MOVES TO THE FORE. IN SHARPENING STRUGGLE IN CHINA
By Livio Maitan
Events in China have continued to unfold at a dramatic pace and the situation is becoming more and more complex and charged with the possibility of new developments.
According to the official sources themselves, at the same time as the Shanghai events -- which we sought to interpret in an article published in World Outlook. [see February 3 issue, p.°116] -- or immediately afterwards, serious conflicts broke out in a whole series of: regions and big cities and, at least in some places, peasant masses also became involved.
It is difficult to give an exact estimate of the nature of movements like those. in Shansi and Harbin and it is possible that it involves a jumble of different and even opposing tendencies, ranging from unorthodox Maoist currents acting on their own to a certain degree and in practice even against the orientation Mao wants, to tendencies expressing the conservative interests of the apparatus, and including largely spontaneous tendencies analogous to those that appeared in Shanghai, regional tendencies, and some that may be infiltrated by genuine reactionaries. :
What is certain is that the explosion of all these tendencies has finally brought about an extremely dangerous situation for the ruling group headed by Mao which in the most serious instances (Shansi, Harbin, etc.) has resorted to bringing in the army as a decisive force. The utilization of the army, however, was not undertaken without hesita-— tion and conflict -- many times the official documents in the latter part of January attacked or criticized military groups or leaders who ‘presumably preferred to have the army remain out of the melee and the army was brought in only after some delay when it became absolutely clear that the “revolutionary rebels" could not win out by other means over the opposing factions.
As others have correctly stressed, the peasants were the last to enter the scene and it is not yet clear to what degree they have become involved. The avilable news and the indications in the Chinese press give the impression that at least up to now, the mobilization of the peasants has been limited to a few regions, the most sensitive politically, as for example in the Shanghai region.
Once again hypotheses can be advanced only on the basis of rather fragmentary reports. It nevertheless seems that the mobilization of the peasants has developed within a framework analogous to that of the strikes in Shanghai. Out and out anti-—Maoist movements, led by oppositionist elements, are not involved; they are largely spontaneous. The peasants, aroused by the appeals to the masses issued by the ruling Mao-Lin Piao group itself, seek to put up their own claims, to advance their own demands. According to an important editorial in a Shanghai newspaper, the staff of which has undergone various vicissitudes, the peasants are said to have demanded the “immediate elimination" of the gap "between town and countryside," more economic remuneration and more adequate welfare services. Other documents have alluded to a tendency that wanted to distribute to the peasants the part of the product set aside for the collective or for deliver to the state.
Despite the polemical distortions, it is clear that in the final analysis the peasant movement has again posed some crucial problems of the transitional phase that China like other workers states faces after overturning capitalism. These problems still remain, it appears, despite the ruling group having adopted solutions noticeably different from those tried by the USSR in its time and by the workers states of Eastern Europe in the past twenty years. Very complex problems are involved for which no a priori solutions exist. In addition it is well known that genuinely conservative tendencies can appear among the peasants. Nonetheless, if the interpretation along this line made by the international bourgeois press and even the news agencies of the workers states must, in our opinion, be rejected, the same goes for the Maoist interpretation according to which the peasants have been hoodwinked by diabolical agitators, who favor the restoration of capitalism and who have raised absolutely impermissible demands.
On this subject, the official documents in their polemics ceaselessly hammer away against what they call "economism," at times resorting to baseless and monstrously tendentious historical analogies. (For example, those who talk about a labor aristocracy in relation to the workers movement in Shanghai disregard the real meaning of the phenomenon and are in fact resorting to polemical distortion for purposes of ideological intimidation.) As we have stated previously, insofar as the Maoist polemic against "economism" seeks to express opposition to tendencies like those that developed in the Soviet Union (Stalin's Chinese defenders forget, however, that this began under his
rule), it has an objectively positive meaning. But it-is something else again when this stereotyped theme is used to answer the right of sectors of the workers and peasants to demand improvements in their standard of living, which, after all, remains very modest.
Another essential feature of the situation in recent weeks has been the continued differentiation and internal division in the Mao tendency itself.°:On-this subject the. material furnished by the official documents is rather abundant (naturally, if the. effort is made to grasp the significance of the allusions). In fact frequent criticisms can -be. found of .persons who sought to go too far in rejecting all. discipline and in striking in an indiscriminate way at everyone in power in the party and the state. — Similarly abundant are appeals-for unity among the obviously divided revolutionary : groups, and denunciations of groups and persons who, under a smokescreen of "Mao's thought" and the concepts and current slogans of the Maoist group, seek to attain different aims, to undertake different actions and even to set up their own organizational instruments. Above all, these denunciations signify an admission by the ruling group that it is unable to control the forces that it has evoked and that tendencies are developing that seek to go beyond the aims set by this group.
It is necessary . to call attention once more to the attitude of the Mao group, since any simplification could lead to very serious errors in judgment. In our previous article we indicated that this group had reacted negatively to the strikes in Shanghai. and we now stress that it has taken an analogous attitude in face of the mobilization of the peasant sectors. Still worse, at a certain point, the official documents not only began to make open threats of repression (and it is quite probable, if not certain, that repressive blows. have actually. been struck), but the Maoist group also decided to get out of the most difficult situations through direct utilization of the army. ..
Tt would be a mistake, however, to overlook “the fact that this attitude toward the imposing mass movement, along with military intervention, were accompanied or were immediately followed by a resumption and intensification of the themes that characterized Mao's appeals to the masses and the Red Guards, beginning in particular last summer. Along this line the Maoist agitation took on a more openly iconoclastic tone and the masses were invited precisely "to take power" and elect committees in the enterprises. According -to. some reports, bodies. of a "new type" which are glowingly compared to the institutions of the Paris Commune were created to administer certain big cities, in the first place Shanghai.
A Hong Chi [Red Flag] editorial sent out January 31 is particularly significant. This document includes the fundamental themes of the Maoist positions and polemics in the latest phase of the crisis in China, ranging from criticism of the "ultraleft" elements in the Mao tendency itself to interpretations of certain key occurrences like the result of the maneuvers of the capitalist elements. Along with a denunciation of the Shanghai strikes and movements like those in Harbin, threats of repression, warnings against the tendency to strike at all the cadres and all the leaders of the party and the administration, is to be found an appeal for direct intervention by the masses and the formation of new and historically original bodies of proletarian democracy. It is clearer than ever, in our opinion, that the Mao group is caught between contradictory needs -- on the one hand it cannot prevail over its adversaries except by basing itself on broad sectors of the masses (and from now on not only the student masses), on the other hand it seeks to block the movement it invokes from developing in accordance with its own dynamics beyond the objectives set for it.
It is difficult to forecast the next developments in this profound crisis which, in any case, will mark a fundamental episode in the history of the tempestuous transition period from capitalism to socialism. It is now possible to grasp the substance of what is happening. The very profound conflicts at the top, the methods utilized by the _ Mao group to fight its adversaries, the increasingly sharp and complex struggle of multiple tendencies have set off a clearer and clearer process of disintegration in the party and state apparatus. In the relative vacuum which this disintegration has produced, all. the social forces of China have begun to move under the impulsion of different objective stimuli and in order to advance their own-claims and demands. This liberation of social forces, this development of a dynamism that is very: largely independent of the aims and will of all the groups at the top is in itself a very positive phenomenon, particularly in view of the fact that the greatest weight by far lies with the workers and poor and middle peasants and that the context in which their action is taking place is absolutely unlike that of the Soviet Union in the middle twenties and the beginning of the thirties. ;
An overall judgment obviously cannot be offered until it becomes possible to see the outcome of the crisis -- and on this at the moment a prognosis cannot be advanced.
February 8, 1967
229.
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