Page 1 of
4 The
historical significance of
Mao By Henry C K Liu
The protracted history of the Chinese
socialist revolution started 94 years ago in 1919
on May 4, when 5,000 students from Beijing
University and 12 other schools held a political
demonstration in front of Tiananmen, the focal
point of what is today known as Tiananmen Square.
The demonstration sparked what came to be known in
history as the May Fourth Movement of 1919-21, an
anti-imperialism movement
rising out of patriotic reactions to dishonorable
foreign relations of the government of China's
then warlord Yuan Shi-kai that led to unjust
treatment of China by Western powers at the
Versailles Peace Conference.
May Fourth
was a political landmark that consolidated the
nation's collective awareness that Western
democracy was as imperialistic as the Western
monarchy it overthrew. This national collective
awareness turned China from Western democracy
towards the path of modern socialism through
Marxist-Leninist proactive revolution.
Mao
Zedong at the time of the May Fourth Movement was
26 years old and a librarian assistant in Beijing
University, where he spent time in the stacks
reading about heroic nationalist leaders such as
George Washington, Napoleon and Otto von Bismark
and became inspired by their world-changing
patriotic deeds.
As a son of a small
farming family that enjoyed comfortable living on
three acres (1.21 hectares) of land in rural
Shao-shan in Hunan province, Mao in his youth
spent his spare time after working in the field
reading Chinese history and literature in the
newly opened public library in nearby Changsha. He
was particularly inspired by the legalist policies
of Qin Shi Wang (259 BC-210 BC) and the theme of
Water Margin, a 14th-century novel of
universal brotherhood and one of the "Four Great
Classical Novels" of Chinese literature.
Before going to Beijing, Mao attended
First Normal School of Changsha, coming under the
influenced of several progressive teachers there,
including a professor of ethics named Yang Changji
(1871-1920), who urged Mao and other students to
read a radical newspaper, New Youth, founded by
Marxist Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), Dean of the
Faculty of Letters at Beijing University.
In 1918, after graduating from First
Normal School of Chansha, Mao moved to Beijing, to
join Yang Changji who had been recently appointed
professor at Peking University by Cai Yuanpei
(1868-1940), the progressive president. Yang
recommended Mao to be an assistant to university
librarian Li Dazhao (1889-1927), a Marxist
intellectual in China who later participated the
the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in
Shanghai in 1921.
Li wrote a series of
articles in New Youth on the October Revolution,
which had just taken place in Russia, during which
the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) seized state power.
Lenin had put forth the theory of imperialism as
the final stage of capitalism based on the
writings of John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940),
building on the socio-economic-political theory of
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels
(1820-1895) in the mid-19th century from
observation on turbulent European conditions.
Li's articles helped create interest in
Marxism in the Chinese revolutionary movement, as
an alternative to Western-style democracy that had
been subscribed by the 1911 bourgeois Revolution
led by Sun Yat-sen, but had proved wanting in the
behavior of Western democracies at the 1919
Versailles Peace Conference. Marxism was then
recognized by Chinese revolutionary intellectuals
as a more effective ideology in the struggle
against Western imperialism even when many of the
concepts of Marxism applied only to European
situations.
The May Fourth Movement marked
a turn by anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals
towards revolutionary Marxism. The success of the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a major factor
in forming the views of Li Dazhao on the
revolutionary role of the state. Li initiated the
Peking Socialist Youth Corps in 1920 and in July
1921 co-founded the Communist Party of China (CPC)
with Chen Duxiu, who had been exposed to socialist
ideas in Japan, as a political institution with
the secular program to seize power of the state to
carry out socialist revolution in China. A
revolutionary state is the rationale for a
one-party government, provided that the ruling
party represents the interest of the people. Li
was a mentor to Mao Zedong, who openly
acknowledged having been influenced by Li's ideas.
The first edition of Stalin's Problems
of Leninism, which appeared in April 1924,
seven years after the October Revolution of 1917,
asks: "Is it possible to attain the final victory
of socialism in one country, without the combined
efforts of the proletarians of several advanced
countries?" The answer was: "No, it is not. The
efforts of one country are enough for the
overthrow of the bourgeoisie [in one country].
This is what the history of our revolution tells
us. For the final victory of socialism, for the
organization of socialist production, the efforts
of one country, especially a peasant country like
ours, are not enough. For this we must have the
efforts of the proletariat of several advanced
countries."
The strategic key words on
socialist internationalism are "final victory",
which cannot be achieved with just "socialism in
one country", and the phrase "the proletariat of
several advanced countries". But "final" implies
not immediate but in the future, even the distant
future. And international communism was focused
not on the whole world, but on "the proletariat of
several advance countries" where evolutionary
conditions were considered as ripe. It was not
focused on the peasantry still living under
agricultural feudal societies outside of Europe or
the oppressed people of imperialist colonies and
semi-colonies.
To both Lenin and Stalin,
the path to liberation in the colonies of the
Western empire was to strengthen the only
socialist country in the world, namely the Soviet
Union, and to weaken capitalism at the core,
namely industrialized economies, to end its final
stage of imperialism. In theory, the liberated
industrial workers of the Western advanced
economies would in turn help liberate the
oppressed peasants in the colonies and
semi-colonies in the still not industrialized
economies.
Unfortunately, actual events
failed to support this theory. There was no worker
uprising in the advanced economies. In fact,
unionism in the advanced economies sided with
management and turned anti-communist. These trends
support the truth that liberation cannot be
delivered by others and must be won by the victims
themselves. Each oppressed group must struggle for
self-liberation through internal political
consciousness.
Both Lenin and Stalin
failed to recognize the inherently powerful but
latent revolutionary potential of the peasants of
the pre-industrial colonies and semi-colonies of
the Western Empires, which had to wait until the
emergence of Mao Zedong in China to force the
world to acknowledge this truth in history. Mao,
in placing his faith in the revolutionary
potential of the Chinese peasantry, redefined the
term "proletariat" to mean those deprived of
property, a property-less class, away from the
European idea of the proletariat as the class of
urban industrial workers.
The October
Revolution of 1917 was launched on the slogan "All
Power to the Soviets", through which the minority
Bolsheviks won political leadership in the
Soviets, which were workers councils that
constituted the power behind the new socialist
state. Bourgeois liberal democracy was not an
objective of the October Revolution, but rather a
target for elimination in order to establish the
dictatorship of the proletariat in the context of
socialist revolution through class struggle.
This was because in feudal Russia in 1917
the proletariat as a dominant class was an
abstraction yet to be created as a reality by
industrialization. The proletariat in its infancy,
small in number, could not possibly command a
majority under universal suffrage in a feudal
agricultural society. Therefore, under similar
circumstances, dictatorship of a minority
proletariat is the only revolutionary path towards
socialism, according to Leninism.
In
pre-industrial societies, liberal representative
democracy is by definition reactionary in the
absence of a dominant working class. Lenin
considered the revolution in Russia as a
fortuitous beginning of an emerging socialist
world order that required and justified a
dictatorship of the proletariat to sustain
revolutionary progress.
Leninists work for
the acceleration of socio-economic dialectics by
the violent overthrow of capitalism just as
capitalism had been the violent slayer of
feudalism. Evolutionary Marxists, such as social
democrats, believe in scientific dialectic
materialism, which predicts the inevitability of
the replacement of capitalism by socialism as a
natural outcome of capitalism's internal
contradiction.
But the evolutionary
process requires the emergence of capitalism as a
natural outcome of feudalism's internal
contradiction. Marx saw the process of evolution
toward socialism as taking place in the most
advanced segment of the world, in capitalistic
societies of industrialized Western Europe, when
the ruling bourgeoisie had replaced the
aristocracy as a result of the French Revolution.
The Russian Revolution showed that geopolitical
conditions had opened up opportunities for
revolutions in pre-industrialized nations and it
was in these pre-industrial societies that radical
revolution was needed to bring about instant
socialism by short-circuiting the long
evolutionary process from feudalism to capitalism
to socialism.
In Germany, the most
industrialized country in the second half of the
19th century, Social Democrat icons such as Karl
Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, titans of Marxist
exegesis, favored gradual, non-violent and
parliamentary processes to effectuate inevitable
dialectic evolution towards socialism because of
the existence in Germany of a large working class.
These Marxists subscribed to the doctrine of
evolutionary Marxism, which renders revolution
unnecessary as socialism would arrive naturally
from capitalism as an evolutionary process of
dialectic materialism.
On the other end of
the spectrum were radical revolutionaries such as
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the
Spartacists, founded in the summer of 1915 when
they withdrew from the German Social-Democrat
Party (SDP) because of SDP support for Germany's
participation in World War I. The Spartacists
staged an abortive coup to overthrow the young
social democratic government in Germany. For
communists, revolution is necessary in order to
short circuit the long stage of capitalism, during
which the evolutionary process can be halted by
unionism and the introduction of a mixed economy
through the injection of a socialist dimension in
the capitalist system. This is particularly true
for pre-industrial feudal societies, when a
capitalist system with socialist dimension can be
employed to ward off any revolutionary pressure.
The call by radical Leninists for a
worldwide coalition of the browbeaten proletariat
majority in the industrial societies in the West,
who were still deprived of political power beyond
the structural dialectical process, and the
agitating proletariat minority in the agricultural
societies in whose name radical Leninists had
gained state power in Russia, was most threatening
to the rulers of the capitalist order in the
advanced imperialist countries.
Reaction
to this threat gave rise to insidious
anti-communism in the imperialist West to prevent
the arrival of socialism in the strongholds of
industrial capitalism ahead of its evolutionary
schedule. In the advanced economies,
state-sponsored capitalist propaganda was
conditioning workers into an active anti-communist
force through industrial unionism and the
addictive appeal of individualistic bourgeois
freedom to neutralize collective working class
solidarity.
Still, all Marxists share the
belief that the structural antagonism between a
capitalist bourgeoisie class and a proletariat
class in advanced economies was a necessary
precondition for creating socialism. It required
the resolution of the contradiction between the
efficient productivity of capitalism and the
economic dysfunctionality of the mal-distribution
of wealth inherent in capitalism.
The good
of capitalism is its efficiency in creating
wealth; the bad is that the way wealth is created
in capitalism requires wealth to go to the wrong
places, to those who need it least, namely the
rich rather than the poor who need it most. Also,
awareness was increasing that capital in the
modern financial system comes increasingly from
the pension funds of workers in a capitalist
society with socialist dimensions - the welfare
state.
Wealth is good Wealth is
good; it is the mal-distribution of it that is bad
and creates socio-economic conflicts. And if that
mal-distribution is carried out through class
lines, then struggle must be part of a socialist
revolution.
The internal contradiction of
capitalism is that it creates wealth by widening
the gap between rich and poor. Wealth disparity is
a polluting socio-economic by-product of
capitalist wealth creation, like the nuclear waste
in nuclear energy.
While capital cannot
create wealth without labor, the proletariat in
advanced economies, oppressed by a pro-capital
legal-political regime, never managed to gain
control of ownership of the means of production
financed by their own wealth, stored in worker
pension funds. Thus oppressed workers remained
silently, docile victims of capitalist
exploitation by capitalists using workers' own
retirement money as capital.
Apologists
for capitalism then create the myth of capital
being needed to create employment, ignoring the
fact that it is the saved income from employed
workers that creates capital. In other words,
employment creates capital, not the other way
around. Chinese reformers have yet to understand
this truism when they accept low wages in order to
attract capital investment.
The global
financial crisis that began in 2007 in New York is
a live demonstration of the self-destructive
potential of finance capitalism when not supported
by full employment with rising wages, which then
forces needed consumption to be financed by
consumer debt, which inevitably will become
unsustainable.
The current financial
crisis of unsustainable debt around the world has
ignited populist demand for socio-political
changes in all countries. These populist changes
will transform the existing socio-economic world
order, even though it is too early to predict what
shape his new world order will take. Suffice to
observe that changes in government toward
progressive populism are now taking place in every
nation, except perhaps China, where a one-party
government lead by the communist party still
governs. But many Western-trained Chinese
neoliberal economists continue to argue for
more-free markets that uses market forces to keep
wages low.
The agrarian socio-economic
conditions in czarist Russia and dynastic China,
while not congruent to each other, were
fundamentally different from the industrial
conditions in Europe, where the Industrial
Revolution had taken place to bring into existence
a large working class of factory workers that was
supposed to be ripe for the revolutionary class
struggle as envisioned by Marx at the start of the
1848 Democratic Revolutions.
Tragically,
the socialist movements were crushed and their
revolutionary leaders murdered by reactionary
forces in both Germany and France. The capitalist
democratic regimes that followed inherited and
embraced with renewed vigor Western imperialism
and its colonies around the world.
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