Democracy and Class Struggle says Red Salute to comrades who made this film - may their film making be emulated to bring the truth of Chinese Revolution and Maoism to people of the 21st Century.
We provide two reports - one on Magnitogorsk and one on Anshan to contrast the developing ideas of Socialism in both the Soviet Union and People's China
Magnitogorsk would be a major city, built largely in secret, on the eastern side of the extreme southwest Urals Mountains on the Ural River in the Chelyabinsk Oblast of the RFSFR. There was at this locality a geologic anomaly – namely, a mountain almost entirely made of iron.
The River locale made it accessible to supply of whatever might be needed to develop this resource for the Soviet Government. It would become the world’s largest city devoted to iron and steel manufacturing dwarfing Pittsburgh in size and extent.
Joseph Stalin had learned of this mountain in his youth, and had climbed it, and had over the years consulted many geologists and engineers about the possibility of exploiting this resource.
As many young people do he had experimented with a magnetic compass while climbing and had seen how the compass went crazy in different directions according to where one happened to be at the moment. Now he would put that knowledge to work.
Everything for Magnetic Mountain and it’s A to Z steel manufacturing complex at the center of a satellite of cities devoted to large-scale industrial manufacturing plants, had to be imported to the chosen site and implanted into the virgin land.
During the years of its construction (the 1930’ s) every attempt was made to jump ahead in social organization along lines which would serve as a “model” for new socialist humanity. For a wonderful exposition of what Stalinist Socialism could and did achieve
I recommend the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Stephen Korkin, 1995, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Great advances were made in the development of education from kindergarten through tertiary levels of university and technical institutes.
Great advances were made in training working people to discuss daily events from the class struggle perspective to determine what a ”socialist” course and/ or perspective should look like on each of the many issues arising in Soviet life.
At the same time old ideas, some then contemporary Bolshevik ideas, were set aside in favor of publicly discussed and agreed upon modifications (as in the areas of marriage, divorce and abortion.
No area of cultural life was ignored as the buildings comprising Magnetic Mountain were constructed to house every area of social as well as technological life.
Source : Jason B Smith ABC Of Communism 2016
Note On The “Charter Of The Anshan Iron And Steel Company
This report of the Anshan party committee is very good. The more one reads it the more delighted one gets. It doesn’t strike one as too long, in fact, one would be willing to read it even if it were longer; this is because the problems raised in the report are factual, well reasoned, and very absorbing.
With more than 100,000 workers and staff members, the Anshan Iron and Steel Company is the country’s biggest enterprise.
Formerly, people there thought that their enterprise was a modernized one and there was no need for technical revolution.
They were opposed to launching vigorous mass movements, to the principle of cadre participation in productive labor and worker participation in management, of reform of irrational and outdated rules and regulations and of close cooperation among cadres, workers, and technicians, and opposed to putting politics in command..; they relied on just a few people working in seclusion.
Many favored the system of placing responsibility solely on the factory director and were against the system of the factory director designated to undertake responsibility under the leadership of the party committee.
They held that the “Charter of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine” (a set of authoritative rules practiced in a big steel plant in the Soviet Union) was sacred.
That was the situation up to the Great Leap Forward in 1958, which marked the first stage. The year 1959 marked the second stage, when people began to think things over, began to have faith in the mass movement, and began to question the system of placing responsibility solely on the factory director and the Charter of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine.
During the Lushan Meeting of July 1959, the Central Committee received a good report from them, which spoke in favor of the Great Leap Forward, of opposing the right deviation and making utmost exertions; it also put forward a high but practicable target.
The Central Committee was extremely pleased with the report and had it circulated ! to the comrades concerned with its comment. They immediately relayed it by telephone to their respective provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, thus helping the struggle going on at the time to criticize right opportunism.
The present report (March 1960) takes another step forward; it does not smack of the Charter of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine, but has given birth to a Charter of the Anshan Iron and Steel Company.
Here emerges the Charter of the Anshan Iron and Steel Company in China, in the Far East. This marks the third stage. Now this report is being passed on to you and you are asked to transmit it to the large and medium-sized enterprises under your administration and to party committees of all large and medium-sized cities and, of course, you may also transmit it to prefectural party committees and other cities.
It should be used as a document for study by cadres in order to stimulate their minds and make them think about the affairs in their own units, so that under due leadership a great Marxist-Leninist movement of economic and technical revolution will be carried out link by link and wave upon wave in the cities and the country side during the whole year of 1960.
Source : Mao Zedong Collected Works 1960
