ERRORS "MOST DANGEROUS" SINCE THIRTIES, DECLARES DEUTSCHER
In a penetrating article, "Mao at Bay," in the October 31 issue of the liberal American weekly, The Nation, Isaac Deutscher offers the opinion that the Mao regime has undergone a deep and grave political crisis that has been partly concealed behind the dramatics of the “cultural revolution." "The Chinese Communist Party is in disarray," he points out. "At least since the early summer, large and influential sections of its hierarchy have been in revolt against Mao Tse-tung and his policies. Peking speaks openly of Right, Left and Center factions struggling against one another within the party, and although the official spokesmen do not identify the programs and the leaders of the factions, the admission itself is unprecedented in post-revolutionary China."
At the August plenum of -the Central Committee, Deutscher holds, "Mao found himself in.a minority, and was either outvoted or was on the point of being outvoted." He responded with the "cultural revolution," which amounts to a coup against the majority. Besides mobilizing students and undergraduates against the party hierarchy, Mao threatened to use the army. This was the meaning of the sudden elevation of Marshal Lin Piao to second in command. .
"The reports that have come out to us," Deutscher continues, "indicate that all aspects of Mao's policy, domestic and foreign, were under attack; but the main issue was his stubborn refusal to open any negotiations with the present Soviet leaders. Mao's critics demanded resumption of talks with Moscow; and he was bent on obtaining from the Central Committee a resolution decrying on principle any ‘united front, i.e., any coordinated action with the Russians over the war in Vietnam or over any other aspect of Communist policy."
In Deutscher's opinion Mao is committing an exceedingly grave error in holding that Brezhnev and Kosygin are mere agents of American imperialism. Even if they wished to play this role, the basic antagonism between the Soviet Union and the United States provides the objective possibility, "and from a Communist viewpoint the imperative need," for joint action. "By refusing such action Mao weakens China's position and brings on himself the odium for the break in the Communist camp. His tactics are ultra- Left rather than Left; and his radical verbiage and the fireworks of the ‘cultural revolution' conceal a policy which is essentially passive and inert. Liu Shao-chi and his adherents argue that Peking needs a more flexible policy precisely in the interest of anti-revisionism, and that the Chinese party should press the Russians relentlessly for joint action over Vietnam. The argument is sound enough. Indeed, not since the early thirties, when the German Communist Party refused to join hands with the Social
Democrats against the Nazis, has any Communist party committed as many dangerous and even suicidal mistakes as Mao is committing at present."
On Mao's "cultural revolution," Deutscher voices sharp indignation. "In the name of Marxism and Leninism, the Guards have denounced Balzac and Victor Hugo, Shakespeare and Beethoven, as the products of a rotting bourgeois culture; they have defaced Pushkin's monument in Shanghai, and have voiced their contempt for the works of Chernyshevsky and Herzen, the progenitors of the Russian revolutionary movement. Peking's ‘cultural revolutionaries' are, it seems, quite unaware of Marx's lifelong admiration of Shakespeare and Balzac; of Lenin's love for Pushkin and Beethoven, and of the fornative influence Chernyshevsky had on him."
Moscow's attempt to make capital of Peking's assault on some of the great treasures in mankind's cultural heritage, draws scorn from Deutscher. “Undertaking the all too easy task of ridiculing these exploits," he says, "the Soviet press has harked back to Proletkult, the Russian literary and artistic movement of the early years of the revolution, which renounced bourgeois art and promised to create a proletarian culture. A writer in Pravda has named Trotsky as the inspirer of Proletkult; an attribution presumably designed to make both Proletkult and the Chinese ‘cultural revolution'-stink-in our nostrils. The truth is that by comparison with the Chinese riot, Proletkult, which was akin to Western European futurism of those years, was an almost civilized affair; it was supported by Bukharin and Iunacharsky, while Trotsky, far from being its inspirer, wrote a whole book, Literature and Revolution, to repudiate it. Pravda could have found a much more contemporary parallel to recent events in China: in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stalin, Zhdanov and Pravda's writers 'disciplined' the intelligentsia, thundered against 'kowtowing to decadent Western culture,' banned the works of Einstein, Freud, Mendel and many other foreign thinkers, and indulged in a hysterical glorification of all things Russian."
Pravda avoids drawing that parallel because the Soviet Union is still suffering from the effects of that period and in fact is still maintaining many of the bans. "But the parallel is close enough; and it suggests that the Maoist ‘cultural revolution'is a deadly serious affair. Its effect on China's spiritual and intellectual life will, in all probability, be just as devastating and lasting as were the consequences of the Stalinist witch hunts."
The "cultural revolution" also signifies that China, like "Russia in the last years of the Stalin era" has "now plunged headlong into a self-centered isolationism and nationalism and has shut itself off more hermetically than ever from all outside world political and cultural influences."
A prominent reason for this turn, Deutscher holds, is the "recent setbacks" on the world scene, “above all the collapse of the pro-Maoist Communist Party of Indonesia and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of its members." The events in Indonesia “mark a deep ebb of revolution and a disaster for Maoism."
The “cultural revolution" was contrived as an "extra-powerful booster to national morale." In Deutscher's opinion it is a poor substitute for a correct policy.
"It can be said in advance that the 'positive' effect of this booster shot to national morale will be short-lived, but that its adverse consequences will be felt for a long time. The party, its hierarchy and cadres, will not soon recover from the humiliation the 'Red Guards' have inflicted on them. The old intelligentsia -- the scientists and the technicians, but especially the writers and artists -- who have been associated with the broad current of the Maoist revolution and have directed the educational work among the masses since 1949, are being degraded and eliminated from their posts. They have not, yet, been destroyed as Stalin destroyed their Russian counterparts, but they are forced to make room for a new intelligentsia, one brought up since the revolution and thus having far fewer ties with either their own native cultural tradition or the heritage of the outside world.
"To some extent, this change of generations is inevitable in any postrevolutionary society, but when it is carried out as abruptly, brutally and demagogically as it was in Stalinist Russia, and now in China, the nation suffers losses it can ill afford: a gap in its cultural consciousness, a lowering of standards and an impoverishment of spiritual life. Post-Stalinist Russia is still smarting from such losses, and Maoist and post-Maoist China will be hurt similarly for years to come."