Socialist Construction - The Chinese Experience

The implementation of the new democratic economic programme started even before nation-wide victory of the revolution. Soon after the Red Army and the Chinese Revolution entered the strategic offensive in 1947, Mao announced and started implementing what was called the three major economic policies of the new-democratic revolution.

These were 1) the confiscation of the land of the feudal class and its distribution among the peasantry, 2) the confiscation of the capital of the comprador bourgeoisie and 3) protection to the industry and commerce of the national bourgeoisie. These policies were immediately taken up for implementation in the vast areas of Northern China which were under revolutionary control and the agrarian reform was completed there by mid-1950. Subsequently the agrarian reform programme was completed in the remainder of the country.

General Line and Step-by-Step Collectivisation: In 1951, the party adopted what came to be known as the general line for socialist construction, for the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. The basic aim set for this period was to accomplish the industrialisation of China together with the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce. The target set to complete this process was roughly eighteen years. This was divided into three years of rehabilitation for recovering from the damage and destruction of the civil war plus fifteen years covering three five-year plans for planned development of the economy.

In accordance with this general line, a ‘step-by-step’ plan was drawn up for the socialist transformation of agriculture. The first step was to call on the peasants to organise agricultural producers’ mutual-aid teams consisting of only a few to a dozen or so households each. These teams had only certain basic elements of socialism like help and co-operation among the members of the team. The second step was to call on the peasants to organise small agricultural producers co-operatives on the basis of these mutual-aid teams. These co-operatives were semi-socialist in nature and were characterised by the pooling of land as shares and by unified management. Then the third step was to call on the peasants to combine further on the basis of these small semi-socialist co-operatives and organise large fully socialist agricultural producers’ co-operatives. The basic principles underlying this step-by-step plan were voluntary participation and mutual benefit. The peasants were to be persuaded to voluntarily participate in this process of collectivisation.
The first step of mutual-aid teams had started in the revolutionary bases even before the nation-wide victory of the Revolution. The second step towards elementary co-operatives took place in the years 1953-55. The third step of transition to advanced co-operatives came about in 1956. There was a literal upsurge of socialist transformation in the countryside. Simultaneously, in the early months of 1956, a related movement rapidly took ahead and completed the process of nationalisation of businesses. Thus China’s industry and commerce was transferred from private ownership to ownership by the whole people far ahead of schedule.

Mao’s Dialectical Approach to the Process of Socialist Construction: The general line was basically reliant on the Soviet model of socialist construction. The emphasis on industry and particularly on heavy industry was the central direction of the First Five Year Plan of 1953-57. Further there was a tendency to uncritically adopt all Soviet policies. With the rise of modern revisionism in the Soviet Union (and particularly after the revisionist 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956), the revisionist tendencies in the CPC were immediately strengthened. In 1956 a campaign was started from within the party to ‘oppose rash advances’—i.e., to stall the process of socialisation. At same time the revisionist theory of productive forces gained ascendancy within the party, with the prime representative being the party general secretary, Liu Shiao-chi. The representatives of this trend upheld the Kruschevites, negated the class struggle and concentrated attention towards building modern productive forces, primarily through heavy industry.

Their argument was that the productive forces are the main motor of change and it was the backward productive forces in China that were the main factor holding back the development of the country. Changes in production relations should wait till after the productive forces had been developed enough. The cooperativisation of agriculture should wait until industries had developed enough to provide machinery for the rural mechanisation. All these proposals negated the importance of production relations and the class struggle. It would lead to growth of revisionist and bureaucratic trends and the growth of a new exploiting class.

Seeing the Soviet experience and realising the revisionist danger Mao immediately launched a struggle to defeat these trends which at that time controlled the party. His first step in this struggle was his speech of April 1956, On the Ten Major Relationships. In this speech, Mao for the first time made a clear-cut critique of the Soviet pattern of socialist economic construction. While referring to the relationship between heavy industry on the one hand and light industry and agriculture on the other, Mao stressed that “We have done better than the Soviet Union and a number of East European countries. …Their lop-sided stress on heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry results in a shortage of goods on the market and an unstable currency.” Similarly he criticised the Soviet policy of “squeezing the peasants too hard”. He also attacked the dogmatists within the CPC who “copy everything indiscriminately and transplant mechanically” while learning from the experience of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. He also criticised those who were following the example of Kruschev in indiscriminately criticising Stalin. He upheld Stalin as a great Marxist with 70% achievements. Thus through this extensive critique of the Soviet revisionists and the mistakes in Soviet socialist construction, Mao led the struggle against the then dominant revisionist line of productive forces within the CPC.

However the biggest contribution of Mao’s speech was its major advancement of the understanding of the process of socialist construction and socialist planning. By presenting the problems of socialist construction as ten major relationships, Mao brought dialectics and contradictions to the centre of the process of building socialist society. He showed how socialist construction involved not merely the mechanical implementation of targets of production and distribution, but a dialectical understanding of the main contradictions in the process, and the mobilising of all the positive forces to achieve socialism. Thus he said, “It is to focus on one basic policy that these ten problems are being raised, the basic policy of mobilising all positive factors, internal and external, to serve the cause of socialism… These ten relationships are all contradictions. The world consists of contradictions. Without contradictions the world would cease to exist. Our task is to handle these contradictions correctly.”

Mao followed it up the next year with his work On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. In it he continued the development of the dialectical understanding of the process of socialist construction. Primarily he also placed the class struggle at the very core of the process. He asserted that the “class struggle is by no means over…the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is not really settled yet.” With this he began the struggle against the revisionist sections in the Party who were saying that class struggle no longer existed under socialism. This marked the beginning of a country-wide Rectification Movement, the Anti-Rightist Movement. During this period many high-level cadre had to present their self-criticism before the masses, millions of students involved themselves in manual labour to integrate with the workers and peasants, all party cadres in the factories and agricultural co-operatives had to participate in manual labour, workers began to participate in decision making in their factories, a socialist education campaign started among the peasantry. Through this process the Party was brought closer to the people and rightist trends that were growing, both within the Party and outside were checked.

Great Leap Forward and the Birth of People’s Communes: With the progress of the rectification movement, the rightists in the party were thrown on the defensive. This led, in 1958, to a rectification of the erroneous productive forces theory which had dominated the Eighth Party Congress in1956. The prime mover of this theory, Liu Shiao-chi, was forced to admit before the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, that, throughout the period before completion of the building of a socialist society, the principal contradiction was between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the socialist road and the capitalist road. His report also mentioned the Great Leap Forward, which had then begun. There had been major advances on every front in socialist construction. Industry, agriculture and all other fields of activity had registered greater and more rapid growth.

Aside from rapid growth however, the Great Leap Forward was a major change in the priorities of the earlier plans and general line. The general line of the Great Leap Forward had been formulated at a Central Committee meeting held at the end of November 1957. It changed the emphasis on heavy industry and aimed at the simultaneous development of agriculture, heavy and light industry. It aimed at reducing the gap between town and countryside, between worker and peasant, and between worker and peasant on the one hand and the intellectual and manager on the other hand. It aimed at not merely an economic revolution but a technological, political, social and cultural revolution to transform the city and countryside.

In 1958 started the building of the people’s communes. The process first started spontaneously when neighbouring peasant associations in a drought affected area made a plan to merge together their labour and other resources to implement an irrigation project. Their merger was given the name commune by Mao. Mao encouraged such formation and this immediately led to a rapid spread of communes throughout the country. They were formed by the merger of neighbouring co-operatives in order to undertake large-scale projects such as flood control, water conservancy, afforestation, fisheries, and transport. In addition, many communes set up their own factories for making tractors, chemical fertilisers, and other means of production. The movement to set up people’s communes grew very rapidly. The CC of the CPC announced in its famous Wuhan Resolution of December, 1958 that “Within a few months starting in the summer of 1958, all of the more than 740,000 agricultural producers’ co-operatives in the country, in response to the enthusiastic demand of the mass of peasants, reorganised themselves into over 26,000 people’s communes. Over 120 million households, or more than 99 percent of all China’s peasant households of various nationalities, have joined the people’s communes.” Summing up the political essence, the CC went on to say: -

“The people’s commune is the basic unit of the socialist social structure of our country, combining industry, agriculture, trade, education, and military affairs; at the same time it is the basic organisation of the socialist state power. Marxist-Leninist theory and the initial experience of the people’s communes in our country enable us to foresee now that the people’s communes will quicken the tempo of our socialist construction and constitute the best form for realising, in our country, the following two transitions.

“Firstly, the transition from collective ownership to ownership by the whole people in the countryside; and,
“Secondly, the transition from socialist to communist society. It can also be foreseen that in the future communist society, the people’s commune will remain the basic unit of our social structure.”
Thus the commune movement represented a tremendous advance which basically completed the process of collectivisation of agriculture. However the expectation of the commune taking ahead the process of the transition to full public ownership and communism could not be fulfilled to that extent. Also attempts at setting up urban communes could not be consolidated.

In the earliest period of the commune movement during the Great Leap, there were certain ‘left’ errors. Mao in his speech in February 1959 called it a ‘communist wind’. These ‘left’ errors, which Mao identified, were mainly of three types. The first was the levelling of the poor and the rich brigades within the commune by making the whole commune into one accounting unit. This meant that shares of the peasant members of richer brigades (the former advanced co-operative) would be smaller than the share they would receive soon after the commune was formed. They would thus resent the formation of the commune and their participation would not be voluntary. The second error was that capital accumulation by the commune was too great and the commune’s demand for labour without compensation was too great. When larger amounts are kept aside for capital accumulation the share that the peasant gets is lower. Similarly more labour without compensation can only come where the consciousness has been raised to that extent. The third error was the ‘communisation’ of all kinds ‘property’. In some areas attempts were made to even bring minor property of the peasant like hens and pigs under the commune. This too was opposed.

These errors were soon corrected. The production brigade (former advanced co-operative), was kept as the basic accounting unit, and in 1962, this was brought to an even lower level, that of the production team. However, though the perspective remained always of raising the level of ownership and accounting to higher levels, as a process of greater socialisation and transition towards communism, this did not achieve success. The basic accounting and ownership unit continued till 1976, to remain at the lowest level—the production team.

Struggle against the Capitalist Roaders: Though the ‘left’ errors were soon corrected, the hold of the capitalist roaders, led by Liu Shiao-chi, remained strong within the party’s higher levels. The two-line struggle was represented in direct and indirect ways. In July 1959, Peng The-huai, then Defence Minister, launched a direct attack on the Great Leap Forward, criticising what he called its “petty-bourgeois fanaticism” and desire “to enter into communism at one step” Mao repulsed these attacks and defended the politics of the Great Leap. However, though Peng was defeated, the other capitalist roaders continued their attacks through indirect means.

One method was through veiled defence of Peng and attacks on Mao in the media. This was through articles and also through plays and cultural performances intending to show how Peng was an upright comrade who had been victimised. The other method was to stall or divert the implementation of key policies decided at the highest levels. A principal example was sabotage of the programme of socialist education and the decision to launch a Cultural Revolution, taken by the Tenth Plenum of the CC in 1962. Though this was formally agreed to by the capitalist roaders, they ensured through their control within the party structure, to ensure that there was no mass mobilisation. They tried to turn the Cultural Revolution in the direction of academic and ideological debate rather than class struggle.

Mao, throughout this period (1959-65), fought the battle at various levels. He realised on the basis of the Russian experience, the very real danger of the restoration of capitalism. He, therefore, on the basis of a major study of the politics and economics of Kruschevite revisionism, drew the theoretical lessons of this experience for the education of the Chinese and the international proletariat. Through the struggle of the Great Debate against Kruschev’s modern revisionism Mao tried to rally around the revolutionaries around the world and in China. Through his works like Critique of Soviet Economics and the CPC’s analysis of Kruschev’s Phoney Communism and its Historical Lessons for the World, he tried to inculcate in the party cadre the theoretical foundations for a fight against revisionism and restoration.

However he mainly tried to draw the masses into the struggle to defend and develop socialism and prevent restoration of capitalism. Besides his earlier mentioned programme for socialist education, he also gave slogans for socialist emulation of the Tachai and Tach’ing experiences as model experiences in building socialism. But when all attempts to mobilise the masses were diverted by the party bureaucracy, Mao succeeded after tremendous efforts in unleashing the energies of the masses through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was the culmination in practice of Mao’s development of the Marxist principles of socialist construction.

For more om Marxism Leninism Maoism

Mao on New Democratic Revolution here:
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2011/01/path-of-revolution-for-colonies-and.html

Mao on the Party here :
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2011/01/mao-on-party.html