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Create a Mass Party!

Cliff Connolly critiques CounterPower’s vision of the “party of autonomy” and offers an alternative vision of the mass party. 

In Praise of Communism by Ronald Paris, sourced from here.

The US left is at a critical juncture where the structure and focus of our organizations will soon be decided. On the one hand, we positively have ongoing processes of cohesion in play with DSA chapters collaborating on writing a national platform and far-flung sects coming together under the banner of Marxist Center. On the other hand, we have many comrades across ideological lines who still echo opposition to the idea of a tightly structured national organization. Central to this contradiction is the question of the party: should socialists strive to build an independent political party, and if so, what should that look like? CounterPower has put forth one possible answer in their article Create Two, Three, Many Parties of Autonomy! They are dedicated organizers and we should all be glad to have them in our midst. However, their strategy of eschewing the mass party model and encouraging the spontaneous formation of multiple “parties of autonomy”, and counting on these disparate groups to unite into an “area of the party”, is unworkable in the long term.

Their argument for the many parties strategy rests on a number of errors—historical misrepresentation (no, CPUSA was not a party of autonomy), uncritical acceptance of failed models (Autonomia Operaia gives us more negative lessons than positive ones), an over-reliance on spontaneity (movements have to be built intentionally), an aversion to leadership (no, it doesn’t automatically create unaccountable bureaucracy), and a confusion of terms (putting anarchist and Marxist vocab words together does not solve the contradictions between them). We will explore each of these points in greater detail. There is also an implicit assumption of false dichotomies built into the many parties line—either we build parties of autonomy or slip into sectarianism, either parties of autonomy or dogmatism, either parties of autonomy or top-down bureaucracy. There is a kernel of truth present here; we certainly don’t want a dictatorship of paid staffers. However, parties of autonomy are not a solution to this problem — in some ways, they would exacerbate the problem.

This was initially written in response to CounterPower’s original essay in 2019, but has since been amended to include dialogue with the updated version published in 2020. The differences between the two are significant and raise new concerns about the many parties model. The most interesting addition in the update concerns the role of cadre — highly trained organizers dedicated full-time to party activity. While we agree wholeheartedly on the necessity of these professional revolutionaries, there is a difference of emphasis that merits debate. This issue will be explored in greater detail below.

That CounterPower started this conversation on the party question is a gift to the whole of the US left—it must be addressed for our organizations to move forward. While many of us vehemently disagree with their conclusions, we should be grateful for their company. After examining each piece of their argument for the many parties model and taking note of its shortcomings, we will investigate a viable alternative—a mass party of organizers built on the principles of struggle, pluralism, and democratic discipline. 

Historical Clarification

There are a number of historical errors throughout CounterPower’s article. By this we are not referring to a difference of opinion about a certain historical figure’s thought process or the motivations behind a particular decision, but rather factual inaccuracies. This in itself does not mean the thesis of the article is automatically false, but it does betray a dependency on unfounded assumptions. First, there is the assertion that the Russian soviets arose organically without being built by socialists, at which point the Bolsheviks joined them and worked harmoniously with other autonomous parties in this “area of the party” to link the soviets to other sites of struggle. Second, there is the quotation from Mao Zedong’s 1957 Hundred Flowers speech, which CounterPower uses to bolster their argument for parties of autonomy. Finally, we are led to believe that both the FAI and the Alabama chapter of the Communist Party USA are exemplars of the many parties model. 

We will begin with the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the soviets. Here is CounterPower’s characterization:

“The organized interventions of a revolutionary party thus take place ‘in the middle,’ as mediations between the micropolitical and macropolitical. This has been a distinguishing feature of successful revolutionary parties, as in the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when clusters of Bolshevik party activists concentrated in workplaces, recognizing that the participatory councils (soviets) emerging from grassroots proletarian struggles embodied the nucleus of an alternative social system. Thus the party’s organization at the point of production enabled revolutionaries first to link workplace struggles against exploitation with the struggle against imperialism, and then to link the emergent councils with the insurrectionary struggle to establish a system of territorial counterpower”.

On the contrary, it is of utmost importance to recognize that the soviets, factory committees, and militias that formed the backbone of the Russian revolution were built intentionally by socialists. While different factions in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party eventually split into separate organizations as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, both groups were instrumental in the creation of these mass organizations. They did not emerge organically from economic struggles with bosses and feudal landlords like some of the trade unions and peasant associations, but instead were the product of a socialist intervention in economic struggles which emphasized the need for political organization. This strategy, commonly referred to as the “merger formula”, was theorized by Marx and Engels, popularized by the German socialist party leader Karl Kautsky, and accepted by Russian socialists of all stripes (most notably Lenin).1

The Bolsheviks did not merely help workers build their fighting organizations. They also competed with political rivals for leadership in them. Beyond their efforts that we would call “base-building” today, the Bolsheviks also invested significant resources into propaganda efforts and electoral contests. The struggle for elected majorities in the soviets in 1917 was pursued in tandem with a strategy of running campaigns for municipal offices and the Constituent Assembly (the bourgeois parliament of the Provisional Government), and it worked. The Bolshevik candidates for the assembly were able to publicly oppose the policies of the Provisional Government, while the elected deputies in the soviets were able to win over the working class to the task of seizing political power. These electoral efforts were instrumental in establishing a democratic mandate for the October Revolution.2 Consider these words from leading Bolshevik (and later leading opposition member purged by Stalin) Alexander Shliapnikov, in 1920:

The Russian Communist Party (RKP), as the history of the preceding years indicates, is the only revolutionary party of the Working Class, leading class war and civil war in the name of Communism. The R.K.P. unifying the more conscious and decisive part of the Proletariat around the Revolutionary Communist Program of action and drawing to the Communist banner the more leading elements of the rural poor, must concentrate all higher leadership of communist construction and the general direction of policy of the country.

Clearly, the Bolsheviks did not consider themselves a “party of autonomy” working side by side with the Menshevik reformists in a broad “area of the party”. Nor did they simply fuse with organic economic struggles in the trade unions. The reality couldn’t be further from CounterPower’s insinuations: the Bolsheviks were a party of political organizers who started as a minority and slowly won over sections of the working class through diligent mass work and bitter struggle with the other parties of the day. By engaging in this process, they eventually took on a mass character and became capable of leading social revolution. The lesson to learn from the Bolsheviks is this: we must win political hegemony in whatever independent organs of proletarian power that we help build, using every available means, including running opposition candidates in bourgeois elections to expose broader sections of the class to our ideas.

Now we will consider Mao’s echoing of the old Chinese proverb “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” This line of poetry is used by CounterPower to demonstrate the need for dozens of independent communist grouplets to form and collaborate on the task of social revolution. They attribute the quote to Mao, but is this how he used it? The short answer is no. It comes from a speech he gave in March 1957 at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work. It is true that he called for a hundred schools of thought to contend, but this was in the context of winning unaligned intellectuals over to the party’s socialist ideals. He gave a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of how the party could accept criticism from the broader population without sacrificing their legitimacy as the ruling organization of the country:

Ours is a great Party, a glorious Party, a correct Party. This must be affirmed as a fact. But we still have shortcomings, and this, too, must be affirmed as a fact…Will it undermine our Party’s prestige if we criticize our own subjectivism, bureaucracy and sectarianism? I think not. On the contrary, it will serve to enhance the Party’s prestige. This was borne out by the rectification movement during the anti-Japanese war. It enhanced the prestige of our Party, of our Party comrades and our veteran cadres, and it also enabled the new cadres to make great progress. Which of the two was afraid of criticism, the Communist Party or the Kuomintang? The Kuomintang. It prohibited criticism, but that did not save it from final defeat. The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.

Clearly, in March 1957 Mao was concerned with building a mass party, not opening space for a loose collaboration between multiple parties aimed at building socialism. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party was underprepared for the criticism they would soon face and reversed the Hundred Flowers Campaign. By July of that same year, the Anti-Rightist Campaign brought a series of purges underway, which got so out of control that Mao had to restrain his subordinates from excess killing. Perhaps Chinese conditions in 1957 were different enough from American conditions in 2020 that this was acceptable, or perhaps Mao the statesman should not be looked to for inspiration as much as Mao the general or Mao the revolutionary. It is beyond the purview of this article to answer that question. What is certain CounterPower draws the wrong lesson out of Mao’s 1957 speech.

Demonstration from the Hundred Flowers Movement

After quoting Mao, CounterPower moves on to claim that the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) is in practice a party of autonomy working within the “area of the party” of Spain’s National Confederation of Labour (CNT). Although the idea of “parties of autonomy” was not formulated until forty years after FAI’s founding, there may be a kernel of truth to this claim. For example, if FAI formed a loose coalition with CNT organizers and worked with them on shared projects, this argument could make sense. The reality, however, is that FAI is essentially a hard-line anarchist faction within CNT that has consistently fought for political hegemony within the broader organization and even purged ideological rivals like Ángel Pestaña. Perhaps they were right to do so; it is outside the scope of this article to pass judgment on the internal political conflicts of the CNT. 

Despite CounterPower’s framing of the FAI as an independent anarcho-communist organization with an “organic link” to the CNT, they are an explicitly anarchist faction struggling to dominate the politics of the Spanish labor movement. They act as a pressure group within the confederation to make CNT adhere to what they perceive as purely anarchist theory and praxis without deviation. This is not a “symbiotic relationship”, it is realpolitik under a black flag. Roberto Bordiga’s window dressing cannot give us a clear understanding of Spanish labor politics; historians like José Peirats and Paul Preston would be better suited to aid this investigation. 

In the updated version of their essay, CounterPower cites the Alabama chapter of CPUSA as a historical example that serves to “elucidate the role and function of a party of autonomy”. This could not be further from the truth. Similar to the FAI, the party of autonomy model would not even be theorized until fifty years after the Alabama chapter’s founding. CPUSA was a mass party with local chapters all over the country for at least the first half of the twentieth century. The Alabama chapter in particular was the result of discussions on “the Negro question” at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, after which the Central Committee of CPUSA chose Birmingham as a headquarters for its foothold in the South.3 Its success in organizing rural and urban communities in the deep south of the 1920s is proof that the mass party model can be adapted to regional conditions and accountable to local rank and file members. Describing this centralized party model as a “party of autonomy” is categorically false.

Spontaneity vs. Base-Building

Now that the historical context of CounterPower’s narrative has been clarified, we should examine the contradiction between their ideological commitment to spontaneity theory on the one hand, and their practical commitment to base-building on the other. Does the working class organically form explicitly political fighting organizations, or is a socialist intervention required for this to occur? This is a never-ending debate between Marxists and anarchists, despite the pile of evidence pointing to the latter. Some would argue that this debate is pointless at the present moment, and these differences are best put aside until the workers’ movement has grown. We would reply: “First, comradely debate in no way hampers unity of action. We can continue base-building efforts while disagreeing on political questions, and it is only through debate that we might one day get on the same page. Second, simply by engaging in the act of base-building with us, you are agreeing with our point in practice while denying it in theory.” How is this possible?

Our comrades in CounterPower are the perfect example. They admit the masses will not come to accept communist ideas on their own:

From strike committees to workers’ councils, tenant unions to neighborhood assemblies, the disparate forms of organized autonomy that arise in the midst of a protracted revolutionary struggle will not automatically fuse with communist politics to create a cohesive system of counterpower.

Yet they don’t address where these councils and unions come from. The reader gets the sense that these organizations simply pop up during times of crisis, as workers get frustrated with bourgeois politics and independently come to the conclusion that they need to organize against their boss or landlord. This may be true in a minority of cases, but most proletarian fighting organizations come from the same source as the Russian soviets: dedicated socialist base-builders. Who built Amazonians United? Who built Autonomous Tenant Union Network? Who built UE, ILWU, and the original CIO? In every case, the answer is: workers and intellectuals who read Marx, became socialists, and decided to organize.

Our responsibilities go beyond just founding these mass organizations; we have to compete for hegemony within them as well. If we neglect this crucial aspect of organizing due to a fetishization of the autonomy of the masses, reformists and even reactionaries will gladly fill the gap. In the case of something like workers’ councils, we cannot have any illusions that they provide anything beyond a means of representation for political tendencies within the movement. This is precisely why the Bolsheviks competed so vigorously with the reformist Mensheviks and populist Social Revolutionaries for elected majorities in the soviets. In fact, the Bolsheviks only adopted their famous slogan “All Power to the Soviets” after they had secured elected majorities in them.4 We only need to look at the difference between the Soviet Republics established in Russia and the brutally crushed Soviet Republic of Bavaria to understand the limitations of the model. Without influence from committed revolutionaries, mass organizations can be rallied to the banner of class-collaboration (as the Russian soviets were before Bolshevik intervention) or adventurism (as in the case of Bavaria).5

CounterPower’s overestimation of proletarian spontaneity has practical consequences for its members. In his recent article In Defense of Revolution and the Insurrectionary Commune, Atlee McFellin analyzed the November 2020 election and drew parallels between it and the situation which produced the Paris Commune. Fearing that elections may never take place again, McFellin argued against any participation in electoral efforts (including, but not limited to the creation of a political party independent from the Democrats). What was proposed instead? “Self-defense forces, solidarity kitchens, and everything else that is required to repel fascist assaults”. In other words, anything but a class-independent party capable of coordinating the struggle for socialism across different political, economic, and social fronts. Rather than face the reality of the radical left’s current irrelevance in national politics and the labor movement, and chart a course to resolve this, comrade McFellin called for the construction of insurrectionary communes as a response to the consolidation of ruling class interests under Joe Biden. Whether the working class has the spontaneous energy necessary for this task remains to be seen;  if it does, we would be ill-advised to hold our breath in anticipation but should wince at the inevitable brutal consequences if such adventurism bears fruit.

While in theory, CounterPower glosses over the role of communists in building workers’ organizations, in practice they are engaged in precisely this work. Rather than relying on the spontaneous initiative of the masses, they actively build tenant and labor unions, political education circles, and other necessary vehicles of class struggle. In fact, they do it remarkably well. This is what makes the claim that communists must “fuse with grassroots organizations” after they appear rather than actively building them in the first place so bizarre. Ultimately, our task as communists is to build mass organizations of class struggle, and then rally the most active participants within them to a mass communist party. By uniting in one party, we can direct the efforts of thousands of organizers according to a commonly agreed upon plan, which is an absolute necessity for the workers’ movement to grow. 

The Role of Cadre

The discussion of cadre organizers is given new attention in CounterPower’s update to their original essay. It mostly focuses on the role these committed party members play in shaping revolutionary strategy and connecting it to active proletarian struggles. As seen in my Cosmonaut article Revolutionary Discipline and Sobriety, those of us who favor the mass party model are in complete agreement with CounterPower on the importance of cadre:

Any collective project, whether a revolutionary labor union or a church’s food pantry, will expect a higher degree of involvement from its core organizers than from its regular members. Not everyone has the time or the technical skills needed to bottom-line such endeavors, and those who do have a responsibility to step up to the plate. These small groups, or cadre, are the powerhouse of the class. Taking direction from the masses they live and labor with, cadre members should focus their lives on facilitating the self-emancipation of the proletariat.

CounterPower rightly points out that these dedicated full-timers are a prerequisite for the development of robust internal political education, external agitation, and consistent recruitment to mass work projects. Key to the every-day functioning of these cadre groups is the organizational center to which they are accountable (and preferably subject to democratic discipline by the whole membership of the organization). While the mass party shares the party of autonomy’s commitment to a common political platform and program, the main difference between the two models is one of scope. Whereas the “area of the party” is composed of diffuse autonomous organizations with separate and often contradictory programs, the local chapters of the mass party work together on a common, democratically agreed-upon plan. As the experience of the Alabama chapter of CPUSA shows, this does not mean the plan cannot be adapted to meet local concerns. 

CPUSA demo in the south

In fact, the mass party model historically proves more capable of achieving its aims than any other method of party organization, whether it is compared to the bourgeois fund-raising parties that dominate US politics or the Italian autonomist model revived by CounterPower. This will be elaborated below in our examination of the Autonomia Operaia movement. For now, suffice it to say that while we agree with our autonomist comrades on the importance of cadre, the mass party model is best suited to coordinate their efforts.

Precision of Terms

Further complicating the problems of CounterPower’s revolutionary strategy is an incoherent collection of opaque and often contradictory terms. Few throughout history have tried to synthesize the theories of the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg, Bordiga, and Malatesta, mostly because it makes no sense to do so. This blend of anarchist shibboleths (affinity groups, autonomy fetishism, Bookchin references) and communist vocabulary (party cadre, collective discipline, professional revolutionaries) is neither an oversight nor the product of genuine cross-ideological left unity. CounterPower is a Marxist organization with a niche ideology informed mainly by the experience of the Italian Autonomia Operaia movement. The fact that they mask this behind an appeal to every possible leftist tendency is frankly dishonest, and makes their writing difficult to follow. Since all these ideas have been presented to us as complementary and harmonious, we must investigate the contradictions between them in order to get a clearer picture. 

First, we should consider their framing of the ideas of Luxemburg:

In contrast to a bourgeois party, Rosa Luxemburg identified that a revolutionary party of autonomy ‘is not a party that wants to rise to power over the mass of workers or through them.’ Rather, it ‘is only the most conscious, purposeful part of the proletariat, which points the entire broad mass of the working class toward its historical tasks at every step”

The primary issue with this framing is that Rosa Luxemburg did not write or speak about “a revolutionary party of autonomy” at any point in her political career. She was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) for most of her life before its left-wing split into the USPD and then Spartacist League (later renamed the Communist Party of Germany, or KPD). Both organizations were mass parties who explicitly intended to lead the working class to overthrow the existing political order and form a new proletarian government in Germany, headed by elected party officials. Her point about the party being an instrument that puts the working class in power was perfectly in line with the existing Marxist orthodoxy. Consider this quote from the SPD’s leading theorist Karl Kautsky for comparison:

The socialists no longer have the task of freely inventing a new society but rather uncovering its elements in existing society. No more do they have to bring salvation from its misery to the proletariat from above, but rather they have to support its class struggle through increasing its insight and promoting its economic and political organizations and in so doing bring about as quickly as possible the day when the proletariat will be able to save itself. The task of Social Democracy is to make the class struggle of the proletariat aware of its aim and capable of choosing the best means to attain this aim.6

Luxemburg and Kautsky both demonstrate the function of the mass party: cohering the most militant and forward-thinking section of the working class into one organization and giving it the tools to win political power. If the party is not “outside or above the revolutionary process”, as CounterPower puts it, then it is coming to power through class leadership. “Providing the boldest elements in decision-making organs” is just a milder way of phrasing “winning political hegemony in the movement.” While it is right to be skeptical of potential opportunists and wary of inadvertently creating an unaccountable bureaucracy, CounterPower overcorrects by trying to avoid the question of leadership altogether. No amount of out-of-context quotes from historical revolutionaries can paper over that deficiency. 

After painting an anarchist portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, CounterPower then calls upon the theoretical authority of actual anarchist Errico Malatesta:

We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies. But this does not mean it is possible—or even desirable—for all of us to be gathered into one specific association. There are too many differences of environment and conditions of struggle; too many possible ways of action to choose among, and also too many differences of temperament and personal incompatibilities for a General Union, if taken seriously, not to become, instead of a means for coordinating and reviewing the efforts of all, an obstacle to individual activity and perhaps also a cause of more bitter internal strife.7

This is a markedly different approach to organization from the mass party model of Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, et al. It is certainly more in line with the autonomists’ “area of the party” theory, but are the assumptions it is based on sound? The experience of the Bolshevik party securing state power and defending the proletariat from white terror, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s triumph over colonialism, the continued resistance to neoliberal imperialism in Cuba, and other achievements of the mass party model seem to indicate otherwise. Petty personal disputes and geographic distance are no excuse to abandon unified efforts to build socialism. If we take a scientific approach and compare the results of party-building trials throughout history to the results of those like Malatesta who deny the party’s role, the pattern is self-evident. 

Lessons of History

CounterPower’s essay does an excellent job of considering the experiences of a vast number of different historical communist groups. Unfortunately, they do so without an ounce of reflection or criticism. They ask us to look at rival groups with opposing political strategies and conclude that both were right, regardless of whether either group actually achieved its aims. They mention the experience of many parties and movements—the KAPD in Germany, Autonomia Operaia in Italy, the MIR in Chile, the FMLN-FDR in El Salvador, the URNG in Guatemala, the HBDH in Turkey and Kurdistan, and more. We’re given the impression that each of these groups consciously agreed with the autonomists’ many parties model, and that each of these groups were successful enough to teach us mainly positive lessons to emulate. Upon closer inspection, it turns out this is not at all the case. For the sake of brevity, we will look at three examples.

Let us begin with the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). This party could be accurately described as a sect based on its low membership, extreme sectarianism, and history of splits. Its complicated lineage is as follows—its members began in the SPD, then split into the ISD, which then joined the USPD, which then split into the KPD, and then finally split from there into the left-communist KAPD. It functionally existed for about two years before splitting again into separate factions. It was quite literally a split of a split of a split that ended up splitting. It had around 43,000 members at its height in 1921, which was minuscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of workers in the mass parties (and that number immediately declined after the factional split in 1922). 

The roots of the KAPD’s separation from the KPD lie in the events of the Ruhr Uprising. In 1920, a right-wing coalition of military officers and monarchists attempted to overthrow the bourgeois-democratic government of Germany. In response, the government called for a general strike, which the workers’ parties heeded. In the Ruhr valley, these parties took the strike a step further by forming Red Army units and engaging right-wing forces in open combat. However, these socialist militias were divided between three different parties and could not coordinate their efforts as well as their enemies who had the benefit of a clear leadership structure. The uprising was ultimately crushed when the bourgeois government made a deal with the right-wing putsch leaders and sent their forces to slaughter the workers of the Ruhr. 

What lessons did the left-communists learn from this? From their perspective, KPD leaders had given up on the struggle by agreeing to disband Red Army units after the fighting looked to be in the enemy’s favor. Because of this, a split was necessary so the workers could be led by the true communist militants that would see things through to the end. In other words, the already divided proletariat needed a fourth party to further complicate the coordination of future actions. Two years later, this fourth party would then split into two factions. Lenin had this to say about the KAPD:

Let the ‘Lefts’ put themselves to a practical test on a national and international scale. Let them try to prepare for (and then implement) the dictatorship of the proletariat, without a rigorously centralised party with iron discipline, without the ability to become masters of every sphere, every branch, and every variety of political and cultural work. Practical experience will soon teach them.8

Unfortunately, Lenin was overly optimistic. Rather than having time to learn from their mistakes, the divided forces of the working class were brutally crushed by the united forces of the right. The Nazis rose to power, and fascism reigned until the Soviets took Berlin in 1945. This does not mean there is nothing we can learn from the KAPD—quite the opposite is true. There may be some diamonds in the rough, but most of the lessons we can learn from the left-communists of Germany are examples of what not to do. Fortunately, in the updated version of their essay, CounterPower scrubbed any mention of the KAPD. Whether this was due to a genuine reassessment of their example or simple editorial limitations, the new version is much stronger without the ill-fated German sectarians. 

Despite their positive appraisal of the KAPD, CounterPower is not a left-communist sect. They are autonomists, and in order to understand their answer to the party question we must take stock of their movement forebears. Autonomia Operaia was a workers’ movement in Italy during the period known as the “Years of Lead”. This period lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and was marked by violent clashes between right and left-wing paramilitary forces. It is worth noting that much of this violence was either planned, supplied, or encouraged by the CIA and its “Operation Gladio”, although that is not relevant to our discussion here. Autonomia Operaia was mainly active from ‘76 to ‘78, and was made up of many smaller socialist groups including Potere Operaio, Gruppo Gramsci, and Lotta Continua. Each group was strongly opposed to unifying into one party, preferring instead to maintain their autonomy and pursue different tactics to work towards their shared goal of social revolution. 

Autonomia Operaia demo

In the end, this worked out in much the same way as it did for the sectarians in Germany decades earlier. Thousands of militants were arrested, hundreds fled the country, many were killed, and most of those who remained dissolved into terrorist groups like the Red Brigades and parliamentary parties like Democrazia Proletaria. Neither the autonomist terrorists nor the autonomist politicians were able to move beyond the failures of the earlier autonomist movement. In retrospect, the autonomists ended up replicating the sect form (albeit with some anarchist-influenced language) and suffered the familiar consequences of this organizing technique. It is worth noting that after misappropriating numerous mass parties (the Alabama chapter of CPUSA, the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg’s KPD) as successful examples of the “parties of autonomy” model, CounterPower leaves out any mention of Autonomia Operaia in the updated version of its essay. This is somewhat understandable as the movement collapsed within two years and failed to achieve its aims, but it is still dishonest. If failures are glossed over rather than rigorously examined, we are doomed to walk blindly into past mistakes. In this regard, CounterPower’s update to their essay does more to obfuscate the party question than answer it.

That said, Autonomia Operaia activists had valid criticisms of the Communist Party of Italy and could have created an alternative to lead the proletariat to victory. This is the positive lesson we can learn from them: when the “official” communist party of the nation abandons its principles, it can sometimes be worthwhile to build an alternative organization. However, they chose instead to create a loose collective of semi-aligned communist clusters which failed to coordinate their actions and create meaningful change. Had they taken on the arduous task of debating long-term strategy and forging programmatic unity, things may have turned out differently. This is the primary lesson we should learn from the Italian autonomists: a proletarian victory requires structure, democratic discipline, and unity of action. 

Although not directly influenced by Autonomia’s answer to the party question, the FMLN-FDR of El Salvador could be theorized as an example of an “area of the party”. As CounterPower pointed out in their essay, this network was composed of five revolutionary parties and a number of mass organizations and civil society institutions who worked together in loose cooperation towards revolution. It ultimately failed, and CounterPower makes two interesting claims about its dissolution: that the failure was due primarily to the popular front reformism of the PCS (one of the five member parties) and that its downfall does not tarnish its status as a positive example of the area of the party in action. These claims do not fare well under the spotlight of historical scrutiny, particularly when shined on the brutal internecine violence that destroyed any semblance of unity within the movement by 1983. 

CounterPower’s assessment of the FMLN identifies the PCS (Communist Party of El Salvador) as the weakest link in the chain, and the FPL (Farabundo Martí Liberation People’s Forces) as the strongest. In many ways, this is true, as the popular front strategy of the official communist parties has consistently ended in disaster the world over and the FPL was the most powerful and trusted party in El Salvador for a time. However, this is not the whole picture. Genuine political disagreements were often buried or papered over to maintain an artificial unity, and the ensuing tension was bound to boil over. While our autonomist comrades say the FMLN established a harmonious “mechanism of communication, coordination, and cooperation among the various politico-military organizations”, the reality is far grimmer. In its disagreement with other parties advocating negotiations with the Salvadoran government, the FPL resorted to gruesome assassinations to enforce its will on the rest of the FMLN. In April of 1983, FPL cadre Rogelio Bazzaglia murdered pro-negotiation leader Ana Maria with an ice pick, stabbing her 83 times. Although there was an attempt to blame the CIA or another party within FMLN, when presented concrete evidence of Bazzaglia’s guilt, FPL leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio promptly wrote a suicide note and shot himself in the head. With its most trusted leaders either disgraced, dead, or both, the FMLN lost steam after many members left the network in disgust. Along with this exodus of valuable cadre went all the legitimacy of the anti-negotiation faction, and so by 1989 even successful military offensives could do nothing more than bring the Salvadoran government to the negotiation table.9 The revolutionary potential of the FMLN died with Ana Maria, and her murder demonstrates how the “area of the party” approach only ends up recreating the problems of the sect form.

The Marxist Center

The US communist movement is essentially home to three different camps regarding the party question. Those who wish to see the movement divided into bureaucratic sects (with the belief that their particular sect is the One True Party) are on the right. Those who wish to see the movement divided into loosely aligned autonomist sects (with the beliefs outlined in CounterPower’s writing) are on the left. Those of us in the center are advocating a qualitative break with the sect form: the foundation of a mass party of organizers. This idea is often associated with a number of inaccurate claims—for instance, we are frequently lumped in with those who wish to replicate the worst aspects of the DSA model, where anyone can join the organization at any time for any reason without even committing to Marxist politics. We are also often accused of wanting to create a dogmatic bureaucracy of staunch Marxist-Leninists who will run the party as they see fit without input from membership. Neither of these claims are true.

In fact, what we desire is a party made and run by the masses themselves. Years of labor-intensive organizing will be necessary to make this happen, as the masses cannot be reached and welcomed into the socialist movement any other way. Tenant and workplace unions, unemployed councils, harm reduction efforts, solidarity networks, and other forms of “mass organizations” (in addition to independent electoral efforts) must be formed and rallied around a common political pole. In order for this pole to exist in the first place, the organizers engaged in mass work must debate and discuss until they articulate and agree on a comprehensive political program. In order for these debates and discussions to produce a clear program, the organizers have to see themselves as part of a common organization aimed at a shared goal. When each of these elements fall into place, something completely unique to the US left will be born: a mass party committed to praxis, programmatic unity, and democratic discipline.

By praxis, we understand a long-term commitment to building, growing, and maintaining the kinds of mass organizations detailed above. By programmatic unity, we mean collective acceptance of a comprehensive set of answers to long-term strategic questions, forged in an extended process of comradely debate and compromise. Ideally, this would take the form of a minimum-maximum program like those laid out and critiqued by Marx, Engels, and others in the first two Internationals.10 The minimum demands are structural reforms that communicate to the working class exactly how our efforts will improve their lives and empower them at the political level. Demands like guaranteed healthcare and housing, eliminating the Electoral College, Senate, and Supreme Court, disbanding the police and forming workers’ militias, ensuring union representation, and more would bring supporters into the fold and give us access to valuable comrades and organizers. They are chosen in such a way that when every demand is met, the proletariat has seized political power from the bourgeoisie and becomes the governing class of society. 

With this done, the new workers’ government can focus on fulfilling the maximum demands, epitomized as communism, which would eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism and transition to a socialist mode of production. Establishing unity on long-term questions of strategy is far superior to enforcing a “party-line” on day-to-day issues and theoretical minutiae. It allows us to collaborate and exert the greatest possible combined strength of the working class in its diverse struggles without splitting over short-term tactical disagreements like “should we partner with this NGO on this tenant organizing project?” or subcultural arguments like “who was in the wrong at Kronstadt?” It also does not require agreement on “tendency” labels (such as Marxist-Leninist, anarchist, left-communist, etc). As our organizations grow, the need for a commonly accepted program will only increase. Finally, by democratic discipline, we refer to the old axiom “diversity of opinion, unity of action”.

These three principles are absolutely essential for the functioning of an effective and battle-ready proletarian party. As we have seen, the organizational forms of sectarians and autonomists (like the KAPD and Autonomia Operaia respectively) crumble under pressure whereas mass parties regularly weather brutal repression. No better example of this can be found in US history than that of the Alabama chapter of the CPUSA:

The fact is, the CP and its auxiliaries in Alabama did have a considerable following, some of whom devoured Marxist literature and dreamed of a socialist world. But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU militant was to face the possibility of imprisonment, beatings, kidnapping, and even death. And yet the Party survived, and at times thrived, in this thoroughly racist, racially divided, and repressive social world.11

While other cases of this phenomenon (the Russian Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and others) have been historically prone to corruption, preventative measures can be taken to ensure the party retains its mass character even after smashing the state and beginning socialist reconstruction. The most immediate step in this process is the collaborative drafting of and universal agreement on a party-wide Code of Conduct. This will facilitate the development of a comradely culture that balances rigorous critique and debate with an environment of pluralism and interpersonal care. In addition to understanding how to have a one-on-one organizing conversation, we should also strive to be well-versed in skills like listening, openly sharing feelings, assuming good faith in arguments, making sincere apologies, and offering support to comrades struggling with personal issues. None of these can be learned by accident in the alienated social spaces created by capitalism, so we must make a deliberate effort to establish these norms in our organization. 

Another would be taking seriously the moral dimensions of Fidelismo’s contribution to Marxism. In stark contrast with both Stalin’s iron fist and Allende’s naive pacifism, Fidel Castro’s leadership of the Cuban revolution combined violent insurrection against the state with peaceful political maneuvering in the revolutionary movement. Over the course of protracted struggle on both fronts, the July 26th Movement was able to defeat the state militarily and construct a democratic mandate for political hegemony. Because Fidel and his comrades took the ethical implications of revolutionary struggle seriously, they were able to achieve victory without recourse to war crimes against the enemy or lethal violence against political competitors within the movement.12 This commitment to moral conduct during violent struggle did not stop them from winning the war. In fact, it allowed them to win the peace. This strategy allowed Cuba to begin building socialism after national liberation without the deadly internecine conflicts that plagued other revolutionary movements (notably including the FMLN). It is crucial that we embrace this legacy by constructing an ethic of revolution for our time. More steps beyond these will of course be necessary, and their exact nature will become clear as we work towards the realization of a comradely culture together.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of the need for a mass party is the fact that the most advanced sections of the US labor movement are already calling for the establishment of a workers’ party. In its recent pamphlet Them and Us Unionism, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) wrote:

Throughout our history, UE has held that workers need our own political party. In the 1990s, UE worked with a number of other unions to found the Labor Party, under the slogan ‘The Bosses Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own.’ Although the Labor Party experiment was ultimately unsuccessful, UE members and locals have been active in numerous other efforts to promote independent, pro-worker alternatives to the two major parties.13

Other labor unions like ILWU and the Teamsters have produced leading organizers who share UE’s commitment to independent worker politics. People like Clarence Thomas, who helped organize the Juneteenth port shutdown on the West Coast earlier this year in solidarity with the George Floyd uprising, Chris Silvera, who chairs the National Black Caucus in the Teamsters, and many more can be found among them. These influential voices of the labor movement have united in Labor and Community for an Independent Party, stating:

We must build democratically run coalitions that bring together the stakeholders in labor and the communities of the oppressed, so that they have a decisive say in formulating their demands and mapping out a strategy. Most important, we need to put an end to the monopoly of political power by the Democrats and Republicans. The labor movement and the leaders of the Latino and Black struggles need to break with their reliance on the Democratic Party and build their own mass-based independent working-class political party.

While it is certainly possible that these efforts could lead to the establishment of a reformist labor party, it is precisely this possibility that behooves us to get involved. Any union that recognizes the need for independent proletarian political action outside the shop floor can be considered “advanced” compared to business unions aligned with the Democratic Party, and relationships with them should be built as part of a communist intervention in the labor movement. As Marxists, we have a duty not only to organize our class but to bring theoretical clarity to its most active champions. If we continue building strong proletarian fighting organizations and elaborate our vision in a comprehensive program, we will be positioned to guide labor and community leaders of all stripes to the creation of a truly communist political party.

Ultimately, the disparate sects within Marxist Center and the local chapters of the DSA must form tighter bonds and consider internal reforms that would allow us to build the party our class requires. In doing so, we should seek to unite as many far-flung collectives and mass work projects as we can in order to become a true threat to bourgeois hegemony. While staying divided in a loose federation may seem like a viable model to some, history shows that it is not. The autonomists and anarchists in our ranks are dedicated organizers doing valuable work, and we should be grateful for that. However, we would be doing ourselves and them a disservice if we did not offer a comradely critique of their organizational models. 

Communists will always find strength in unity.

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The Chinese Rural Commune with Zhun Xu

Matt and Christian join Zhun Xu, author of From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty for a discussion on China’s communes from their construction to their dismantling. They contextualize land reform globally, elaborate on how the Chinese land reform process looked different from the Soviet one, discuss how the  communes looked and functioned, and what services they provided as well  as their achievements and their points of failure. They then take a general look at the cultural revolution, and how it was slowly reversed after Mao’s death, why and how the rural communes were targeted first for reform, and they finish by looking at the fate of the urbanized peasantry and why they have not yet joined the urban struggles in China.

 

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Was Mao a Bukharinist?: The “Three-Line Struggle” in Economic Debates Preceding the Great Leap Forward

Matthew Strupp examines economic debates in China during the leadup to the Great Leap Forward and assesses comparisons made between Mao and Bukharin. 

Depiction of a People’s Commune in Mao-era People’s Republic of China

A common understanding of the political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is that it underwent a grand “two-line struggle” in the years from the completion of “socialist transformation” with the nationalization of industry in 1956 up to Mao’s death in 1976. The two sides between which this supposed struggle took place were the Liuists, or capitalist-roaders, and the Maoists, the genuine Marxist-Leninists. This view is still common among Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and until Liu’s rehabilitation under Deng1 this was the official verdict of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its own history. It was replaced by a view that attributed to Mao the great merit of having revolutionarily unified the country but no longer asserted the correctness of his line in these struggles, no doubt since his line, posed against capitalist-roaders, had uncomfortable implications for the new leadership.

The problem with the original “two-line struggle model” is that it washes away much of the complexity of the actual politics and virtually ignores the competing bureaucratic interests involved in the decision-making process of the Chinese state, though this is also true of the view that replaced it and in questioning the one the author by no means intends to endorse the other. The effect is to thoroughly reduce the economics and politics of this attempt at socialist construction to a caricature, replacing political and historical analysis with a confession of faith.

An interesting alternative framing to these ways of understanding the politics of the PRC is the approach of R. Kalain. In a 1984 paper, Kalain argued that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” phase in the late 1950s, coming to similar politics as the Bolshevik revolutionary, statesman, and economist Nikolai Bukharin despite a lack of a direct influence from him. Bukharin is known for advocating for the continuation of a modified version of the New Economic Policy. He opposed the early ’20s “super-industrializers”, as well as the late ’20s forced collectivization of the peasantry and the first Five-Year Plan.2 Kalain argues that Mao criticized the “Soviet Model” of development for its promotion of heavy industrial construction at the expense of light industry and agriculture along Bukharinist lines. At first glance, Kalain provides a compelling wrench to throw into the “two-line struggle” argument. However, he fails to provide a useful explanation for the developments in Chinese economic policy in the years he describes. In particular, why would Mao have gone from a “Bukharinist” position in 1956 to launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958? 

This article will advance an argument for an understanding of Chinese economic debates, and particularly those between 1956 and 1962, in terms of a “three-line struggle.” This is a notion borrowed from David M. Bachman in Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System. This framing is opposed to the model of “two-line struggle” and to understanding Mao as a Bukharinist. It will particularly highlight the figure of Chen Yun as one whose role is especially illustrative to understand this period. This approach will reveal the Great Leap Forward to not have been simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but a case of his intervention into an existing bureaucratic struggle. The aim is a treatment of the dynamics of an “Actually Existing Socialist” society that goes beyond the standard focus on big personalities, or treating the state and ruling parties of such societies as either monoliths or as engaged in struggles limited to those between defenders of the communist faith and heretics. Rather, we will emphasize the conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state, both to correct one-sided historical narratives, and to stress the importance of questions of state and civil institutional arrangements to future attempts to realize the emancipated society of communism.

The “Three-Line Struggle” Model

We will begin with a summary of the “three-line struggle” model. In his 1985 China Research Monograph, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System, David M. Bachman lays out the ideas as well as the bureaucratic support groups of the “three lines” in Chinese economic debates preceding the Great Leap Forward. Bachman refers to the three groups as the “planning-heavy industry coalition”, the “extraction and allocation coalition”, and the “social transformation group.” The latter is referred to as a “group” rather than a coalition because its support was concentrated in the Party rather than across a handful of ministries.

The planning-heavy industry coalition was represented in speeches at the 8th Communist Party Congress in 1956 by Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Planning Commission and Bo Yibo, Chairman of the State Economic Commission. It had a base of support in the heavy industrial ministries.3 The extraction and allocation coalition was represented at the Congress by Chen Yun, fifth-ranking member of the CCP and first Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic, Li Xiannian, Minister of Finance, member of the Politburo, and Vice-Premier, and Deng Zihui, head of the Party’s Rural Work Department and Vice-Premier. This coalition had its base of support in the ministries of Finance, Commerce, and Agriculture.4 The social transformation group was primarily based in the Party. It favored mass mobilization as a method for solving social and economic problems and was ideologically opposed to the divide between mental and manual labor, city and countryside, and worker and peasant. Its views were frequently espoused by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party.

The planning-heavy industry coalition tended to favor higher rates of investment in heavy industry, direct allocation of goods by the ministries, and higher rates of extraction from the peasantry to finance capital construction. This policy served the bureaucratic interests of the ministries who supported the coalition. This was because it maintained their control over a larger portion of the social product, and created a closed loop in which the products of factories operated by a ministry would be allocated by that same ministry for new construction.5 These policies were a far cry from the policy favored by the extraction and allocation coalition, who controlled the taxation system, the budget drafting process, and the distribution of the products of agriculture and light industry.6 Due to its role in the distribution process and its contact with the working-class, and especially with the peasantry, the extraction and allocation coalition was highly sensitive to the new problems in the Chinese economy that had come along with the completion of “socialist transformation,” the previous focus of most bureaucrats, and shifted their focus toward these new issues. These problems included the over-extraction of grain from the peasantry, the supply problems related to the disorganization of production, and disproportion in investment that favored heavy industry over light industry and agriculture which led to shortages of agricultural products. They also pointed to the availability of too few consumer goods to satisfy the increased worker purchasing power that had come with recent wage increases, which threatened inflation in the short run.7 The extraction and allocation coalition thought that these problems had to be paid special attention, and that above all, rashness should be avoided. They tended not to think of the benefits of a planned economy in terms of rapid industrialization, although they affirmed the goal of a “strong, socialist country.” Instead, they focused on its ability to avoid the irrationality, disproportion, and destructive instability of capitalism. They thought that uses of the planning system that resulted in such instability and did not meet the needs of the population were abuses of this system. As Li Xiannian put it at the 8th Communist Party Congress, due to the existence of the planned economy in China: 

…it is possible for us to pay attention to the connection between one year and another in a planned way, and to regulate the range of the year to year fluctuations, so as to avoid, as best we can, excessive fluctuations …. Had we been a bit more conservative last year and thus saved some raw materials and commodities, it would be helpful for working out the plan for 1957 …. We should gradually expand our material reserves . . . and thus ensure the even, smooth progress of our national construction, thereby further exploiting the superiority of a planned economy.8 

This was a view that stressed evenness in development, rationality in planning, and the avoidance of a destructive level of fluctuation.

The extraction and allocation coalition favored moderate levels of grain extraction and increased investment in agriculture and light industry. They believed in the “three balances” of budgets, loans and repayments, and material production and allocation. They also advocated use of the market in distribution where the planning system did not yet have the requisite capacity to distribute all products, increased prices for grain to increase peasant standards of living and incentives for production, and larger private plots for peasants. They favored cutting investment in heavy industry in the short term, but thought that the increased revenue provided by the quick turnaround of investments in light industry would put heavy industry on a more solid basis in the long term.9 This was a far-reaching alternative to the policies that the CCP had hitherto followed. It stood in clear opposition to the program of the planning-heavy industry coalition.

Bachman argues that while this debate was raging through the state ministries, much of the Party, and therefore the social transformation group which included Mao himself, were too distracted by the ongoing Hundred Flowers campaign to pay much attention to economic matters.10 When they did pay attention, it was the planning-heavy industry coalition that was able to successfully make the case to Mao and the Party that its policies were superior. It promised to resolve what the CCP had declared to be the principal contradiction in Chinese society: the contradiction between the advanced “socialist” relations of production and the backward “underdeveloped” forces of production, while also addressing the inequalities in Chinese society that had persisted since the completion of “socialist transformation.” These inequalities had begun to worry Mao more and more.11 

It was State Economic Commission Chairman Bo Yibo and State Planning Commission Chairman Li Fuchun who pioneered the approach that synthesized the preoccupations of the social transformation group with the policies of the planning-heavy industry coalition. This approach involved embracing the construction of small and medium-sized enterprises in the localities funded by the localities themselves; calling for greater efficiency in production through sheer voluntarism to make up for proposed cuts in light industry investment, and making up for cuts in the central investment in agriculture by relying on peasant labor mobilization and additional investment in heavy-industrial fertilizer plants. This would allow them to achieve their desired results of greatly increasing investment in large heavy-industrial plants while decreasing the external demands for heavy industrial goods by the localities. The localities would now be supplied by the small and medium-sized enterprises. The fears of Mao and the social transformation group about the divide between city and countryside, a divide which was growing as China industrialized, would be assuaged by bringing industry to the countryside, and the concerns about neglect of agriculture would be assuaged by advocating peasant labor mobilization. Mao rallied to this program at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September-October 1957. There, he summed up its ethos as “more, faster, better, and more economical,” and the Great Leap Forward was set in motion.12

Backyard Steel Furnace during the Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was not simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but the program of an alliance of bureaucratic interest groups. These were the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group, who had come together in the course of the “three-line struggle” in the Chinese state and the Communist Party. Their battle against Chen Yun and the extraction and allocation coalition would continue over the course of the Great Leap Forward. Chen conveniently claimed to have fallen ill between the Third Plenum and late summer-early fall of 1958, the period of the initial offensive of the Great Leap. He then gained Mao’s full favor between March and May of 1959, a period when Mao was more critical of the Leap.  He supposedly fell ill again during the renewed radical phase of the Great Leap Forward between May 1959 and the fall of 1960. Chen only returned to prominence in 1961 as a leader of the economic recovery effort after the extent of the damage caused by the Great Leap Forward was undeniable.13

Assessing Mao’s “Bukharinist Phase”

After having undertaken a survey above of the “three-line struggle” in the economic debates occurring in the PRC before the launch of the Great Leap Forward, it should now be easier to assess the merits of R. Kalain’s argument in their 1984 paper, Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Bukharinist’ Phase. Kalain argues that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” period in the late 1950s that he abandoned by the time of the Great Leap Forward. According to Kalain, Mao’s views in this period were characterized by a preference for “a more balanced relationship between agriculture and industry in contrast to the Soviet model’s emphasis on heavy industry” and he “viewed agriculture and light industry as the foundation for the development of heavy industry and the economy in general.”14 Kalain claims that the core of Mao’s “Bukharinist” case can be found in his 1956 speech On the Ten Major Relationships, and in his works critiquing Soviet books on economics: Concerning Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1958), Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1959), and Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy (1961-62).15

One problem with this claim should be immediately clear. With the exception of the 1956 speech, all of these works in which Mao supposedly argues for a position which he had abandoned by the time of the Great Leap forward were written during the period of the Great Leap itself, that is, in the period 1958-1962. Kalain mitigates this problem by only using quotes from the 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships16, in their paper. However, it is undeniable that the purpose of these later texts was to provide theoretical underpinnings for the Great Leap Forward. By looking at the text this picture becomes even starker. In Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “The vast majority of China’s peasants [are] ‘sending tribute’ with a positive attitude. It is only among the prosperous peasants and the middle peasants, some 15 percent of the peasantry, that there is any discontent. They oppose the whole concept of the Great Leap and the people’s communes.”17 It is difficult to see how this statement by Mao can be reconciled with Kalain’s claim about this text: that it represented a position that was opposed to the Great Leap Forward.

This should not prevent us from acknowledging that Kalain is not totally off base in including Mao’s early critiques of Soviet economics as examples of his “Bukharinism.” At points Mao’s critique does seem to line up pretty well with what Kalain describes as a “Bukharinist” perspective insofar as Mao criticizes the prioritization of heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry as well as the inequalities between the city and countryside. For example, in his 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships, Mao indeed offered a more “Bukharinist” solution to some of these problems. He states that “The emphasis in our country’s construction is on heavy industry,” but claims that in the Soviet Union and in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe, “there is a lop-sided stress on heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry.” He claims that if more importance is attached to agriculture and light industry and a greater proportion of investment made in them “there will be more grain and more raw materials for light industry and a greater accumulation of capital. And there will be more funds in the future to invest in heavy industry.” On the subject of the extraction of grain from the peasantry he stated: 

The Soviet Union has adopted measures which squeeze the peasants very hard. It takes away too much from the peasants at too low a price through its system of so-called obligatory sales and other measures. This method of capital accumulation has seriously dampened the peasants’ enthusiasm for production. You want the hen to lay more eggs and yet you don’t feed it, you want the horse to run fast and yet you don’t let it graze. What kind of logic is that!18 

This should not be seen, however, as a new and distinct proposal for sweeping changes to the policies of the PRC or an argument for the abandonment of a whole economic model. Although Mao points out some problems with the economic policies of the PRC, in this speech he mostly counterposes China as a positive case against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as negative cases because of the PRC’s already prevailing lower rates of grain extraction in comparison with these other countries. 

While Mao’s concerns on the balance in investment between agriculture and industry could indeed be called “Bukharinist,” because Bukharin paid considerable attention to similar problems in the early Soviet Union, and his early approach to these problems bore some resemblance to Bukharin’s, Mao’s ultimate solution to these problems in the Great Leap Forward was anything but “Bukharinist.” Again in Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “If we want heavy industry to develop quickly everyone has to show initiative and maintain high spirits. And if we want that then we must enable industry and agriculture to be concurrently promoted, and the same for light and heavy industry.”19 Unlike Bukharin, who advocated investing a greater share of revenue into light industry and agriculture, and using the faster turnover time on these investments to finance heavy industry; Mao proposed solving the disproportion in development between agriculture and industry and between light industry and heavy industry through initiative and high spirits.  If we follow David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates in the Chinese state and Communist Party, it becomes clear that Mao’s critiques in these later texts represent his social-transformationist concerns about the inequalities baked into the “Soviet Model” of development. And this mobilizational approach to the problem was precisely the program of the alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group that formed in opposition to the more “Bukharinist” extraction and allocation coalition.

Mao’s overall trajectory in economic matters in the late 1950s should not be seen solely in terms of individual innovation, that is, from an innovative Bukharinist policy to the innovative Great Leap Forward. Rather, it should be thought of in terms of Mao coming to actively intervene in an already existing bureaucratic struggle taking place within the state and the Communist Party. His position was initially closer to that of Chen Yun, one of his highest ranking economic advisors, and soon to be one of the leaders of the extraction and allocation coalition. Once the “three-line struggle” heated up and Chen became known as a partisan of the extraction and allocation coalition, though, Mao shifted his position to be in favor of the side that he felt had the superior program for industrialization and social transformation, that of planning-heavy industry coalition leaders Bo Yibo and Li Fuchun, in the Great Leap Forward, justifying this policy in his critiques of Soviet economics written between 1958 and 1962.

Chen Yun: Conservative Marketizer or Communist?

The departures Mao makes from the Soviet Model should not be understood as unique to him. Rather, as David M. Bachman argues, departures from the Soviet Model were precisely the sort of thing that Chen Yun had already been saying for years, beginning in 1954 in speeches he gave on the PRC’s first Five-Year Plan.20 The figure of Chen Yun is a relatively neglected one in the standard narratives of the PRC’s history. This is unfortunate because, in the actual political struggle that preceded the Great Leap Forward, the program of his bureaucratic coalition, the extraction and allocation coalition, was the only alternative proposed at the heights of the party leadership to the new course. It was also aimed at solving the broader problems that the Chinese economy faced after the successful completion of “socialist transformation.” At least in the English language literature, Chen Yun seems to have hitherto only attracted interest from supporters of China’s capitalist restoration. These tend to downplay his differences with Deng Xiaoping. They value him both as a leading champion of the market in the CCP for many decades and as a moderating influence on a process of marketization that ran into difficulties when it proceeded too rashly. This is certainly true of David M. Bachman, as well as of Nicholas R. Lardy and Kenneth Lieberthal, authors of the introduction to a collection of Chen’s speeches from 1956-1962 translated into English, titled Chen Yun’s Strategy for China’s Development: A Non-Maoist Alternative; and of Ezra Vogel, who wrote a biographical paper on Chen titled Chen Yun: his life.21

Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1978

For example, Bachman stipulates in a number of places that Chen Yun was categorically not a “market socialist” of even the Yugoslav variety, and that he saw the market solely as a supplement to the plan. Bachman stipulates that in all cases Chen thought it should be subordinated to the needs of a socialist society, becoming the leading internal opponent of the Deng marketization after it went far beyond the measures he recommended.22 Yet, Bachman does not consistently portray Chen as someone with serious communist commitments that might lead him to come at the problem from a totally different perspective than that which motivated this latter process.23 Bachman makes an open-ended process of “reform” one of the key tenets of Chen’s economic thought and refers to him as on the conservative end of a spectrum of reformers that ends with Zhao Ziyang, the most aggressive of China’s marketizers. 

However, Chen Yun’s economic thought offers something to those of us interested in the project of a planned economy as well. He offered a serious assessment of the problems that the Chinese economy faced after “socialist transformation” and proposed measures he thought would strengthen the overall planning system even if it required making limited use of the market. In both the Mao era and the Deng era he opposed every round of “overheating” forced on the Chinese economy, which usually carried detrimental consequences. This was in accordance with an overall view of the benefits of a planned economy which insisted that the goal of socialist planning was to serve the needs of the population in a way that avoided the violent disproportion and irrationality of capitalism. Lastly, he had a “bird-cage” model of the relationship between planning and the market, in which the bird is the market and the cage is the plan. If the cage is too small, the bird will suffocate, if there is no cage the bird will fly away. This metaphor offers an interesting light in which to view the plan-market relationship.24

Reflections

David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates taking place in the CCP and in the state bureaucracy of the PRC preceding the Great Leap Forward is a useful lens for understanding the bureaucratic interests involved in the debate. It holds that the policies at the heart of the Great Leap Forward came into being as a result of an alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group in opposition to the extraction and allocation coalition. We have applied this model to assess the veracity of R. Kalain’s claim of a novel “Bukharinist” approach coming from Mao. We found this model to be insufficient because it confuses Mao’s social-transformationist concerns in his writings critiquing Soviet economics with earlier proposals that were in line with recommendations made in 1954 by one of his highest-ranking economic advisors, Chen Yun. We have also reassessed Chen’s legacy in light of scholarship that has cast him as simply a “conservative marketizer.” In contradistinction to this portrayal, we ought to emphasize his communist convictions and the usefulness of his thought to those attached to the project of a planned economy today. 

Overall, this article has looked to explore the nexus of politics and economics in the PRC, going beyond cardboard cutout narratives of capitalist-roaders and genuine Marxist-Leninists still popular today, and to refine our understanding of the complex interplay of the two, taking into account conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state. This has been carried out in the interest of correcting one-sided historical narratives of “Actually Existing Socialist” societies and for the benefit of future attempts at the realization of a communist project, stressing the importance of questions of the arrangement of state and civil institutions to the course of such projects.

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Leon Trotsky and Cultural Revolution

Doug Enaa Greene argues that in Trotsky’s work a theory of cultural revolution can be found, one which differs from Mao Zedong’s that was developed in the context of the Russian Revolution and its struggle against bureaucracy. 

The argument that a “cultural revolution” is a necessary part of a socialist revolution is generally associated with Mao Zedong and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that he initiated in China. However, Leon Trotsky, in a vastly different way than Mao, stated that Russia needed a cultural revolution. According to Trotsky, a cultural revolution was needed along with industrialization to construct socialism. Trotsky’s industrialization plan for Russia would increase the social weight of the proletariat. A cultural revolution would raise the masses’ cultural level by eradicating mass illiteracy and superstition and change their habits and customs, which would make the working class fit to rule society.

The Heritage of Underdevelopment

According to Marx, socialism would develop first in industrialized capitalist countries with their vast productive powers and rich cultural heritage that the working class would use to build a new order. Contrary to Marx, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in a backward country, which complicated matters in regards to cultural transformation. Although the major urban centers were “islands of capitalism” with a high concentration of workers in modern factories, large portions of the countryside were just emerging from feudalism. As the Bolsheviks recognized, Russia did not possess the material and cultural conditions needed to overcome capitalism on its own. Both Lenin and Trotsky believed that one of the tasks of the new Soviet republic was to begin the process of creating them. However, the low levels of culture, technical skill, etc., for most of the population along with the isolation of the revolution meant that options were limited.

For Lenin, questions of culture and ideology were intimately connected with the goals of communism – how to overcome the legacy of capitalism and class society. According to Georg Lukács, Lenin’s cultural strategy had three goals:

To abolish the difference between village and city, to abolish the difference between physical and intellectual labour, and to restore the meaningfulness and autonomous nature of labour. Here, too, economic construction and cultural revolution appear inseparable. The electrification of the village, the mechanisation of agricultural production, and such like, directly serve purely economic goals: increased production. However, this increase is not achievable by means other than continuously raising the cultural level of the village; so, too, it requires that agricultural production draw ever closer to the principles of planned factory-production, to principles supported by the latest achievements of science, which master nature ever more thoroughly, and which demand of the labour-force scientific capabilities.1

Lenin’s vision, shared by Trotsky, was that the working class had to not only master the achievements and culture of bourgeois society but overcome their limitations in the construction of socialism. The development of a socialist planned economy coincided with not only economic modernization, but also cultural transformation. Modernization and the increase of productive forces were not seen as ends in themselves – this would merely reinforce the inequalities of capitalism – but were part of an all-around transformation of the conditions of life.

Trotsky and the Proletkult

The Russian Revolution not only brought the working class power, but unleashed great artistic and cultural creativity. Among the changes there were assaults on the traditional family, divorce was made easy, women expanded their horizons, social privilege was rejected, new laws put national equality in place of Great Russian chauvinism (anti-Semitism was outlawed). There was social experimentation in everything from factory organization to education. The Revolution saw the flowering of the artistic avant-garde, as can be seen in the symbolic image of the “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” or the emblem of the hammer and sickle that are powerful representations to convey the values of the revolutionary cause to communists, artists, and workers. Lastly, there was the Proletkult, a movement of Bolshevik intellectuals, artists and workers inspired by the ideas Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who rejected class culture and wanted to create a culture, science, and art based on the values of internationalism, materialism, and atheism. A new proletarian culture, stripped of bourgeois influences, would be the basis of modern socialist society.

Lenin did not think very highly of the Proletkult movement, stating:

Proletarian culture is not something that suddenly springs from nobody knows where, and is not invented by people who set up as specialists in proletarian culture. Proletarian culture is the regular development of those stores of knowledge which mankind has worked out for itself under the yoke of capitalist society, of feudal society, of bureaucratic society.2

Lenin’s negative view of the Proletkult movement was shared by Trotsky, who argued that

It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consist in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.3 

According to Trotsky, every class creates its own art and culture, but bourgeois culture developed in a protracted period of several centuries before taking power, while the proletariat did not develop its own culture before the revolution. Furthermore, a proletarian dictatorship was transitory (lasting years or decades) and during that time, the attention of the working class would mainly be absorbed in fierce political struggles. There would be no development of a distinctive proletarian culture, since the dictatorship of the proletariat leads to the end of class distinctions and the creation of a universal human culture. Considering the backwardness of the Russian proletariat in regards to culture, Trotsky said they needed to critically appropriate, absorb and assimilate the old culture. According to Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky said the working class

ought to view the cultural legacy dialectically and see its historically formed contradictions. The achievements of civilization had so far served a double purpose: they had assisted man in gaining knowledge and control of nature and in developing his own capacities; but they had also served to perpetuate society’s division into classes and man’s exploitation by man. Consequently, some elements of the heritage were of universal significance and validity while others were bound up with obsolete or obsolescent social systems. The communist approach to the cultural legacy should therefore be selective.4

Cover of Furnace, an official organ of Proletkult, designed by Aleksandr Zugrin

Economic Development and Cultural Revolution

Trotsky’s conception of a cultural revolution involved the proletariat eliminating illiteracy, superstition and raising their cultural level, so they would be fit to rule. However, Russian backwardness meant that different and contradictory conceptions of the world coexisted together among the people, even among communists:

A man is a sound communist devoted to the cause, but women are for him just “females,” not to be taken seriously in any way. Or it happens that an otherwise reliable communist, when discussing nationalistic matters, starts talking hopelessly reactionary stuff. To account for that we must remember that different parts of the human consciousness do not change and develop simultaneously and on parallel lines. There is a certain economy in the process. Human psychology is very conservative by nature, and the change due to the demands and the push of life affects in the first place those parts of the mind which are directly concerned in the case.5

A resolute struggle was needed to raise the cultural level of the proletariat and peasantry so they wouldn’t reproduce systems of oppression and domination under a socialist veneer. The battle against backward ideas and attitudes was not simply a struggle for ideas, habits, and attitudes needed to be connected with uprooting the material conditions that engendered them.

Socialism would overcome those conditions by creating modern industry, improving the standard of living and increasing the weight of the proletariat in Soviet society: “The decisive factor in appraising the movement of our country forward along the road of socialist reconstruction, must be the growth of our productive forces and the dominance of the socialist elements over the capitalist—together with an improvement of all the conditions of existence of the working class.”6 At the same time, the bureaucracy who ruled had to be combated and the workers needed to be in firm control of the Soviets, trade unions and the Party. Although Trotsky did not believe that the USSR would be secure until the worldwide victory of socialism, they had a task to hold out until they could receive aid from revolutions abroad. Ultimately, the worldwide victory of socialism, the development of industry and culture would free the proletariat from the shackles of feudalism, make them fit to rule.

Trotsky’s ideas on cultural revolution and developing industry formed a single integrated strategic vision:

even the slightest successes in the sphere of morals, by raising the cultural level of the working man and woman, enhance our capacity for rationalizing production, and promoting socialist accumulation. This again gives us the possibility of making fresh conquests in the sphere of morals. Thus a dialectical dependence exists between the two spheres.7

A cultural revolution could not be delayed until the productive forces were already developed but needed to be done simultaneously, otherwise, old customs, relations, habits of Russian backwardness would engulf the revolution.

Soviet underdevelopment meant the bureaucratization of the party and state were real and pressing problems. There was a tendency among the bureaucracy to protect its monopoly to information from the working class. As Marx said, the bureaucracy “is a hierarchy of knowledge.”8 The Soviet bureaucrats did not want the masses involved in the life of the country:

What is the use, they say, of wasting time in discussions? Let the authorities start running communal kitchens, creches, laundries, hostels, etc. Bureaucratic dullards usually add (or rather imply, or say in whispers—they prefer that to open speech): “It is all words, and nothing more.” The bureaucrat hopes…that when we get rich, we shall, without further words, present the proletariat with cultured conditions of life as with a sort of birthday gift. No need, say such critics, to carry on propaganda for socialist conditions among the masses—the process of labour itself creates “a sense of socialness.”9

Trotsky said this problem would not be solved by replacing the “bad” bureaucrats with “good” ones, but the working class taking charge in the construction of socialism.

Trotsky’s approach to the bureaucracy was guided by several considerations:

1) The party and state could not possibly know everything. Bureaucrats tend to be inert and distrust initiative, but socialism requires the masses taking conscious leadership to solve the problems of economic development and cultural change.

2) Socialist consciousness will not emerge in a spontaneous way. Although the “state can organize conditions of life down to the last cell of the community,” but unless the workers themselves were involved in the process, then “no serious and radical changes can possibly be achieved in economic conditions and home life.”10 Whereas the previous generation of workers learned communism through class struggle and revolution, the next generation will learn “in the elements of construction, the elements of the construction of everyday life. The formulas of our program are, in principle, true. But we must continually prove them, renew them, make them concrete in living experience, and spread them in a wider sphere.”11 While the state will play a major role in constructing socialism, the masses had to be the guiding force: “The proletarian state is the structural timber, not the structure itself. The importance of a revolutionary government in a period of transition is immeasurable… It does not mean that all work of building will be performed by the state.”12

3) The course of socialist development meant that change could not from enlightened bureaucrats, but through coordination of local needs within an overall plan. Ultimately, socialism requires revolutionary practice by the working class and not administration by bureaucrats.

Although the party needed to promote their own cultural workers (artists, writers, etc), this did not mean that the party had a monopoly on knowledge. A cultural revolution needed pluralism and competing currents of artistic and literary schools – save for those who were openly and unambiguously counterrevolutionary. While the party should provide guidance in the realm of culture, it should not enforce a state-led cultural revolution. According to Trotsky: “The state is an organ of coercion and for Marxists in positions of power these may be a temptation to simplify cultural and educational work among the masses by using the approach of ‘Here is the truth – down on your knees to it !”13

Trotsky rejected the claims of the Proletkult that Marxism was a universal system which provided a master key for every problem. According to him,

The Marxian method affords an opportunity to estimate the development of the new art, to trace all its sources, to help the most progressive tendencies by a critical illumination of the road, but it does not do more than that. Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. …The domain of art is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly….And at any rate, the Party cannot and will not take the position of a literary circle which is struggling and merely competing with other literary circles.14

Trotsky’s plan for a cultural revolution and economic development was to realize the communist dream where “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”15 A communist society would mean a transformation in the arts where “technique will become a more powerful inspiration for artistic work, and later on the contradiction itself between technique and nature will be solved in a higher synthesis.” Art and culture would be cleansed of the inequities of class society and flourish under communism. People would finally be free to develop their capabilities to the fullest. In a lyrical passage, Trotsky described the untold possibilities of cultural development under communism:

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psychophysical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music, and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.16

Construction on White (Robot), by Aleksandr Rodchenko 1920

Trotsky and Mao

At the 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Mao rejected Trotsky’s approach to culture as one of “dualism” or “pluralism” which confined the party’s leadership extended to “politics,” while art remained “bourgeois” (a mischaracterization of Trotsky’s position):   

Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolutionary period. Opposition to this arrangement is certain to lead to dualism or pluralism, and in essence amounts to “politics–Marxist, art—bourgeois”…17

For Mao, art and culture needed to be subordinate to the requirements of politics, since they

are part of the whole revolutionary cause, they are cogs and wheels in it, and though in comparison with certain other and more important parts they may be less significant and less urgent and may occupy a secondary position, nevertheless, they are indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine, an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause. If we had no literature and art even in the broadest and most ordinary sense, we could not carry on the revolutionary movement and win victory. Failure to recognize this is wrong. Furthermore, when we say that literature and art are subordinate to politics, we mean class politics, the politics of the masses, not the politics of a few so-called statesmen.18

While art and culture had previously served the bourgeoisie, now Mao said both would serve the proletariat.

Since art and culture were stamped by class and politics, reactionary ideas needed to be struggled against. Like Trotsky, Mao does not believe the working class should reject art from previous epochs, stating

We should take over the rich legacy and the good traditions in literature and art that have been handed down from past ages in China and foreign countries, but the aim must still be to serve the masses of the people. Nor do we refuse to utilize the literary and artistic forms of the past, but in our hands these old forms, remoulded and infused with new content, also become something revolutionary in the service of the people.19

It was the task of revolutionary artists, cultural workers, and intellectuals to take the stand of the working class and the masses, not those of the elite. Art had to be produced for the masses and taken up by them as a weapon of struggle. In order for writers and artists to accomplish this, their primary task was to know the people (their daily lives, “common sense,” feelings, struggles, etc) and develop the cultural forms created by the people and tease out the elements of “good sense.” Art and culture must reflect the problems and aspirations of ordinary people and not the aspirations of the old ruling classes. Mao’s conception of culture was successfully able to mobilize millions to take the fight against the Japanese and the People’s Liberation.

There was a potential for abuse in Mao’s conception of culture, which can mean cultural control by the party – who could determine what was or was not revolutionary. In contrast, Trotsky granted a greater scope for culture outside of the control of the party (save for openly counterrevolutionary voices).

Mao’s theory behind the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was that a series of cultural revolutions were necessary to “continue the revolution” since bourgeois survivals remained in both the economy and the superstructure that conflicted with new political, cultural and ideological ideas. According to Mao, the superstructure did not automatically change in response to developments in the base, rather there was a lag as the old culture lingered. A conscious effort is needed through mass campaigns and action. If a conscious effort is made to change the superstructure, this would in turn spur development of the economic base as encapsulated in the slogan “grasp revolution, promote production.”

Since the People’s Republic was a transitional society, the birthmarks of capitalism continued to exist and were reproduced – such as the law of value, disparities in decision-making, inequality, access to resources, education, culture, and the persistence of patriarchy which encouraged a breach between the party and the masses. Mao feared that these tendencies would lead to the growth of capitalist restorationist elements within both the party and state.

The Cultural Revolution rejected the premise of developing the productive forces and recognized that the class struggle continued under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the continuing revolutionizing of the productive relations would increase the control of the masses in society, overcoming capitalist economic relations and the ideological and political relations which reproduce them, in order to continue on the socialist road.

The Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966 a call to the masses, inside and outside of the party, to overthrow the “capitalist roaders” in the party and state, and root out old ideas and culture:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.20

The Maoist vision of Cultural Revolution was voluntaristic and idealistic with an under-estimation of the weight of economic factors. While socialists need to reject economism, this doesn’t mean socialism can be built by political will regardless of unfavorable conditions. The ultimate criteria for determining the capitalist or socialist character of a society was whether or not it followed the correct political line (in this case, Mao Zedong Thought). This can lead to declaring that the class character of the party and socialism have little to do with the working class, but that socialism is solely determined solely by ideology and political line.

The Soviet Cultural Front

Although Trotsky was ousted from power, at beginning of the Five Year Plans, the USSR did embark on its own cultural revolution. The Soviet cultural revolution opened vast avenues of educational and cultural mobility for the working class throughout society. According to the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the purpose of the cultural revolution was “both asserting party control over cultural life and opening up the administrative and professional elite to a new cohort of young Communists and workers.”21 Although the Soviets had a long-standing policy of placing workers into administrative positions, this was done on an unprecedented scale during the cultural revolution. According to Fitzpatrick: “Of the 861,000 persons classified as ‘leading cadres and specialists’ in the Soviet Union at the end of 1933, over 140,000- more than one in six had been blue-collar workers only five years earlier. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. The total number of workers moving into white-collar jobs during the First Five-Year Plan was probably at least one and a half million.”22  Furthermore, the numbers of workers receiving higher education swelled: “About 150,000 workers and Communists entered higher education during the First Five-Year Plan, most of them studying engineering since technical expertise rather than Marxist social science was now regarded as the best qualification for leadership in an industrializing society.”23 These newly educated workers and administrators rejected the claims of bourgeois experts to leadership in production, leading them to view some elements in the party “as protectors of the bourgeois intelligentsia, over-reliant on the advice of non-party experts, complacent about the influence of experts and former Tsarist officials within the government bureaucracy, and prone to infection by ‘rotten liberalism’ and bourgeois values.”24 The Soviet cultural revolution (whatever its limitations) struggled against bourgeois values, intellectuals, culture, elitism and bureaucracy in all aspects of society. The cultural revolution fired the imaginations of young party members and workers who were encouraged to attack any manifestation of liberalism or capitalism, “but at the same time they were instinctively hostile to most existing authorities and institutions, which they suspected of bureaucratic and ‘objectively counter-revolutionary’ tendencies.”25 Many of the cultural revolution’s initiatives were spontaneous and outside of party control, but their ideas “were also taken seriously, receiving wide publicity and also, in many cases, substantial funding from various government agencies and other official bodies.”26

Despite the great advancements in education and upward mobility for the Soviet working class during the 1930s, the same period also saw the growth of the bureaucracy and a “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin. In the USSR, the traditions of Marxism mixed uneasily with those of Tsarism and Greek Orthodoxy. As time passed, the structure of the Communist Party and society more and more resembled the spirit of the Orthodox Church with its dogmas, orthodoxy, heresies, and inquisitions (most grossly on display during the Purge Trials). Furthermore, the social weight of the peasantry and backwardness took their revenge as beliefs in “primitive magic” found expression in the party and state. According to Deutscher, primitive magic was common amongst the peasantry and “expressed man’s helplessness amid the forces of nature which he had not yet learned to control; and that, on the whole, modern technology and organization are its deadliest enemies. On the technological level of the wooden plough primitive magic flourishes.”27 Initially, the Bolsheviks spoke a language of reason to the peasantry, but as the revolution’s emancipatory energies were exhausted, the party “lost the sense of its own elevation above its native environment, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”28 Nothing exemplifies the Soviet embrace of primitive magic more than the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, who was seen as the all-knowing and all-wise leader. In the later Stalin years, rampant chauvinism was fostered in the USSR “to convince the Soviet people that the Russians, and the Russians alone, had been the initiators of all the epoch-making ideas and of all the modern technical discoveries…[which] goes back to that remote epoch when the tribe cultivated a belief in its own mysterious powers which set it apart from and above all other tribes.”29

By the time of the Great Purges, the sheer weight of Russian backwardness and isolation took their toll as the cultural revolution and emancipatory initiatives were rolled back. In their place, the Soviets reasserted old moral and cultural values, a need for order, authority and social hierarchy, promotion of the traditional family and increasingly, Russian nationalism. The USSR shed its iconoclasm in the cultural sphere and promoted “Socialist Realism” which glorified the achievements of the Soviet state and society. According to the Marxist cultural critic Ernest Fischer, Socialist Realism was a “tendency to control the arts, to administer and manipulate them, to drive out the spirit of criticism and free imagination, and to transform artists into officials, into illustrators of resolutions.”30 Trotsky viewed Socialist Realism as a symptom of Thermidorian decline, disillusionment, and a move towards conservative uniformity:

The style of present-day official Soviet painting is called “socialist realism.” The name itself has evidently been invented by some high functionary in the department of the arts. This “realism” consists in the imitation of provincial daguerreotypes of the third quarter of the last century; the “socialist” character apparently consists in representing, in the manner of pretentious photography, events which never took place. It is impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with horror, or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the “great” and “brilliant” leaders, actually devoid of the least spark of genius or greatness. The art of the Stalinist period will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution.31

Conclusion

Trotsky’s vision of a cultural revolution, just like that of industrialization, was connected with questions of working-class emancipation and socialism. Economic development would increase the proletariat’s social weight in society. The proletariat would need to assert their own interests by controlling both the party and state (meaning both had to be democratized). To enable the working class to rule, the USSR had to build a modern society with education, social provisions, and raise the standard of living. Therefore, a cultural revolution was necessary to raise the spiritual and cultural level of the working class so they could consciously create socialism.