by BERNARD D’MELLO
(From left to right) Karl Marx (1818-1883), Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), and Mao Zedong (1893-1976) IMAGE/Indi Media
This year marks 50 years since Mao and his close comrades launched the Cultural Revolution in China. Next year, 2017, will be 100 years since the February and October revolutions in Russia. And, 2018 will mark the 200th birth anniversary of Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose works were a compelling source of inspiration for the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries. The three anniversaries will doubtless be occasions when, illuminated by their vision of a decent human society, the works of Marx and his close comrade and friend Friedrich Engels will be re-interrogated. Surely questions will be asked as to why subsequent socialist revolutionaries inspired by that vision — most of all, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades in Russia, and Mao Zedong and his close comrades in China — despite their best efforts, could not lay the basis for a socialist society — a society of equality, cooperation, community and solidarity.1
‘Bombard the Headquarters’
The March 1966 issue of Red Flag, the theoretical political journal of the then Chinese Communist Party (CCP), carried an article on “The Great Lessons of the Paris Commune” of 1871, explaining how one can learn from the communards as to how to prevent the party-state bureaucracy from repudiating their assigned role of “serving the people” and instead becoming the masters of the people. This theme of the Paris Commune was picked up and communicated on 25 May with a big character poster (BCP) from Beijing University that boldly declared the need for a “Chinese Paris Commune,” the significance of which, the poster claimed, “surpasses” that of the original Paris Commune. Indeed, this BCP won Mao’s applause, and on 5 August, he released his own BCP, titled “Bombard the Headquarters.” Then, three days later, on 8 August, the Central Committee of the CCP adopted a “Decision . . . Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” which, in its view, was “A New Stage in the Socialist Revolution,” “to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road.” The Cultural Revolution also intended to “transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base.”
Indeed, if one goes by this Central Committee decision, which came to be known as “the 16 points,” there was an expression of the intention “to institute a system of general elections [my emphasis], like that of the Paris Commune, for electing members to the Cultural Revolution groups and committees and delegates to the Cultural Revolutionary congresses,” which were to be “permanent, standing mass organisations.” Indeed, the Central Committee even intended to give the people the right to recall, a principle of the Paris Commune. The “boldly aroused masses” that it hailed were, of course, the student-intellectual Red Guards and the workers. The workers very soon rose up in early 1967 in China’s main industrial-heartland city, Shanghai, in what came to be known as the “January Storm,” which overthrew the Shanghai municipal government, and, on 5 February at a million-strong rally, proclaimed the formation of the “Shanghai Commune.” Here was the first time that a post-revolutionary society was seriously confronting bureaucratism and elitism, or, at least, initiating radical trial runs in direct democracy to find a viable solution to these problems.2
Sadly, though, this time Mao did not applaud. Indeed, he summoned the main leaders of the Shanghai Commune, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, to Beijing, called them “anarchists,” and ordered them to disband the commune. Tragically, all the other Paris-type communes in the making also met with premature extinction. Mao’s alternative to the commune was the tripartite “revolutionary committee,” composed of unelected People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel, CCP cadres, and representatives of the “revolutionary masses.” Those who held on steadfastly to the Paris Commune-like original ways of the Cultural Revolution were now deprecated and dismissed as the “ultra-left,” to be dealt with harshly by PLA personnel in alliance with rival Red Guard groups.
Clearly, the fresh shoots of radical democracy were nipped in the bud, and as for those “communards” who persisted, worse was in store. The so-called ultra-left’s time was up. Unprincipled factional strife, excessive violence, personal tragedies, a lot of ugly features, and the cult of “Mao’s thought” — this last being ridiculous and harmful to scientific temper — had muddied the waters. Of course, the context was that of a protracted political struggle between the “capitalist roaders,” headed by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, and the “proletarian roaders” headed by Mao. But, even as Mao seemed to be in the lead politically, the Liu-Deng faction dominated organisationally, and tactically it even paid lip service to Mao’s thought and ideals. Very soon, the struggle was no longer about what it was meant to be: the student-intellectual Red Guards and workers (both guided by Maoist intellectuals) taking on the elites of the party, the state, and the PLA. The Maoist principles of handling contradictions among the people and those of the “mass line” (the leadership norm, “from the masses, to the masses”) went for a toss.
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