Agresión

Western authors have often referred Mao‘s thought as ―Maoism.‖ The Chinese

themselves often use the term ―Mao Zedong Thought,‖ referring to practical ideology innovated by Mao drawing on Marxism-Leninism. As the official Chinese definition goes, it is the

―application of the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete practice of the Chinese socialist revolution and construction.‖ In other words, Mao Zedong Thought is the selective application of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution and socialist construction. Class analysis and class struggles had been significant component elements of Mao Zedong Thought.

Mao wrote an article in 1926, titled ―Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,‖ to categorize Chinese society into five major classes: the landlord and the comprador; the middle bourgeoisie; the petty bourgeoisie; the semi-proletariat; and the proletariat. The first category was the landlord and the comprador. According to Mao, they colluded with foreign imperial power. Mao considered them as the most hostile enemies of the Chinese Communist revolution.

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The second category was what Mao called the middle bourgeoisie, which represented the capitalist relations of production in China. The middle bourgeoisie was nationalist as it was under the oppression of foreign capital and the warlords in China. It supported the revolutionary movement against imperialism and the warlords. However, as Mao argued, the class had an ambiguous attitude towards the revolution that had involved the militant Chinese proletariat and international proletariat.

Mao labeled the third category of class ―the petty bourgeoisie,‖ including the owner-peasants, the master handicraftsmen, lower-level intellectuals, such as students, primary and secondary school teachers, lower government functionaries, office clerks, small lawyers, and small traders. According to Mao, it belonged to the lower middle-class, vulnerable to the uncertainty of economy dominated by foreign capital and the warlords in China, and surviving on the edge of sinking into the proletariat class.

Mao called the fourth category the semi-proletariat, including the overwhelming majority of the semi-owner peasants, the poor peasants, the small handicraftsmen, the shop assistants and the pedlars. In the countryside, semi-owner peasants and poor peasants constituted a very large part of the rural masses.

For Mao, the last but the most important category was the proletariat. Although, at that time, there were only two million industrial workers in China, which was economically

backward, Mao recognized that the industrial proletariat represents China‘s new productive forces. Mao considered them as the most progressive class in modern China and the leading force in the revolution.¹²⁰

120 Mao Zedong, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, Seleted Works of Mao Zedong Volume 1, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm.

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Although Mao acknowledged communist revolutionary ideology, which is based on the concept of a workers revolution, he recognized the crucial role of peasantry in the communist revolutionary movement in an agrarian society like China. Mao‘s revolution ended up in appealing to peasant grievances and creating the revolutionary bases in rural areas. Contrary to the October Revolution in Russia, the Chinese revolution had followed what Mao called the path of ―encircling the cities from the rural areas and then capturing them.‖ Mao had relied on the poor peasants as the driving force of the Chinese revolution. However, Mao developed a peasant revolution under the guidance of a proletarian worldview and the leadership of the CCP – a highly disciplined and professional Leninist communist party.¹²¹

The victory of Mao‘s peasant revolution founded the People‘s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Mao developed the theory of New Democracy to define the nature of the Chinese

revolution. According to Mao, the Chinese revolution from 1911 to 1949 had aimed to overthrow feudalism and achieve China‘s national independence from colonialism. Consistent with his class analysis in the 1920s, Mao viewed the Chinese revolution as the New Democratic Revolution involving the coalition of the ―Bloc of Four Social Classes‖ - proletarian workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners), and the nationally-based capitalists – against the imperial powers, the landlord class and the comprador class in China. The New Democratic Revolution is distinct from the Sun Yatsen-led bourgeois revolution in that its ultimate goal is leading to socialist and communist revolution in China. The Maoist conception of the Chinese revolution envisioned a two-stage revolution for China, the New Democratic stage followed by the road to full-blown socialism and ultimately, communism. As Mao wrote,

121 Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao‟s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949 Vol VII New Democracy, 1939-1941 (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2005). Translation of the full text, based on 1943 edition.

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Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes.¹²²

The stars on the national flag of PRC embodies the bloc of classes reflecting the principles of New Democracy - the largest star to represent the Communist Party of China‘s leadership, surrounded by four smaller stars symbolizing the Bloc of Four Classes. However, the New Democratic Revolution was an ―intermediate stage,‖ setting a stepping-stone to socialism.

During the New Democratic Revolution, China had taken the path of class collaborationism – allowing private ownerships by peasants, petite bourgeois and nationalist capitalists. However, after 1953, China began to develop Maoist socialism through a series of programs, including the Transition to Socialism (1953-1957), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), Readjustment and Recovery (1961-1965) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao described Chinese socialism as ―state-capitalism.‖ In 1953, Chairman Mao wrote:

The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People‘s Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state.¹²³

Mao had envisioned a three-stage theory about the whole process of the Chinese revolution. If the New Democratic Revolution was a prerequisite stage, the next stage was to

122 Mao Zedong, ―On New Democracy,‖ January 1940, Selected Works, Official PRC translation.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm.

123 Mao Zedong, ―On State Capitalism,‖ July 9, 1953, in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 22 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977, Vol. V).

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transform China into socialism, and ultimately move on communism. Accordingly, Mao developed his class analysis further and attempted to constitute socialist ideology to push forward socialist revolution in China. For Mao, to achieve socialism, China must enforce the dictatorship of the proletariat. Replacing class collaborationism in the New Democracy, Mao advanced his theory of class struggle for achieving socialist revolution and the ultimate goal of socialist construction in China - the creation of a stateless, classless and moneyless communist society. In 1962, Mao warned of ―never forgetting class struggle.‖ Socialist transformation - the

―establishment‖ of a socialist system through transformation of ownership of the means of production - had eliminated the system of exploitation and weakened the landlords and bourgeoisie.

However, Mao argued that individual members of the overthrown classes and the ―new‖

classes arising within socialist society itself, all of them hostile to socialism, would attempt to restore capitalism in China. While the changing of the ownership system had removed the economic basis on which these exploiter classes were defined, Mao insisted the remnants from the former society remained. Mao further argued, ―The bourgeoisie is a class which can be born anew.‖ Therefore, Mao asserted that there are still classes, class contradictions and class struggle in socialist society.¹²⁴ Subsequently, Mao developed the ―theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat‖ by 1967. Mao had worried about the potential

abandonment or reversal of socialist revolution in China, which would lead to the restoration of capitalism. He had kept exploring a theory of class struggle to ensure the continuation of socialist revolution, maintain and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat.¹²⁵ He finally waged the

124 Graham Young, ―Mao Zedong and the Class Struggle in Socialist Society,‖ The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No.16 (July 1986): 41-80.

125 Ibid.

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Cultural Revolution as a means for consolidating socialist revolution and preventing the restoration of capitalism in China. Mao insisted on relying on the working class, the poor and lower-middle peasants and the revolutionary masses. He mobilized them to counter what he called the ―new bourgeois elements‖ and ―capitalist roaders‖ who grew from the new middle class intellectuals and the ranks of Party and government officials and management of enterprises.

Mao‘s theory of class struggle and class analysis in the context of socialist transformation in the 1950s and 1960s has often been dismissed as means for political campaigns and purges of political rivals. As So argues, the terms ―classes‖ and ―class struggles‖ used by the Maoists were outdated during the Mao era when the economic foundations of classes and relations of capitalist production had been dissolved.¹²⁶ However, Mao not only acknowledged the economic

definition of class, but also understood classes in terms of politico-ideological agents.¹²⁷ On the one hand, Mao used the term ―class-in-itself‖ to describe an economic class formation as yet unconscious of its existence as a class. A class in itself was a body of human agents occupying a particular location within a system of production relations. It was economically a class, but unaware of such an identity. In Mao‘s works, he had made sense of classes as economic entities and defined them in terms of their placement in a configuration of production relations and distribution relations. As China had started socialist transition, this dismantled the economic foundation of exploitation and oppression between classes. For Mao, however, there were potential threats of abandoning or reversing socialist revolution and restoring capitalism in China. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would be protracted during

126 So, ―The Changing Pattern of Classes‖.

127 Paul Healy, ―Misreading Mao: On Class and Class Struggle,‖ Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 38, No. 4 (November 2008):535-559.

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the entire socialist transition period.¹²⁸ For Mao, the class struggle would be salient in the superstructure. Despite his insistence on the economic designation of classes, therefore, Mao emphasized that classes emerge as combatants in superstructural conflict. Classes and class struggle would take political and ideological forms.¹²⁹ For Mao, the distinction between ―class in itself‖ and ―class for itself‖ could be denoted in the political and ideological development of a class.

As Schräm argued, Mao emphasised subjective, rather than economic, factors in the determination of class membership.¹³⁰ While classes are economically defined in orthodox Marxism in terms of their relationship to the means of production, Mao defined classes

―ideologically and politically.‖¹³¹ Mao‘s conception of class is voluntarist in the sense that he thought about classes as politico-ideological categories in the period of socialist transition.

Compared to Marxism defining class position in economic terms, Mao came to define it in superstructural terms, specifically on the basis of political behaviour.¹³² Mao believed that direct

―moral transformation‖ would be the force to generate social change and the key to eliciting social change would be ―the making of a new revolutionary soul.‖¹³³ As Wakeman argues, for Mao, ―[I]n modern China, socialist man did not determine his social self by his own labor; he was fashioned by internalizing noneconomic ideas imposed upon him by a personalistic state.‖¹³⁴ With regard to the Chinese working class, therefore, awareness of class identity or consciousness

128 Young, ―Mao Zedong and the Class Struggle‖.

129 Healy, ―Misreading Mao.‖

130 S Schräm, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1977).

131 S Schräm, ―Classes, Old and New, in Mao Zedong‘s Thought, 1949-76,‖ in Classes and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China, ed. James L. Watson, 29-56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1984).

132 Healy, ―Misreading Mao.‖

133 Andrew G. Walder, ―Marxism, Maoism and Social Change: A Re-examination of the ‗Voluntarism‘ in Mao‘s Strategy and Thought,‖ Modern China Vol.3, No.2 (April 1977): 145.

134 F. Wakeman, History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung‟s Thought, 28 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), cited in Walder, ―Marxism, Maoism and Social Change,‖ 145.

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had been raised through Maoist socialist ideology and politics. When I discuss class

consciousness and subjectivity of the Chinese working class in this dissertation, I trace back to the Maoist definition of classes by reference to political and ideological factors.