Un service De presse: ouvrier @
Vol.55 No: 8 February 24, 1967
SECRET POLICE CHIEF HEADS PEKING'S "PARIS COMMUNE"
An official notice, signed by the Red Guards of School 5 and posted February 11, announced that Hsieh Fu-chih has been named director of Peking's new Commune. Hsieh Fuchih is the Minister of Security of the People's Republic of China. The appointment of the head of the- country's secret political police to head the new organization indicates how little reliance is to be placed in the Maoist propaganda that one of the aims of the “cultural revolution" is to institute "extensive democracy" modeled on the democracy that made the Paris Commune of 1871 legendary in the history of the international socialist movement.
But even this is not all. On February 12, notices were posted in Peking announcing that a military commission has been placed in charge of controlling everything connected with public security. The security forces in turn have been reorganized into a "revolutionary police" which have been placed under the direction of Mao Iu-shan, a figure emerging into the limelight for the first time. According to Reuters, the headquarters of the police and a number of police stations in Peking have been placed under the guard of contingents of the army. All these measures were approved by the Military Commission of the Central Committee, which constitutes the supreme command of the army, and bear the official seal of the Ministry of Public Security headed by Hsieh Fu-chih.
New York, N. Y. 10010. SP ie
In a parallel move, reported in Tokyo on the basis of all posters that appeared in Peking February 13, Mrs. Chiang Ching, the wife of Mao Tse-tung, was placed in charge of a Committee of Orientation for the Cultural Revolution. The job of this committee,
apparently, is to screen the central bodies of the
party and the government for possible deviationists.
Its connection with the Committee of the Cultural
Revolution headed by Chen Po-ta, which was function-
ing under the control of the party's Central Commit-
tee remains unclarified.
According to the Hsinhua News Agency, the
first new commune to appear was the "Revolution and
Production Committee" which was set up in the Shang-
hai Glass Machinery Plant on December 27, 1966. As
reported in Hsinhua's January 24 bulletin, "Members
of the committee hold no official titles and call
themselves 'servants.' They always work with 'Quota-
tions from Chairman Mao Tse-tung' in pocket and tools
in hand. They do not divorce themselves from produc-
tive labour, sit in office rooms or act as high and
mighty bureaucrats."
A sharp struggle occurred among the workers at
the time, some of them suggesting that "members of
the former staff were very 'shrewd' in management"
and should be kept "to take care of technical matters,"
an argument that was, of course, rejected. In addi-
tion, "some of the workers grumbled that the object
of the revolutionaries in seizing power was to place
themselves in official posts." After a number of meet- MRS. CHIANG CHING ings, "many workers who had been misled by the 'Red
Militia Detachment’ came to see the truth and crossed over to the [Maoist] revolutionary rebels." The allusion to the "Red Militia Detachment," which was evidently considered to be an opposition formation among the workers, was left unexplained in the Hsinhua dispatch.
According to Hsinhua, in the Shanghai Glass Machinery Plant, "Bureaucracy has been wiped out....Everybody is brimming with revolutionary enthusiasm and displaying great initiative in work. Production has gone up steadily, some of the workers redoubling their average quotas. A completely new, Communist-style revolutionary factory has come into being."
The setting up of such new communes has taken place under the general slogan of "smash the old state machine that did not correspond to Mao Tse-tung's thought." (Hsinhua, February 3.) However, the Maoists were not long in advancing certain limitations. "Ultra-democracy and liberalism: these are corrosives which eat away unity, undermine organisation, cause apathy and create dissension," according to an article issued by the Third Headquarters of the Peking Red Guards. (Quoted by Hsinhua, February 4.)
An article in Red Flag, the theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party (quoted by Hsinhua February 5), spells this out at some length. "There is a class struggle in socialist society." The "concentrated expression of this struggle" revolves around "political power" and the “usurpation of political power by the bourgeoisie and its agents within the party and the proletariat's seizing power from them." In this struggle "counter-revolutionary discipline must be thoroughly smashed." But this does not mean that all discipline must be ignored. "Proletarian revolutionary discipline" must be consciously observed. Even while exercising "the most extensive democracy," the "highest degree of centralism should be enforced."
Then comes a revealing thrust at the Paris Commune: "We must bear in mind the lesson that the Paris Commune was too restrained in the use of its authority. The provisional organs of power and their leading members who carry out Chairman Mao's revolutionary line in directing the struggle to seize power must display the mettle of proletarian revolutionaries, lead the masses, and successfully accomplish the historic task of the struggle to seize power."
In setting up the new Peking "commune," the Maoists have indicated what is meant by not ignoring discipline and in fact establishing a pattern which puts forward the "highest degree of centralism." A combination of police-military rule indeed represents the highest degree of centralism. It can now be expected that the Maoists will provide some illuminating examples on how to enforce this centralism. As for "extensive democracy," this appears to be boiling down pretty much to the equalitarian right of everyone to possess his own individual copy of the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
MRS. CHIANG CHING
WESTERN SPECIALISTS CONSIDER WHICH FACTION TO SUPPORT IN CHINA
The Johnson administration appears to have succeeded in imposing extraordinary secrecy on the assessments being made in the Pentagon and State Department of the political crisis in China and how best to intervene in it to the advantage of the capitalist West and more particularly the American military position on the Asian mainland. Perhaps no hard and fast decisions have been made as yet.
However, the tentative line of thinking may have been indicated by C.L. Sulzberger in the February 3 New York Times. "Possibly now is the time for major new policy decisions, because the moment of opportunity may pass," said this expert in foreign affairs. [See World Outlook February 10, p. 149.] As an example of what could happen, Sulzberger suggested that "should the forces of Liu and the party hierarchs achieve a decisive victory one of their steps might be to reaffirm the shattered Sino-Soviet alliance."
Sulzberger indicated in this way a key criteria in weighing. the factions from the American imperialist viewpoint -- which of them should be favored as most likely to maintain the breach with Moscow? A decision on which faction to favor is a necessary preliminary to any tactical moves designed to.advance a consistent strategy.
Whether by coincidence or not, precisely this question was put on the agenda at a four-day conference of academic specialists on China which ended February 9. Held in Chicago, the conference was sponsored by the Chicago University's Center for Policy Study. A number of papers were read and discussed. The publicity, however, went to the topic of which faction to favor. oo
Several participants asserted, according to the February 10 New York Times, “that it was more in American interest in the short run to see the militant faction of Chairman Mao Tse-tung win Communist China's power struggle than his opposition."
The reasoning cited by the Times was the same as that hinted at by Sulzberger; namely, that "Mr. Mao's opposition, judging by. past statements, would have tried to heal the split with the Soviet Union and would have pressed for unity of action with Moscow on the war in Vietnam, possibly leading to a more direct clash with the United States."
Dr. Uri Ra'anan of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described as "an expert on Communist affairs," said: "In the short run, say two or three years, the Mao forces might be the lesser of" two evils."
In a paper based on statements by the various Chinese leaders Dr. Ra'anan held that a victory of Mao over Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping might be preferable from the point of view of "the West."
"Many people have thought that the pro-Soviet opposition would be more moderate toward the West," he said. "This is exactly the reverse of what is shown by analysis of their public statements. They. would have had to be more militant toward the West in order to sell, to justify the pro-Soviet policy at home, and this would have meant a greater commitment by both countries in Vietnam."..
Dr. Richard Lowenthal of the Free University of Berlin advanced a comparable view. "In the present situation, Mao is better for us than his opposition," he said. "A victory by Mao excludes even a partial reconciliation with the Soviet Union. If he wins, China will not solve its economic problems."
Dr. Donald S. Zagoria of Columbia University held a similar view, although with some qualifications. "The Maoist faction regards the Soviets as the main enemy and they are unwilling to compromise even on Vietnam," he said. "Because they cannot afford to fight on two fronts, they do not want a confrontation with the United States on Vietnam."
In his opinion, the opposition to Mao wanted unity with the Soviet Union for various reasons. The military leaders had in mind strategic considerations both in the Vietnam situation and in modernizing the armed forces. He also thought that some Com-— munist party leaders wanted better relations with the Soviet Union in order to renew the flow of economic aid.
Zagoria expressed doubt, however, that in the long run a victory by Mao would be preferable for "the West." His reasons were not reported in the press.
The three experts were in general agreement that China could not maintain two fronts, one against the Soviet Union, the other against the United States. "Forced to
choose, they said, the Maoists would make Moscow ‘enemy No. 1' while the opposition would give the United States that place."
As for the current incidents, Dr. Lowenthal thought that Mao could use a diplomatic break with the Soviet Union as a “device in his internal power struggle.”
"Through it," he was reported as saying, "Mao can isolate his opponents. He can turn them into traitors."
Dr. Ratanan held that domestic issues were at the heart of the political crisis in China but that differences over strategic and military questions had played an "unexpectedly large part in top-level debate in 1965 and 1966."
The cold-blooded way in which these ideologues go about deciding which faction to favor is worth noting. They pay no attention to the oceans of propaganda in the West picturing Mao Tse-tung as some kind of devil incarnate. They keep their eyes on what is really at stake in the internal conflict in China; and, of course, the question of a united front between Peking and Moscow in support of the Vietnamese revolution and against American imperialist aggression is a vital issue affecting the defenses of both China and the Soviet Union. The specialists never lose sight of the basic antagonism between the world capitalist system and the entire camp of workers states. They do their best to analyze how to exploit the differences that arise and to favor those groups and forces which seem preferable from the imperialist point of view, if only temporarily and if only in comparison with the alternative.
This has always been the imperialist approach. For instance in the struggle between the bureaucratic forces headed by Stalin and the revolutionary Marxist opposition headed by Trtosky, the imperialists favored Stalin. Franklin D. Roosevelt even went so far, it will be recalled, as to present Stalin with a Hollywood film Mission to Moscow that pictured the notorious frame-up trials as authentic.
Socialists who stand for the unconditional defense of both the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union should keep careful watch of the imperialist machinations. “They should maintain the position that it is up to the people of China and the Soviet Union and the working class internationally to decide on the merits of the Sino-Soviet conflict. The imperialists, with their reactionary ulterior motives, have no business intervening. This applies all the more with regard to the internal crisis in China. Imperialist intervention on either side in the factional struggle will only further embitter and poison relations and introduce fresh confusion. Let the imperialists stay out of it!
DEUTSCHER'S VIEWS ON THE CHINESE "CULTURAL REVOLUTION"
The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation has just published the interview with Isaac Deutscher on the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" which was given to Ernest Tate on September 20, 1966, and which first appeared in the Italian left-communist journal La Sinistra. The pamphlet is being sold by the Foundation, lla Wormwood Street, London, E.C.2, for one shilling and sixpence. It may also be ordered from Merit Publishers, 5 East Third St., New York, NY 10003 for $.35.
In the interview Deutscher dismisses the possibility that China harbors any "aggressive plans" in Southeast Asia. But he believes that the preparation of the Chinese government for an American attack has been a very important factor behind the current political crisis. He says that Mao and his supporters are "thinking in terms of fighting alone against the United States" and have been working to convert the whole of China into a replica of the organization during the so-called Yenan days so that the population can carry on partisan warfare for a prolonged period, as in Vietnam.
He holds that "many of the accusations the Chinese level against the Russians and their criticisms of Russian opportunism in dealing with the Western powers are justified." Moreover, the withdrawal of all Soviet aid from China "was a tremendous shock to the Chinese economy and people. The whole industrial development of China was set back by many years; and this coincided with a series of natural calamities and bad harvests...
"Millions of Chinese lost their jobs in the cities and had to trek back to their native villages where there wasn't enough food for them. Thousands of factories, into which the Chinese had invested a great amount of their meagre resources, could not be built up and completed. Huge investments were frozen with disastrous results. Since then, I think, the Chinese have been reacting to blows and shocks in an irrational manner,
from deep resentment and a sense of grievance."
Nevertheless, he thinks that the Maoists are committing "a great, a fatal mistake" in their policy toward the Soviet Union in the present world situation, "comparable to the mistake committed by the German Stalinists between the years 1929 and 1933."
Deutscher says further on this:
"I really think that today Mao Tse-tung has, as it were, his own version of the theory of ‘social fascism' which he has applied to Krushchev and American imperialism. He underrates the antagonism between Moscow and Washington. He underrates the inevitability of conflict between them. I don't speak of armed conflict here, but of the permanent, continuous social and political conflict that may or may not lead to armed struggle. The Maoists overlook the fact that the Soviet Union has a vital interest in stopping aggression and expansion of American imperialism, no matter how much Krushchev or Kosygin have tried to appease Washington.
"The Maoists therefore don't see any objective basis for their own co-operation with the U.S.S.R., and they reject the united front, instead of calling for it indefatigably, tirelessly, day in and day out; instead of appealing for the united front to Soviet opinion, to the Soviet masses, and to the Communist parties all over the world. It is the Russians who are calling for joint action; it is they who are appealing for the United Front. One may doubt their sincerity; but the Maoists, by refusing the united front, play into the hands of the American Administration and also into the hands of those in Moscow who really don't want to do anything over Vietnam, to co-ordinate action with the Chinese; who really are not interested in promoting the anti-imperialist struggle-and the revolutionary ferment in the world."
Specifically on the “cultural revolution" in China, Deutscher said the following:
"Now the term ‘cultural revolution' has to be clarified. You may use the term in a metaphorical sense to indicate the cultural rise of formerly oppressed and illiterate people, a cultural rise that must take many, many years and decades. When hundreds of million, or tens of millions of illiterate peasants are taught to read and write and are further educated, one can speak broadly of something like a cultural revolution extending over the lifetime of two or three generations. But to speak of a cultural revolution as a single act is absurd. What is a revolution? The classical definition of it is the transfer of power from one class to another. You can make a-social and a political revolution. You make a social revolution when one class seizes the property of another and nationalises it. You make a political revolution when you seize political power from one class and another takes it into its hands -- then a revolution is made in a single act or within a very short time. A social revolution is already more than a single act. A political revolution may be an armed uprising which overthrows a government and establishes representatives of a revolutionary class in office.
. “But how can you make a cultural revolution in a single act? Can you transfer at a stroke the knowledge and the skills accumulated in the head of one class into the head of another? Revolutionaries who would achieve this would indeed perform a feat of which the philosophers, including the philosophers of Marxism, have not dreamt. One can, of course, kill, or reduce to silence, or send to concentration camps a whole generation of an intelligentsia and in this way deprive society of a certain fund of knowledge, civilised- habits and skills that have been accumulated over generations, but this will not turn those who destroy the old intelligentsia into the possessors of the knowledge, the skills and arts they have annihilated.
"Lenin, therefore, spoke not of ‘cultural revolution,' but of the cultural heritage which it was the duty of the Bolshevik Party and of the revolutionary government to preserve and develop. Trotsky posed the problem of employing specialists in this context -- he posed it with regard not only to military specialists employed in the army but to specialists employed in the economy and in education as well; he saw this as part of a great endeavour to make the cultural heritage of the past accessible to a new revolutionary regime. Not ‘cultural revolution' but mastery of the cultural heritage was the guiding idea in Lenin's time.
"To be sure, the Bolsheviks were not just attending to the cultural heritage of the bourgeoisie and of the feudal classes -- they did their utmost to carry education into the masses of the Russian workers and peasants -- only in this way could the cultural heritage be made accessible to the rising social classes; and Lenin and Trotsky and their followers accepted the cultural heritage critically, with Marxist discrimination, absorbing what was vital in that heritage and overcoming its obsolescent elements. And so much was and is vital, because in science and in the arts the old dominant classes had in a sense transcended themselves and their own limitations.
"One may consider Shakespeare as a representative of the bourgeois dream, as the representative of what was in his time an essentially new bourgeois individualistic sensitivity. But in Shakespeare this bourgeois sensitivity transcended its own limitations and rose above itself, as it were, to create lasting artistic values which retain their force after so many changes of governments, regimes, and social orders. Similarly, the old Greek drama can be said to have represented a type of sensitivity and a way of thinking that was rooted in a society which lived by slavery; but Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus artistically transcended these limitations and created lasting values, which are not to be overthrown in any ‘cultural revolution.' (My Italian readers will, of course, remember the contempt with which a Marinetti and other Futurists once treated Dante, Petrarch and the masters of the Renaissance.)
"Only savages, or petty bourgeois, half-baked ultra-radicals, or bureaucratic upstarts can make bonfires of the works of the great thinkers and artists of the past. The Maoists, who do it in the same name of Marxism and Leninism, commit moral harakiri. And they harm the revolutionary interest of China, they harm it shamefully and disgracefully! We must defend the revolutionary cause of China, despite them and even against them!"
KOSYGIN ON BBC
During his trip to England, Kosygin replied to questions asked him by a journalist in an interview over BBC February 10. Among other things he talked about the Sino- Soviet conflict. To our knowledge this is the first time that a head of a workers state has talked on such a subject, utilizing the facilities of a bourgeois communication system. Considering how far things have gone in the quarrel between the Chinese and Soviet leaderships, this in itself doesn't mean much. What Kosygin said, however, does speak volumes.
Here is one of his key statements as reported in the press:
"It (this struggle] has been caused by the setbacks they [China] have suffered both inside the country and in foreign affairs." (New York Herald Tribune [published in Paris], February 11-12.)
The statement appears harmless, but how revealing it is. Reverses in the field of foreign affairs? Kosygin did not mention what they were. It would be interesting to know what he meant by these words. There were defeats, certainly, which if they did not exactly cause the struggle in China, at least highly exacerbated it.
The most important defeat was the one in Indonesia, which in fact directly preceded the unleashing of the “great cultural revolution" in November 1965. Is this what Kosygin was referring to? Everything points to it. But then this was not only a reverse for China alone, it was a reverse for socialism, including the Soviet Union. The way in which the Soviet leaders acted after this defeat was criminal. Their policy encouraged Johnson to escalate the war in Vietnam. [See the statement of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in World Outlook, November 4, 1966.]
_Kosygin's remarks on BBC, his way of speaking about defeats for China internationally, were to the highest degree characteristic of the thought of the present heads of the Soviet Union. This does not appear to bother them. In the field of foreign policy, Stalin is not dead. .
HOW MUCH AID IS