not bad from the economic point of view, and that state control had resulted in increased productivity. But, it added that from the political and psychological point of view the situation was deplorable ... Indeed, the whole scheme had fallen down on one fundamental issue: the earnings of the peasant had not increased. [23]
Thus, contrary to Baran’s model, the source of surplus from investment was not simply a utilization of the old (monopolized by imperialism and the native ruling class) potential, but a result of the increased exploitation of the peasantry (using that term in its “classic” sense as designating the ratio between the paid and unpaid portions of the working day).
The situation of the workers is, of course, somewhat better than that of the peasantry. However, all government figures must be used quite critically, since they usually do not indicate the amount of wages that is “contributed” to one or another cause imposed by the regime, e.g. the Korean War. But even given these difficulties, Gluckstein’s conclusion, after balancing the available statistical information, was:
This rough calculation suggests that real wages expressed in dollars or pounds of constant value, have probably not changed much one way or the other since more than thirty years ago. [24]
Again, it must be emphasized that this is in the context of increased productivity, and that a stable level of wages thereby signifies an increase in exploitation.
But we need not stay on the ground of statistical speculation. There is, for example, this very interesting statement of the People’s Daily in September 1957. It is from an editorial entitled, We must Try to Reduce the Consumption of Cereals in the Town.
The standard of living in the towns having always been relatively high and the consumption of cereals fairly important, will not the townsfolk grumble at the Party and the government now that they are being asked to reduce their consumption? ... In order that town dwellers may actively support the slogans calling for reduced consumption, we need only explain to the people that the economies effected in the case of cereals are of great political and economic significance for the consolidation of the alliance between workers and peasants. [25]
This kind of evidence is sharply opposed to Baran’s thesis of an accumulation primarily derived from curtailing the profits of the old, parasitic classes. We have instead a picture involving two elements: the possibility of an absolute decrease in living standards (suggested by the People’s Daily editorial); and the certainty of a relative decrease, that is, of the increase of the surplus which is taken away from the producers. This is not to argue that there is a widespread immiseration as compared with the era of the Kuomintang. It is merely to document the question of who is paying for all those steel mills. Baran’s theory would suggest that the answer is the old profit-makers. The reality is to the contrary: never having been asked about it, the workers and peasants are paying.
It must be emphasized that none of this should be taken as a denial of the technological accomplishments of the Chinese Communists nor as a theory of galloping immiseration. Through the stabilization of currency, the creation of a unified economy and other actions of the Communists, there has been a rise in real wages in many sectors of the country. But even here, this fact must be seen in context. As the United Nations Economic Survey of Asia and the Far East, 1957, pointed out, the priority of capital over consumer goods has given rise to very real inflationary tendencies in China. [26] To counter this, the regime has employed two main measures. One is the direct restriction of consumption through rationing. The other is the standard Stalinist technique of siphoning off purchasing power (after the “real” wage figures have been trumpeted to the world) through demanding “voluntary” subscriptions to bond issues, contributions to campaigns, etc., and through forcing peasants to sell surplus grain at state prices rather than at the higher level of a local market. Thus, we must also take into account the various techniques of depriving the masses of at least part of their apparent gains.
Finally, a few other points about the source of investment surplus and living standards should be cleared up.
As was mentioned before, the regime itself is conscious of the locus of its surpluses. That is why Mao, in his speech of July 1955 argued for collectivization as a means of solving “contradictions between our requirements in marketable grain and industrial raw materials – which are increasing each year – and the present very low level of output of the principal agricultural products.” [27] Those who believe that this has been done by simultaneously raising the level of peasant living standards had better pay more attention to the Chinese Communist press. For some time now, and particularly since the collectivization drive, there have been regime reports of a “Blind, massive” flight of the peasantry to the towns. The most recent statement of this theme can be found in the dispatches to the New York Times from David Chipp of Reuters (who recently returned from China). [28]
Indeed, the most obvious sign of peasant discontent has been the introduction by the Communists of a system of internal passports – that hallowed technique of the most reactionary tyrannies. It is now impossible to move from one place to another without official permission. [29] This, most observers agree, was aimed at the peasant resistance and flight to the cities. It hardly corroborates the Baran thesis of the “easy” transition.
And then, we must take unemployment into account as another social cost of the heavy industry policy. According to a Hong Kong dispatch in 1957, it appears that the jobless now total “many millions” [30] in China. The root of this situation, admitted by the regime, is that the headlong emphasis on building up a lop-sided economy with a huge heavy industrial base has not kept pace with the population growth. (Incidentally, Baran is a classical “anti-Malthusian” which is a luxury which even Mao cannot afford. In 1956, the regime reversed its previous line and came out in favor birth control and changed the laws on abortion.)
Finally, another group paying a high price for industrialization are the students and intellectuals, particularly those who took the “hundred flowers” speech seriously. In the February 6, 1958 issue of France-Observateur, Francis Fejto reports the deportation of a million such people to the collective farms. This is one method of solving the manpower problem.
To summarize this criticism of Baran’s first proposition: the evidence does not indicate that the problem of China’s development has been one of mobilizing a potential surplus which had previously been dissipated by the ruling class. On the contrary, the exploitation of the workers and peasants has been the mainspring of accumulation; and this has been done without raising the living standard of the masses appreciably, indeed it has sometimes resulted in an absolute decrease in consumption. Thus, even with a totalitarian apparatus, there is no easy transition to industrialization in an underdeveloped country which relies primarily on its own resources. Baran’s view not only does not illuminate the actual facts of the situation – it leads to a political assumption of a degree of satisfaction and support for the regime on the part of the masses that is contradicted by everything we have learned from China in recent years.
THERE IS ANOTHER PROPOSITION in Baran’s thesis – more implicit than stated. Since he posits the primary problem as one of mobilizing actual potential, and in doing so contrasts the techniques of totalitarian industrialization to those of the state capitalist road (India), Baran is implicitly arguing in favor of the efficiency of totalitarian industrialization. For here, to be sure, we do have an enormous mobilization of resources. However, this factor – present, for example, in the great strides of Russian rocket research and production, or in the undeniable material advances made by the Chinese Communists in heavy industry – must be seen in a larger context, and that includes bureaucratic mismanagement, the inefficiencies of totalitarian planning.
The democratic socialist concept of social planning is based on the idea of policy control by the people themselves, and a constant exchange of information between central agencies and local groupings. But under conditions of totalitarianism, these checks on the errors of the planners are simply not present – and the conditions for appalling waste are created. Khrushchev’s speech on the decentralization of the ministries gave us a view of the fantastic situation prevailing in Russia up until two years ago (and there is every likelihood that the fundamental problem remains since only the structure of the Russian system was altered, and not its basic premise). And in China we can see similar situations developing. Indeed, there is evidence that the Chinese Communists are attempting to follow the Russian lead in a “decentralization” program. [31]
The case of the plow is the most recent, and illuminating example, indicating the problems of totalitarian planning. Recently, China has been in the midst of a severe agricultural crisis. The over-ambitious plans of 1956 ran into peasant opposition and severe natural calamities. And the 2,500,000-ton grain increase in 1957 was the smallest increment to be reported under a five year plan. [32] In December 1957, an agriculture ministry spokesman told a Reuters correspondent that it is an “open secret” that some peasants and cooperatives still “affected by old ideologies” are engaged in hoarding. [33] Moreover, since the new birth control campaign has not yet proved effective the regime is faced with the problem of finding food for an annual population increase of 13,000,000 consumers. [34]
In this context, it is obvious that the development of agriculture is of prime necessity for Mao. And yet, during the first half of 1956, the Communists manufactured 1,400,000 plows which were ... useless! [35] The plans were copied from a Russian model which had been designed for broad flat wheatlands – and were almost completely unsuited for the terraced, intensive agriculture of China. In addition, they were so heavy that one farmer could not drag one of them over the ridges between fields, and two water buffaloes sometimes balked at pulling them. And yet, according to the monthly Planned Economy of December 23, 1956 [36], the plows were sold to regional distributors by “various compulsory means.” Those farmers who received one called them “plows for hanging up purposes.”
This is what was behind those charming pictures of Mao turning a furrow himself. Such a ritual has long been associated with the Emperor; but more importantly, it was a cover up for a huge waste of resources.
In a very interesting article, Research and Freedom in Undeveloped Countries [37], Stephen Dedijer summed up the effect of this bureaucratic waste on scientific research:
This danger is also present with respect to the role of industry in developing research. The primitive peasant agriculture and small industry – mostly extractive or manufacturing a narrow variety of goods by primitive factories for the local market – never had nor even felt the need for research. There may exist a danger that when the industry starts developing under the narrow policy of “economics is primary” it contributes little to the formation of a research policy. This can occur in the general atmosphere of a dictatorship when there is little incentive for the individual enterprises to develop new products or improve or produce more of the old. It can occur if there is too much planning and bureaucratic control and interference in the economy ... In a country that has failed to open up the channels of communication, there is grave danger that a hit-and-miss research policy based on unrealistic, purely political motives will be set up by inexperienced state bureaucrats.
The description fits China beautifully. How can we explain the fantastic case of 1,400,000 useless plows? Or the over-estimation of the educational facilities which resulted in a 40 per cent surplus of students in 1957 (one of the reasons for the “voluntary,” back-to-the-land line of the regime)? Yes, Chinese Communism industrializes – but at an enormous cost and through an enormous waste. Baran seems to assume that the only problem of transition is a willingness to mobilize potential surplus, he has left out a crucial element (indeed, in the long run, the crucial element): democracy which is an economic as well as a political necessity for socialism.
One final point from Baran’s book – his dismissal of violence as an “inevitable” concomitant of revolution. It is, of course, true that the great revolutions of the past – the English in the seventeenth century, the French in the eighteenth – were accompanied by great internal convulsions, by violence. But there were the struggles in which a minority (in the cases cited above, the bourgeoisie) were carrying on a struggle against feudalism. We cannot, of course, rule out violence in some areas of the socialist revolution (in Hungary, for instance, it was made necessary by the totalitarian character of the class enemy), but neither are we bound by old predictions, particularly as they relate to the advanced countries. The thesis recently offered by the French left socialists of the Union de la Gauches Socialistes discussing the possibilities of peaceful transition in advanced countries is of great interest in this regard. [38]
But where there is violence in the case of a socialist revolution we can make certain generalizations about it: first, that it is the last resort imposed by the armed resistance of the minority to the established, democratic will of the majority; second, that it is a temporary phenomenon; third, that it is directed against the armed insurrectionists of the old classes. How does this relate to China? In the beginning, one can argue that the violence was that of the majority against a fanatical, anti-democratic and unrepresentative minority. But that revolution, as we demonstrated in the first section of this article, was betrayed in the very process of its success. It was the means whereby a minority assumed total control over the majority.
In China today, terror and violence are a built-in feature of the system directed against workers and peasants, against the majority, by a tiny and determined minority. For Baran to analogize this to Marx’s discussion of violence, or to the general socialist attitude on violence, is incredible. It is true enough that a certain grim, brainwashing technique of “persuasion” is often used by the Maoist, but that cannot hide the ultimate basis of the dictatorship – which is its monopoly of the means of destruction and its willingness to use them against the majority.
Thus, on every count, I find Baran’s basic thesis lacking: first, his assertion that a potential surplus of the old ruling classes suffices for industrialization, or is the primary base of it, does not correspond to the Chinese reality; second, his assumption about the efficiency of a totalitarian industrialization does not take into account the available evidence of the waste of this regime; and finally, his cavalier remarks on violence have little or nothing to do with the Chinese situation – or with socialism.
CHINA IS A BUREAUCRATIC collectivist state; a dynamic, Asian repetition of the Russian pattern. Its motor is forced industrialization; its means, the exploitation of the vast majority. Its power rests ultimately upon terror. And those who believe that we have here a fundamental departure from Stalinism are wrong. Given the greater distance which the Maoists must traverse before they achieve industrialization, given the fantastic pressures of population growth, there is every indication that this will be an even more terrible counter-revolution than the Russian.
Ultimately, the argument of those who support such a pattern of totalitarian accumulation in the name of “socialism” rests upon a curiously mechanistic foundation. There were those in the European socialist movement before the first World War who pointed out that imperialism brought “culture” to backward peoples, that it shattered outlived social systems and prepared the way for the future. Consequently, they went on, imperialism was progressive. The Marxists of that period (I am thinking particularly of Luxemburg and Lenin) rejected this argument out of hand, for it divorced social development from the actual living struggles of the workers and of the colonial people. In the Junius Brochure, Luxembourg directed her scorn upon those bourgeois economists who saw each new railroad as an advance of “progress and culture.”
And so we must confront a new variant of this mechanism: only now it is not based upon the statistics of capitalist expansion, but rather upon the charts of bureaucratic accumulation. In each case, the grand historic abstraction allows its proponent to forget the very heart and soul of socialism – the actual lives of workers and peasants. To be sure, and Luxembourg noted this with regard to capitalist imperialism, there is a sense in which this accumulation prepares the way for socialism. So did American expansion during World War II, so did Pérez Jiménez’ policy in Venezuala – so does any increase in the productive power of the economy. If such a statistical evaluation were all that was necessary for the Marxist, then politics would indeed be simple.
But what is the policy of these “progressivists” during a strike under Mao? Toward peasant resistance to forced collectivization? Do not such acts “retard” the raising of productivity? Of course they do. And if the figures of increased heavy industry are enough to guarantee the progressive character of a regime and a social system, then the “socialist” is honor bound to take his side with the police power and against the (unfortunately) wrongheaded people.
But then, the traditional Trotskyist analysis avoided this dilemma. It conceived the bureaucracy as reactionary, as a fetter upon production; and the mere existence of nationalized property as progressive. Consequently, this point of view was able to defend the resistance of the people against the bureaucrats though it led to support for the imperialist imposition of bureaucratic collectivism in Poland). From an internal point of view, then, there was to be opposition; but with regard to the menace of capitalist imperialism, support of the social system, as it is, in the name of the defense of its progressive core.
This distinction never had any relevance; but to continue to maintain it now, in the face of the current evidence, is truly incredible. If it means simply that socialists do not support any imperialist power, i.e. that we do not support an American financed attack by Chiang on the Chinese mainland, that has nothing to do with our attitude toward the social system. But if it means that in an intra-imperialist conflict, in a struggle between two exploitative social systems, that the socialists “chooses” one over the other, then it is another form of social patriotism. And there is still another, and new, point Since a third, imperialist war runs the risk of the extermination of mankind, this becomes an over-riding consideration. We could not, for that matter, take responsibility for the purest socialists state in the world which employed nuclear holocaust as the means of “socialist” policy.
But what then should our attitude be toward China? Clearly, it must rest, basically and primarily, upon our solidarity with the Chinese people. As this article has demonstrated, even if in sketchy fashion, these workers and peasants are currently being victimized by the Chinese bureaucracy. That means that we cannot spread the myth, the illusion of abstract progressivism, that Mao is to be supported. Even as we subject the reactionary impotence of Chiang and his Kuomintang to analysis, even as we record the increase in production statistics, we cannot let our attention wander from the central problem: that of the people. Our aim, then, is to achieve the social transformation which China so urgently needs, in a progressive way, and not through the support of Mao’s totalitarian exploitation.
Concretely, this means that American socialists should make their criticisms of Mao in a certain context. The horrors of totalitarian accumulation, it goes almost without saying, are not documented in order to smear democratic socialist planning. And the necessary work of exposing Mao’s road must be coupled with a positive socialist alternative; and not abstractly, but in terms of avoiding World War III. Today, this means that independent socialists must urge an American program of massive aid to the colonial revolution, understanding all the while that this single point implies a far reaching campaign to change the very basis of American politics.
1. Both from Peasant War In China, translated in the Bulletin of Marxist Studies, No. 1, August 1957, pp. 15–16.
2. cf. Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao by Benjamin Schwartz, Harvard, 1952, p. 97.
3. Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (French ed. 1951), p. 454.
4. Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (rev. ed.), p. 312.
5. cf. The Stalinist State in China, by M.Y. Wang, New International, March–April 1951, p. 101.
6. New York Times, February 25, 1958.
7. Quoted in an article by Tilman Durdin, New York Times, January 5, 1958.
8. For a full and documented discussion of Chinese Communist peasant policy in this period, see Leon Tribiere, The 1951 pre-Kolkhoze Policy in China at the Turning-Point in July, 1955, and the Crisis in the Chinese Communist Party, Saturn, Jan.–Feb. 1956.
9. Translated in Saturn, ibid., pp. 85–6.
10. cf. Mao’s China by Michael Harrington, in the Winter 1958 issue of Anvil.
11. Belden, op. cit., p. 483; and Gluckstein, Mao’s China (1957), pp. 192ff.
12. Gluckstein, op. cit., p. 193.
13. Quoted in China Under Communism, by Richard Walker, p. 106.
14. Proposals of the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party for the Second Five Year Plan (Peiping 1956), pp. 24–5
15. Quoted in Saturn, December 1957, p. 87.
16. Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, pp. 226–7.
17. Ibid., p. 228.
18. Ibid., p. 255.
19. Ibid., p. 278.
20. The New Reasoner, Winter 1957–58, pp. 121–22.
21. Gluckstein, op. cit., p. 103.
22. Ibid., p. 104.
23. Robert Gullian, Taking Away the ‘Good Earth’, New Republic, March 13, 1957. p. 33.
24. Gluckstein, op. cit., p. 255.
25. Quoted in Saturn, December 1957, pp. 151ff.
26. cf. Hans Bayer, Chinesische Wirtschaftspolitik, Gerwerkschaftliche Monatshefte 11, November 1957, p. 676.
27. Saturn, Jan.–Feb. 1956, p. 86.
28. New York Times, January 15, 1958.
29. New York Times, January 11, 1958.
30. New York Times, September 12, 1957.
31. New York Times, March 30, 1958.
32. New York Times, December 5, 1957.
33. Ibid.
34. New York Times, March 30, 1958.
35. New York Times, January 28, 1958, quoting the Chinese Communist press.
36. Quoted, ibid.
37. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1957.
38. La Révolution Qui Vient, by Yvan Craipeau (1957).
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