Wednesday, April 15, 2015

The Proletarian Cultural Revolution is Deep Criticism of the Doctrines of Confucius and Mencious by Fang Hai


Democracy and Class Struggle continues with its examination of Lin Biaoism and Confucius, many of the ideas of Soviet Revisionists on Confucius were later applied by Deng Xiaoping. 


In fact there were projects started in 1980's funded by hundreds of millions of dollars by the Chinese State to create Confucian Studies Departments at Universities which attracted some of the elite's children but the general population had little time for this academic neo confucianism.

 

Confucianism was explored anew after the 1980s.

 

The first indication of this
was the establishment of certain institutions authorized by the party and government,
for instance, the China Confucius Foundation (CCF).


In  1984 and the International Confucian Association (ICA ) was formed.

 

 The CCF was established and financially supported by the central government. International activities related to Confucianism are still strongly promoted by the ICA. This is different from the CCF.

 

In any case, until now, the ICA and the
CCF are still the most influential organizations of Confucian studies in China

 
 

The promotion of "Confucian Harmonious Society" was Hu Jintao's ruling philosophy.

Near the end of his tenure in 2011, Hu appeared to extend the ideology to an international dimension, with a focus on the international peace and cooperation, which is said to lead to a "harmonious world". 

The administration of Hu's successor, Xi Jinping, has used the philosophy more sparingly. See Xi Jingping and his approach in documents below.

Document No 9 and Document No 30 of the Chinese Communist Party in the 21st Century are reflections on the Communist Party of China's ideological failures since Mao and an attempt to hijack some features of Maoism to solve their current political problems has Confucianism or Neo Confucianiam has been an abject ideological failure.



The Proletarian Cultural Revolution is Deep Criticism of the Doctrines of Confucius and Mencious by Fang Hai


The party's basic line

tells us that socialist society covers a considerably

long historical period and that throughout this historical

period, there are classes, class contradictions

and class struggle, there is the struggle between the

socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the

danger of capitalist restoration and there is the

threat of subversion and aggression by imperialism

and social-imperialism.

Struggles between two 1ines

within the Party, which reflect these contradictions,

will also continue for a long time, and may

occur ten, twenty or thirty more times.



 

In China, ever since the proletariat appeared on
             the political stage as a class-conscious, independent
             political force, the revolutions it led have invariably
             been closely linked with criticism of the reactionary
                           Confucian and Mencian doctrines.
 


The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution initiated
           and led by Chairman Mao is a great political revolution'

                It is also a profound criticism of the doctrines of
                                 Confucius and Mencius.

 
            The reactionary doctrines of Confucius and Mencius
                                are doctrines of restoration.


Every reactionary ruling class in Chinese history
                has made use of them in an attempt to hold back
                     social progress and restore the o1d order.


Representatives of opportunist lines within the

Communist Party are agents of the landlord class

and the bourgeoisie.

 

In order to turn back the wheel of history and oppose
the proletarian revolution, they inevitably pick
weapons from the trashy ideological arsenal of the
decadent slave-owning and landlord classes to
attack the proletariat and so are bound to be diehard
defenders and frenzied peddlers of the reactionary
doctrines of Confucius and Mencius.
'
During the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, we have
smashed the two bourgeois headquarters, one
headed by Liu Shao-chi and the other by Lin Biao.
The struggle against Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao is
also a struggle between opposition to and worship
of Confucius.





The criticism of their revisionist lines involves
widespread criticism of the reactionary
doctrines of Confucius and Mencius. Like all
other ringleaders of opportunist lines within the
Party, Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao were worshippers
of Confucius.
 
The reactionary doctrines of Confucius
and Mencius constitute one of the main ideological
sources of their revisionist lines.
 
The sinister book on "self-cultivation" by the
renegade, hidden traitor and scab Liu Shao-chi
stemmed from the reactionary doctrines of Confucius
and Mencius and was directed against the
proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
 
Most of the vicious views he spread were new
versions of these doctrines. Confucius
and Mencius preached "loyalty and considerateness"
and "accord among men," and Liu Shao-chi
on his part urged people to "learn from Confucius
in practising the principle of considerateness," to
show "magnanimity, forbearance and the spirit of
conciliation and compromise"; all of which he did
in order to promote his theory of "the dying out
of class struggle" and of "peace within the Party."





 
Confucius and Mencius preached that "only the
highest who are the wise and the lowest who are
the stupid cannot be changed," and that "the common
people should be directed to do things but not
made to comprehend them."
 
Liu Shao-chi sang the same tune;
he slandered the working class as
"having developed to a considerable extent the
mentality of the guildsmen and of the hooligans,"
and "lacking a sense of social responsibility," and
accused the peasants of thinking of nothing except
"keeping cool and sleeping at their homes." All
this he did in order to peddle his theory of "docile
tools" and his thesis that "the masses are backward."
 
Confucius and Mencius spread such
fallacies as "those who work with their minds
govern, while those who toil with their hands be
governed," and that "he who excels in learning
can be an official."
 
Correspondingly, Liu Shao-chi peddled the ideas
of "joining the Party in order to climb up
," "studying in order to become an official"
and "going to the countryside to gild oneself." Liu
Shao-chi proved himself a worthy disciple of Confucius
and Mencius by parroting their canons and
imitating their actions.
 
The bourgeois careerist, conspirator, double dealer,
renegade and traitor Lin Biao was likewise
an out-and-out Confucian. He used the reactionary
doctrines of Confucius and Mencius to oppose
and sabotage the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
in a bid to subvert the dictatorship of the
proletariat and restore capitalism in China.




 
The adage "restrain oneself and return to the rites
preached by Confucius, was taken up by Lin Biao
as his reactionary programme for the restoration
of capitalism. Confucius and Mencius spread the
notion that some people are "born with knowledge,"
and other fallacies of idealist apriorism.
 
Lin Biao used these as reactionary ideological weapons
for a "return to the rites."
In their slanders against the labouring people
and contempt for manual labour, Liu Shao-chi and
Lin Biao were entirely at one with Confucius and
Mencius. Confucius engaged in demagogy and
swindling wherever he went.
Lin Biao emulated him by playing double-faced tricks
, and saying all the fine-sounding words
while doing everything
evil. Lin Biao and Confucius not only used the
same language, but their politics, ideology and
tactics ran in the same vein.
 
Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao were adherents of
Confucius. In the cultural revolution and the
struggle to consolidate and develop its rich achievement
 it is necessary for us to criticize Confucius
along with criticism of Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao'

 
Although Confucius was a spokesman for the slave owners
of more than 2,000 years ago, that binds
all three together indissolubly is their essence - a1l
representing reactionary exploiting classes and
manifesting a common ideology and behaviour, i'e',
the effort to turn back the wheel of history' Therefore,
we must criticize Confucius while criticizing
Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao.







The current struggle to criticize Lin Biao
and Confucius has the purpose
precisely of consolidating and carrying forward the
major achievements of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, strengthening the dictatorship of
the proletariat and opposing the restoration of
capitalism in China.
As Lenin pointed out, if we want to expose
the counter-revolutionary inner
nature of revisionism to the full, we must lay bare
its origins.

In criticizing Bogdanov, a revisionist
who had sneaked into the Russian Bolshevik
Party, Lenin traced his revisionism back to the
Englishman Berkeley, father of reactionary bourgeois
idealism.
 
Lenin pointed out: "The 'recent' Machians
have not adduced a single argument
against the materialists that had not been adduced
by Bishop Berkeley."
Now, in criticizing Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao and their counter revolutionary revisionist lines, we are stripping them
right down to their origins in Confucius.



 
Can we not see that the "latest" goods
hawked by these
political swindlers are the time-worn stock-in-trade
of the Confucian Shop?
Can we not see that their
whole sinister system of thought, their entire reactionary
ideology constitutes a black line linked
with that of Confucius and Mencius?

 
Chairman Mao teaches us: "There is no construction
without destruction, no flowing without
damming and no motion without rest." Put
destruction first, and in the process you have construction.
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
, both Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao have been
exposed as faithful adherents of Confucius. Their
counter-revolutionary revisionist lines have been
scathingly criticized alongside the reactionary
doctrines of Confucius and Mencius.
During the fierce struggle to smash
the two bourgeois headquarters
of Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao, the masses
of people engaged in large-scale destruction of the
traditional ideologies of the reactionary classes
which were stubbornly defended by those two and
built up proletarian ideology on a large scale.
The decadent ideologies
upheld by Li Shao-chi and
Lin Piao had as their main source the doctrines of
Confucius and Mencius, which made up the most
reactionary part of China's feudal culture and
ideology.

 
The Chinese bourgeoisie was feeble
politically and economically, and moreover was
closely linked with the feudal forces, so it could
not, and did not oppose the feudal culture in a
thoroughgoing way.
At all times, its culture and
ideology retained many feudal dregs. Liu Shaochi
and Lin Piao were representatives of this bourgeoisie
within the Party.
In practising revisionism,
they were bound to employ the doctrines of Confucius
and Mencius to oppose proletarian culture
and ideology. It was for the sole purpose of creating
public opinion to prepare for the overthrow of
the dictatorship of the proletariat that they spared
no effort in seizing upon the field of ideology,
assiduously preached the reactionary doctrines of
Confucius and Mencius, frantically exercised a
counter-revolutionary dictatorship over the proletariat
in the departments under their control and
fostered a lush growth of poisonous weeds.





The
aim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
is to oppose and prevent revisionism, seize back
that portion of power usurped by the bourgeoisie,
exercise all-round proletarian dictatorship in the
superstructure including all fields of culture, consolidate
and strengthen the socialist economic basis,
and prevent capitalist restoration, thereby enabling
our country to continue its advance along the socialist.
road. In the final analysis, this revolution
is aimed precisely at destroying the ideology of the
declining exploiting classes and transforming the
world according to the world outlook of the proletariat.

During the cultural revolution a multitude of
brand-new things emerged in the course of the up and-
down struggle against the revisionist lines
pushed by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Biao. Their
appearance also came about as a result of penetrating
criticism of the doctrines of Confucius and
Mencius were so stubbornly upheld by Liu
Shao-chi, Lin Biao and other political swindlers.
Literature and art began to portray and serve the
workers, peasants and soldiers who took over those
realms, so that the emperors, kings, generals,
ministers, scholars and beauties who for centuries
had personified Confucian and Mencian values on
stage were swept from the boards. This in itself
was a penetrating criticism of the reactionary
idealist conception of history - "only the highest
who are the wise and the lowest who are the stupid
cannot be changed" - preached by Confucius and
Mencius, in which the people were regarded as
mere chaff.

On the educational front, the cultural
revolution wrote an end to the situation in which
education was divorced from the masses of workers
and peasants and from productive labour, and to
domination of the schools by bourgeois intellectual
Workers, peasants and soldiers now attend universities,
run them and are transforming them with
Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse tung Thought. Millions
of educated young people are going to the countryside
to integrate themselves with the peasants. Al1
this constitutes a deep criticism of the reactionary
thinking that "he who excels in learning can be
an official," peddled by Confucius and Mencius,
with its contempt for the working people. Cadres
in state organs and other parts of the superstructure
are taking the "May 7" road - they are able to
work well at whatever job they are given to do,
either as officials or as rank-and-filers.
This again
is a deep criticism of the reactionary view of Confucius
and Mencius that "those who work with
their minds govern." Lin Piao and his crew were
consumed with fear and hatred of these socialist
new things born in the course of criticizing Confucianism,
and by the breakaway of more and more
people from the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius.
They left no stone unturned to undermine
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and
negate everything new.






In their plan for a counterrevolutionary
armed coup d'etat, known as Outline
of Project "571," they attacked the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution in the most vicious
language. They slanderously described the excellent
situation emerging after the Great Proletarian Cultural revolution
In line with Chairman Mao's directive of May 7, all
cadres go' to "May 7" cadre schools in rotation. There they
do serious reading and study linked with the present-day
struggle, take part in collective productive labour as
ordinary working people and go to live and work in agricultural
production brigades to temper themselves. Thus they
remould their world outlook. This is a strategic measure for
carrying out the basic line of the Party in the historical
period of socialism, opposing revisionism and preventing its
emergence and consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat.
 
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in which the socialist
cause is flourishing as "beset with growing crises"
and "fallen into stagnation," the practice of
opposition to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
and to the newborn things, the more we
should expand and deepen our criticism of Confucius
and Lin Biao so as to consolidate and develop
the tremendous achievements of the cultural revolution
and promote the speedy and healthy growth
of the new things.
 
The facts of Chinese history show that only a
cultural revolution carried out and led by the proletariat
they could not be thorough in this' As
Chairman Mao has pointed out: "In past history'
before they won state power and for some time
afterwards, the slave-owning class, the feudal
landlord class and the bourgeoisie were vigorous'
revolutionary and progressive; they were real
,Tigers. But with the lapse of time, because their
opposites - the slave class, the peasant class and
the proletariat - grew in strength step by step,
struggled against them more and more fiercely,
these ruling classes changed step by step into the
reverse, changed into reactionaries, changed into
backward people, changed into paper tigers. And
eventually they were overthrown, or will be overthrown,
by the people."'


 When the landlord class
and the bourgeoisie (including the intellectuals in
their service) were ascending, they stood for transformation
and progress and opposed and criticized
the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius which
advocated restoration of the o1d order and blocked
their way forward.


But after these classes had
seized political power, and held it for a time, they
changed over to worship for Confucius in order
to consolidate their own rule and preserve their
own interests, and in their turn promoted a counterrevolutionary
ideological and political line for the
maintenance of the old order.


When a class or a person changes from
opposition to Confucius to
worship of Confucius, it marks the change in that
class or person from revolutionary to reactionary
and from progress to retrogression. Such changes
of stand are determined by the interests and nature
of the exploiting classes and represent a law of class
struggle independent of man's will.
 




The proletariat is different from all the exploiting
classes. Representing the most advanced relations
of production, it is the greatest class in the history
of mankind, the most powerful revolutionary class
ideologically, politically and in terms of strength'
It is a class which, from first to last, stands firmly
for the progress and transformation of society and
works for the interests of the vast majority. Only
a cultural revolution Ied by this class, the proletariat,
is up to the task of thoroughly opposing and
criticizing Confucius. When the proletariat of
China mounted the political stage, history placed
this task upon its shoulders.

The great May 4th Movement of 1919 raised the
slogan "Down with the Confucian Shop!" and thus
began to break down the 2,000-year-old cult of
Confucius. "The May 4th Movement was uncompromising
in its opposition to feudal culture."
For that time on our country's democratic revolution
entered a new stage.

And as the new democratic
revolution led by the proletariat
developed in depth, the struggle against Confucian-
ism also became ever fiercer and deeper. In the
course of the socialist revolution the economic base
of the bourgeoisie has already been smashed. But
this exploiting class refuses to quit the stage of
history and, turning its attention to winning the
battle in people's minds, is attempting to use the
ideology of the exploiting classes and the reactionary
doctrines of Confucius and Mencius to corrupt
the masses, undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat
and restore capitalism
 




Ever since the founding of the Peop1e's Republic
of China, the great leader Chairman Mao has paid
close attention to the class struggle in the sphere
of ideology and repeatedly issued instructions and
Iaunched criticism against the reactionary Confucianism.
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
and the current criticism of Lin Piao and
Confucius, both initiated and led by Chairman Mao,
Confucianism is being criticized more penetratingly
and on an incomparably wider scale than in any
of the previous cultural revolutions in China's history.
The May 4th Movement belonged in its
nature to the bourgeois-democratic revolution,
so it was not possible for it to oppose the ideologies
of all the exploiting classes.
The current movement
to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, however,
is a political and ideological struggle in which
Marxism is triumphing over revisionism, and the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie in the realm of the
superstructure - a more profound revolution in the
ideological sphere.
 
During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
we have smashed the two bourgeois headquarters
headed by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao, and deeply
criticized the counter-revolutionary revisionist
lines which they pushed and the doctrines of Confucius
and Mencius which they touted. Their attempt
to imitate Confucius in conspiring for
restoration was thwarted. This is a great victory
of Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line.
But we cannot say that the struggle between the
criticism and the worship of Confucius has come
to an end with this great movement. On the one
hand, Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao were not two
isolated persons, but representatives of a class and
a political line; and although they have been overthrown,
we must continue to examine thoroughly
and repudiate politically and ideologically the revisionist
lines they acted upon and the doctrines of
Confucius and Mencius which they advocated. On
the other hand, we must see that the struggle between
criticism and worship of Confucius has all
along been an important component of the struggle
between the two classes and the two lines, and is,
therefore, a long-term fighting task.
Although Liu Shao-chi, that worshipper of Confucius,
was overthrown during the Great proletarian
Cultural Revolution,, Lin Biao came out to
unfurl the tattered banner of Confucius-worship.


 
This fact shows vividly that the followers of Confucius
will not disappear as a result of just one or
two cultural revolutions. The party's basic line
tells us that socialist society covers a considerably
long historical period and that throughout this historical
period, there are classes, class contradictions
and class struggle, there is the struggle between the
socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the
danger of capitalist restoration and there is the
threat of subversion and aggression by imperialism
and social-imperialism. Struggles between two 1ines
within the Party, which reflect these contradictions,
will also continue for a long time, and may
occur ten, twenty or thirty more times.
Lin Biaos will appear again and so will persons like
 
Wang Ming, Liu Shao-chi, Peng Teh-huai and Kao Kang.

Doctrines of Confucius and Mencius are doctrines
for restoration, as long as there is anyone attempting
restoration there will be reverence for
Confucius and utilization of his doctrine"to push the
revisionist line and oppose the proletarian revolution
and the dictatorship of the proletariat. There_
fore, the criticism of Confucius and Mencius will
continue throughout the entire historical period of
socialism in the struggle between the two classes,
two roads and two lines and will at all times be
one of the main contents of the socialist revolution
in China.

 
We must stick to the Party's basic line
for the historical period of socialism, persist in making
revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat,
deepen the class struggle and the two-line
struggle and carry the struggle of criticism of Lin
Biao and Confucius through to the end.

Only so
can we consolidate and develop the victorious
achievements of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, strengthen the dictatorship of the
proletariat and carry the proletarian revolution constantly
forward.
  

 
 
 
 
 

No comments: