To analyze the role played by China in the current phase of international politics and the nature of its ruling group, we must take as our starting point the revolution that finished victoniously in the autumn of 1949. This victory of the Chinese revolution was the most important event since October 1917: it represented a qualitative leap with far reaching conseqwences for the Chinese people. It dealt at the same time a mighty blow against imperialism and brought about profound alterations in the relation of class forces on a world scale. No amount of criticism of the order built in China after the revolution, or of the politics of the ruling group, can alter this fundamental assessment.
The comparison that follows is not novel but still retains its force: it is sufficient to compare the development of China over the last twenty years with that of India to understand the scope of the problems tackled by the revolution. While China has fully freed itself of imperialist influence, in India the effects of imperialist interests, in particular those of Great Britain and the United States, are felt more clearly than ever before. While in China the basis of the previous ruling classes has been completely destroyed, India is torn apart by an extreme social polarization: the barbaram of caste society still rules the country. Although national tensions have not yet disappeared, China has virtually accomplished the task of national unification. India, on the other, at certain periods only -in factories and local hand, totters under the sway of centrifugal forces that are likely to bring about its disintegration. China has no foreign debts while India's indebtedness is huge. While China has done away with its traditional poverty, India finds it impossible to carry out the most urgent economic reforms: the great majority of it: population lives under the constant threat of starvation. The divergent development of the two countries is based on the qualitative diffenenon of their social and economic orders. The Chinese experience, in spite of all its contradictions and limitations, testifies to the historical superiority of the socialist relations of production that are built in countries where the working class is in power, over the capitalist relations pertaining to bourgeois class The ultimately victorious revolutionary war of twenty years duration provoked a justified interest and came to serve as a source of inspiration for other struggles, China became, particularly in Asia, a powerful focus of attraction and a major anti-imperialist power. Even the neighbouring bourgeoisies, for a certain period, practised a policy of friendly relations with China-something that China welcomed and even encouraged, occasionally at great cost to itself. Chinese influence did not weaken even later, when developments in world politics and in the internal affairs of some of these countries provoked certain changes and ruptures in the Chinese positions. On the contrary, the prestige of China grew among the radical peasant, worker and petty-bourgeois masses, particularly after the Sino-Soviet split and the ensuing Chinese critique of the CPSU. The radicalized masses looked to Peking to intervene decisively in solving the crisis within the international working-class movement and to extend political, if necessary even military support to struggles against the native ruling C353 This unity of objective, structural factors and subjective elements underlies the role played by China in the course of fifteen years after the victory of its revolution. These factors and elements have far from disappeared in spite of events and changes in recent history. However, the building of the new social order in China took place within a contex: that soon engendered various deformations and degenerations. For a long time now revolutionary Marxists have studied and criticized these phenomena and for this they have often been charged with "dogmatism" and 'sectarianism'. But after the eruption of the crisis inappropriately termed the "cultural revolution', and after the polemics that raged in the course of it, it became difficult not to conclude-if only on the basis of evidence and criticism voiced by the neration of the workers' state had taken place in China. Mao himself declared that "from the liberation to the present day, in the course of seventeen years, we have considerably distanced The Red Mole 15 May 1972 Page 6 to a head during the phase of the "cultural revolution "
ourselves from the masses".
In a book shortly to be published in Britain (by New Left Books), I have developed a series of arguments supporting the thesis of bureaucratic degeneration in China. This degeneration has assumed concrete forms in the process of social differentiation which, although not as drastic as in the USSR, has nevertheless affected the whole of Chinese society. Apart from a visible difference in the standard of living between town and countryside, serious inequalities have appeared among the peasantry; the same is true of the working class, which was also the first to suffer from the slowing down of the wage dynamic. More important, big differences in the standard of living have appeared between the workers and the peasants on the one hand and the new privileged stratum on the other. In industry, technicians and managers claim a considerably higher income than the workers and marked social differentiation is to be found even within the state and the party apparatus. Privileges, and not only of income, grow visibly as one ascends the ranks of the party, the military and the state. As voiced in some very sharp accusations levelled in China between 1966 and 1969, the top leaders enjoy a standard of living hardly comparable to that of the masses.
This process has been made possible by the nature of the political apparatus and the mode of its functioning. With the exception of some independence present at the village level andadministration, important economic and political decisions have always been an exclusive monopoly of the party and state leadership, which have been merged to a greater degree in China than in the other workers states. The Chinese Peoples' Assembly and its Standing Committee have never been the organs of decision-making. All important decisions have always been made by the party apparatus, and as party congresses (or Central Committee Ple nums) are rarely called (in the last twenty-six years only three congresses have been held), these decisions are made by the Politburo, that is, by itsstanding committee. (An alternative is for the Central Committee to appoint special commissions.) Such a mode of functioning could only result in the expulsion of the masses from any real control over the economic and political life of the country and in the consolidation of powerful groups inside the party which often waged secret struggles against each other and which were to become one of the main targets of attack during the cultural revoAn objective factor that contributed to the process of degeneration in China was the terrible backwardness of the country, even worse than that of the USSR after the revolution. But an even more decisive factor was the use of remnants of the old political and administrative apparatus in the creation of the new social order. Thus qualitatively new, revolutionary structures that would ensure the participation of workers and peasants in the running of the country were not present anywhere. This was not coincidental but followed, in the last instance, from the nature of the Chinese CP and nature of its leading apparatus originally formed in the liberated territories. In spite of its specificity, and in spite of the differences between it and Stalin at crucial moments of the Chinese revolution, the CCP suffered nevertheless from the destructive effects of Stalinism: after the revolution it was to play a fundamental role in the bureaucratization of the new social order. The Stalinist features of the CCPalready present at the time of the civil war, and the degeneration of the Chinese workers' state during the 50s and 60s, should not allow us to forget the important lessons of that armed struggle nor the fact that it was the CCP that led the masses to the overthrow of the old class rule. But it is equally important to realize that the historical success of the revolution should not prevent us from grasping its complex and contradictory process or from analyzing the nature of the Maoist order.
The political and social crisis that goes by the na me of "cultural revolution", stretching symsupporters of the group around Mao-that a dege- bolically between November 1966 (the beginning of the public debate on the now famous stage play) and April 1969 (the opening of the Ninth Party Congress) forms a coherent part of the framework sketched above. In the final analysis it is a result of conflicts and contradictions that had accumulated in the new social order. This new order, initiated by the revolution, was from the beginning marked with bureaucratic deformations, which hampered and distorted industrial development and the process of collectivization, thus creating tensions within the economic, political and military apparatus as well as within the society as a whole. The international context-1965 was the year of the imperialist offensive in Vietnam and of the Indonesian catastrophesharpened the contradictions even further. There was a real possibility that the dynamic of the war in Vietnam could provoke a direct attack on China and this forced the Chinese leadership to consider a strategy for dealing with this problem-something which involved, among other things, China's relationship with the USSR.
There are two interpretations of the cultural revolution- both incorrect-which have to be rejected. The first interpretation starts from the indisputable fact that the conflicts started in the highest echelons of the party -after which appeals were made to the masses (first to the students, then to the workers). Taking the final outcome of the crisis also into account, this interpretation attempts to reduce the phenomenon of the cultural revolution to a conflict within the bureaucracy in which workers and students took part under strict control from above, ie., as forces which were essentially manipulated for the purpose of consolidating the hegemony of the leading group. The partisans of the second interpretation take as their starting point the equally indisputable fact of mass mobilization (particularly in certan phases), and the fact that the masses took over certain organizational structures, in order to present the cultural revolution as a relatively spontaneous movement of the masses aimed at the destruction of the bureaucracy and the establishment of democracy from below. In actual fact, the cultural revolution represented at one and the same time a deep crisis of the ruling apparatus at all levels and a very wide rallying of social forces which, encouraged at first by the contesting factions, soon gained their own impetus and confronted the framework of bureaucratic rule itself.
It is necessary to grasp this point in order to understand the decision of the group around Mao Tse Tung (who after all had taken similar initiatives in the past) to bring fresh forces into the conflict between the various currents in the party leadership: this decision was crucial to its ultimate success. At the same time we can understand why, as soon as the upheaval went too far and hit not just at specific forms of bureaucratic rule but at bureaucratic rule itself, the same faction took energetic measures-including violent repression-to arrest further mobilization of the masses and channel it into a more appropriate direction. This first happened when the student movement got under wayin autumn 1966 and afterwards-and thenon a more explosive and significant scaleat the time when widespread strikes shook a number of Chinese towns, reaching a peak in the first month of 1967. It is symptomatic that all the apologists of the cultural revolution try if not openly to ignore workers mobilizations and strikes then at least to reduce them to insignificant dimensionsin spite of the fact that the official sources themselves give a good indication of their scale. Indeed, they try very hard to ignore exactly those events that speak most openly about the conflict between, on the one hand, the aspirations of broad masses and, on the other, the interests and orientations not only of the more conservative tendencies but of Mao's faction as well.
Secondly, the role played by the army must also be brought into the picture. It is not accidental that one of the first battles signalling the crisis, from the middle of 1965 to the beginning of 1966, was conducted precisely within the army. The Mao-Lin Piao faction was keen to consolidate its control over the armed forces before moving to a frontal attack. For this purpose, a meeting was called of the army top brass and Lo Jui Ching, then the Commander-in-Chief, was replaced. In fact, the army played a decisive role in the most important phases of the cultural revolution. At the time when the state and party apparatus was deeply shaken and paralyzed, with the leadership The calm before the storm: Mao Tse Tung wit drastically reduced in size, the army was hardly touched and came to acquire in a natural way functions normally exercised by other sectors of the apparatus. For this reason the army was vital in bringing the crisis to its end-something that naturally follows from its position as the first line of defence for the bureaucratic order. Thirdly, we have to consider the methods with which the political battle was fought before the masses. During the cultural revolution, there was no open confrontation over real problems and on real positions. Instead of this, various 'transcriptions" and "translations' were used in worst Stalinist fashion. The purged leaders were not allowed to defend themselves publicly against the charges levelled against them and therefore became easy targets for public attack and abuse, in order finally to be branded as agents of the class enemy and imperialism. Insofar as it is possible to check the evidence, there is no doubt that their positions were distorted if not completely misrepresented. When judging the nature of the leading faction we must also take into account the fact that, instead of conducting their policy of confrontation in the spirit of Leninist principles of democratic centralism, they approached the problems involved in the worst Stalinist manner. This does not necessarily imply that the accused expressed progressive positions, or positions more progressive and revolutionary than those of Mao and Lin Piao. The positions and perspectives offered were sufficiently differentiated to prevent a simple classification. Nevertheless we can say that Liu Shao Chi and Teng Hsiao Ping expressed the more traditional and organically bureaucratic approach to the role of the party and the state, and that this lost them the battle in a situation which provoked a political awakening of the masses.
Finally, it is important to remember that, in the course of the upheaval, some of the aspirations of the masses came to be articulated in quite concrete ideological and organisational terms. Workers" and student' committees were formed which opposed the official channelling of the masses. Various texts (of uneven significance and value) were produced calling for a consistent anti-bureaucratic struggle and charging the leading faction with unwillingness to lead the cultural revolution to its completion. These committees even held discussions on the nature of socialism in China, a clear sign of growth in the political consciousness of the masses. It is not surprising then that, at certain crucial moments in the cultural revolution and quite recently as well, these "ultra-left' tendencies came under heavy attack from the Maoist faction, marshalled by Chou En Lai.
Certain interpretations of the cultural revolution talk of the destruction of the old party and state apparatus and the creation of new democratic organs expressing the will of the massos. We do not deny that these structures were shaken or that significant replacement of cadres occurred at all levels, ensuring a more in
cher (left) and later with Lin Piao timate and lively contact with the masses. We believe that at local administrative levels the masses now have a greater say in what goes on and that, at least in some enterprises at the peak of the crisis and immediately afterwards, the workers could influence the running of factories. Indeed, we believe that the ice of forces is more favourable to the as after the tural revolution then be* 1965- se, as we have & a growth in the polatical We cations of thi change will be shown in the future pattern of upheavals that are bound to shake Chinese society again. But for us the important question is whether the cultural revolution really did represent a qualitative break, ie. an end to bureaucratic degeneration through a complete re-organisation of society on the basis of really democratic and revolutionary new structures. Is the road now chosen by the Chinese leadership a new and better model for building socialism?
First of all, if we examine the concepts and perspectives articulated in the course of the cultural revolution, we find that they neatly follow those put forward in the past by Mao and other leaders, especially at the time of the Great Leap Forwardand Peoples' Communes. This undeniable element of continuity is also reflected in the massive exploitation of old texts and quotations by the party leaders during the crisis. As for the main direction of economic policy, the Ninth Party Congress re-affirmed the 1961 directive: "Agriculture is the basis of our economy and industry its leading element". Many interesting studies and articles published at the time on problems in the countryside have as their central concern the dialectics of collectivisation and mechanisation. But the main formulations on the whole follow those already outlined in the 50s. In some cases, when tractors are handed over to the communes, we find peasants being painted an almost Kruschevite vision of the future. No basic changes have occurred in the system of remuneration of peasants either. On the whole we can say that no fundamental metamorphosis in the countryside has occurred.
As for industry, the polemic conducted between 1965 and 1968 concentrated on criticizing authoritarian and technocratic forms of management. Here the principle of the leading role of the party, announced at the time of the Great Leap Forward, was re-affirmed. In the period of restructuring the main role was played by revolutionary committees where party members always had a clear majority. The wage system, as far as we know, was not changed. Certain restrictions on workers' initiative in production have been removed, the cumbersome managing system has been simplified. the principle of co-operation between specialists and management was proclaimed, some experiments were made towards breaking down the distinction between intellectual and manual labour, and workers were given some scope for personal advance. None of this adds up, however, to real workers' management. Like peasants, workers have no say on the fundamental economic choices that concern the country as a whole and which, after all, determine local economic policy. In this decisive area, the hegemony of the bureaucracy remains untouched.
The cultural revolution gripped the imagination of people outside China because it produced a number of texts-above all the famous Sixteen Points-which evoked the principles of the Paris Commune, hailed by both Marx and Lenin as laying the foundation of proletarian democracy. What were the practical results of the cultural revolution in this domain? After the 1966-67 shake-up in the political and administrative apparatus, revolutionary committees were formed in twenty-nine Chinese provinces. But only in a few cases were these committees elected, and then they were allowed to function only after being explicitly recognized by the leading faction. The committees were in most cases appointed: rather than expressing the will of the masses, they were the result of agreements, validated from above, reached between the components of the so-called triple bloc: the army, the leading cadres and the masses. It is not accidental that the key role in these committees was played by the army. Also, it is most significant that this restructuring took place only at the provincial level. Official instructions were always crystal clear: "taking power did not extend to the State Council (the government), the Central Committee or even the provincial central committees. In other words, the real centres of power remained untouched. Here we have to remind ourselves of something which is fundamental to Marxism: when political decisions on the most important matters are not made by the masses, or organs directly created by them and whose work they permanently control, then power does not belong to the masses and proletarian democracy does not exist. The bureaucratic petrification present in China before 1965 could not be removed by replacing a few individuals or by reorganisation of certain levels, but only by a qualitative change at all levels. Hence the so-called cultural revolution" was essentially an attempt at reform within the framework of the existing bureaucratic order and not a revolutionary destruction of it.
Revolutionary Marxists have always stressed the importance of the debate between China and the USSR and openly declared that Chinese criticism of the USSR and of other CPs was often valid. Chinese support for the armed struggle in Thailand, for example, significantly contributed to the development of anti-imperialist struggle in Asia. In criticising the opportunism of Western CPs, in extending sympathy to the revolutionary left during the May 68 events in France, in condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Chinese leadership objectively contributed to the crisis of the bureaucratic regimes and parties, and inspired new political vanguards. Such acts explain the attraction of Chinese positions in many parts of the world, although this attraction is limited, particularly in the East European workers' states, by the failure of the Chinese leadership to break with Stalin and Stalinism. Nevertheless, any analysis of Maoism as a current in the international working-class movement must go beyond a mere comparison of the Chinese and Russian positions. It is necessary instead to grasp the nature of Maoism as a whole in order to understand the fundamental logic of its politics.
When we come to analyze Chinese foreign policy, we must remind ourselves of something which has decisive implications for struggles in the colonial and neo-colonial countries. Here the strategic orientation taken by Peking, and groups under its influence, rests upon a premise of democratic or national-democratic revolutions which ate aimed not against capitalism as such but against feudalism and imperialism. From this follows the policy of alliance with national bourgeoisies and other democratic, patriotic and anti-imperialist forces". It is not necessary to point out the original inspiration of this orientation: it follows conceptions dominant in Stalin's time and taken over by his successors. The trajedy of the Indonesian CP which, on Chinese advice, had long worked closely with the national bourgeoisie represented by Sukarno, illustrates forcefully the necessarily disastrous consequences of such a strategy. But the lessons of Indonesia remain to be learnt: after the destruction of the Indonesian CP. after the cultural revolution the Maoist leadership continues its policy of cooperation with the 'national' bourgeoisie-even when this bourgeoisie is represented by military dictators of the Ayub Khan-Yahya Khan type, who were both triumphantly welcomed in China at the very time when they were engaged in merciless repression of the workers, peasants and student movements in both East and West Pakistan.
It would be a mistake to believe that this policy is the consequence of a mistaken analysis or an erroneous strategical perspective. The fact is that the Chinese bureaucracy defines its line first of all in relation to what it considers is required by its own needs and its own diplomacy. For a number of years China maintained good relations with Indonesia: hence its cooperation with Sukarno, practised also by the Indonesian CP. After the revolution and in the 50s China worked closely with India. Once tensions appeared between the two countries, Peking drew closer to Pakistan and this special relationship with Pakistan represents even today a significant factor in Chinese foreign policy. We would not deny to a workers' state the right to maintain diplomatic relations with bourgeois or even reactionary governments. But for revolutionary Marxists it is unacceptable that, in a military conflict between two bourgeois states, the Chinese leadership should not only take the side of one of them but defend it as its ally. It is even more unacceptable to us that the interests of the international revolutionary movement should be subjugated to diplomatic manoeuvres and alliances. This is a policy characteristic of Stalinism. It is the policy practised by China for a number of years. This is what China did in the case of Pakistan, when it gave support to one of the most brutal repressions in history against a people who rose for their national independence. This is what China did in the case of Ceylon, where it quite openly and cynically (see Chou En Lai's letter to Bandaranaike) took the side of a bourgeois regime that survived only by appealing to all conservative forces in the world. This is what China did when it gave unhesitating support to the dictatorship in the Sudan, to murderers of communists and tradeunionists. This is what it did when it welcomed with the highest honours the Emperor of Ethiopia-country subject to the most barbaric social and national oppression, and which also provides A merican imperialism with one of its most important bastions in Africa. This is the policy that reacts positively to certain manoeuvres within the Common Market, passing in silence over what this alliance represents: a pressure towards international concentration of capital. Now new and serious conflicts have yet again erupted in China, Lin Piao has been eliminated most of the top army commands have been changed, and Chou En Lai has apparently achieved a new dominance within the leading faction. Although the ultimate outcome of these events is impossible to predict with confidence, it is nevertheless understandable that deep differences should have emerged on a whole range of questions: from problems of economic development to the reorganization of the party and to the direction of foreign policy. So far, the basic confrontation seems to have been between the party and the army. As we have seen, the relative vacuum that appeared at the peak of the cultural revolution came to be filled by the army. But once a minimal reorganization of the party was completed, a confrontation between those who wanted to prolong army hegemony and those who wanted a return to 'normal conditions' (le. the leading role of the party) was inevitable. And the swing to the rightsymbolised by the agreement to Nixon's visithas apparently now provided the occasion for a split at the highest level.
The Nixon visit was not simply a question of 'normalisation" of diplomatic relations. It must be seen within the context of, on the one hand, the Chinese leaders' view of the Soviet Union and, on the other, the present phase of the war in Indochina. The Chinese interpretation of the Soviet Union as capitalist and of Russian foreign policy as social-imperialist is not just completely anti-Marxist: it has profound implications for China's own foreign policy. For if the Soviet Union is a capitalist country with imperialist aspirations, then it may at any given moment be considered as the principal enemy and American imperialism as secondary. Such a view would justify the Sino-American entente in the face of recent Russian diplomatic successes in the Indian sub-continent. But the latest victories of the Vietnamese drive home tellingly the absurdity of the theory of Russian "social-imperialism'. The second thing that must be clearly understood about Nixon's trip was that it occurred at a time when, as the Vietnamese themselves repeatedly stressed, American imperialism was in fact escalating the war under the cover of "Vietnamisation' with the confident aim of maintaining an anti-communist regime in Saigon (as in Pnom Penh and Vientiane). The statements by Vietnamese leaders leave no doubt as to their views on the Nixon visit to China; they were only too aware of the assistance it gave Nixon in disguising the real character of American strategy in Asia. At all events, what is clear is that we have not yet seen the end of political upheavals in China. The new generation of workers, peasants and students who have acquired valuable experience in the course of the cultural revolution will play an increasingly important role in the future and, learning from the experience of other countries, they will finally succeed in overthrowing bureaucratic rule and replacing it by true proletarian democracy.
Livio Maitan (This article is based on a talk given by Comrade Maitan to Yugoslav students at a public meeting in Belgrade on 6 December 1971).
Two new bills have just been put through of its 14,000 political prisoners as it sees fit. though China supported its suppression, the Bandaranaike government has shown no more mercy to the Maoists than to the JVP. Their chairman, N. Shanmugathasan, was arrested early in the repression and the Maoists have issued public complaints of the torture and ill-treatment of their cadres.
With the JVP and the Maoists temporarily immobilized, the government recently turned its fire against the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), Ceylon's Fourth International group which has its base in the urban trade unions. The LSSP-R broke away in 1964 from the parent Lanka Sama Samaja Party, Ceylon's or other private or public installations. In future the proceedings of courts designed to deal with such offences will be inquisitional. Commissions appointed to enquire into them may present either written or oral evidence of any kind (and thus by implication, evidence obtained under torture), and the court may exclude the press and public from part or all of any enquiry. The act provides for forced confessions to be used in evidence not only against the confessor but also against any person indicted by him, without the accused having the right to cross-examine the confessor, Defence and cross-examination are also precluded with respect to any report "pur-
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