Joan Robinson And The Cultural Revolution

"Behind this lurks a more solid point: how can China stand alone in the face of the hideous threat of American aggression?"

Joan Robinson, one of the world’s finest economists (and JM Keynes’ collaborator), visited China frequently, where her interest evolved from curiosity about socialist alternatives in developing economies to deep admiration for Mao’s China as a unique alternative to Soviet ‘revisionism’. She, by contrast, saw China as testing genuine socialist relations, critiquing bureaucracy, and promoting mass participation and, given her prominence, her views made her controversial in the West. Criticized as a ‘fellow traveler’, she was invited to address the world’s leading economics conference, and spent an hour tearing strips off the entire profession for abandoning the moral core of economics.

INTRODUCTION

It is difficult even to begin to understand the significance of the Cultural Revolution through the medium of translations from the Chinese, for not only the phraseology but the concepts in which it is expressed are strange to us. What is the meaning of a Party person in authority taking the capitalist road? How can class war persist when there are no owners of private property to exploit the workers? How can the leader of an established government proclaim that rebellion is justified? What are a Great Alliance and a Triple Combination? How does the thought of Mao Tse-tung make crops grow on a stony hill?

A New Revolution

The key to the conception of the Cultural Revolution, as its own spokesmen see it, lies in the Marxist analysis of society, refined and developed by Mao Tse-tung on the basis of his long experience of Communism in China.Marxist analysis distinguishes between the base of a social system and the superstructure. The base is a system’s economic foundation. The base of capitalism is personal property in the means of production, which yields rentier income and gives private enterprise control over economic development. Similarly, the base of socialism is State ownership and control of industry.

A superstructure is the pattern of institutions, organizations, chains of authority, traditions, and habits of thought of rank, status in society. Inequality in consumption, the love of status and power, untrammelled individualism and a social hierarchy based on wealth, belong to the bourgeois superstructure; the superstructure of proletarian socialism requires acquisitiveness to be replaced by a spirit of service.

Accepting the dichotomy between the base of a social system and the superstructure, Mao Tse-tung shows how the superstructure may react upon the base: Ideas may become a material force. Contrariwise, when the base is changed, the superstructure will not automatically transform itself accordingly. Old-fashioned Marxists might regard this as a heresy, but that is scarcely reasonable. The meaning of a proposition depends on what it denies. Marx, combating the liberal idealism with which he was surrounded, denied that independent thought, drawn from the blue air, can control events. Once the view that ideas arise out of material circumstances has been accepted, there is no sense in denying that causation runs both ways. If Marx had believed that ideas can have no effect on events, why should he have taken the trouble to write a book?

According to the Chinese view, Russian experience shows that a capitalist-type superstructure can grow up on a socialist base. When there are no capitalists to run industry and direct investment, the State develops organs to take over these functions, and the individuals put into control of them may suffer deformations of character, sometimes even more unpleasant, from the point of view of socialist ideals, than those of the old bourgeoisie.Sometimes a third party might feel that the embittered attacks which Chinese spokesmen make on Soviet ‘revisionism’ are exaggerated and unfair. But they are clearly right in opposing Stalin’s contention that abolishing private property in the means of production automatically creates a classless society. Soviet experience shows that power, privilege, and access to education can form a new social hierarchy based on the State apparatus, even when there are no private owners of the means of production.

The Struggle

The Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road, whom we may call the Rightists for short, were accused of being the main objects of attack. Bourgeois intellectuals, except for those ‘scholar despots’ who were carrying out reactionary educational policies, are treated tolerantly in the Sixteen Points, and special mention is made of the need to protect scientists and technicians who, though bourgeois, have contributed to national development.

Class is not defined by birth. An old mandarin or an ex-landlord may be an honorary proletarian; some of the most vicious of the organization men were once-poor peasants corrupted by power. Class is defined by a state of mind, and the state of mind is revealed in conduct. When the record of a cadre is being examined, former status as a poor peasant will count in his favour, and a former bourgeois style of life is prima facie suspicious, but in neither case decisive. He must prove a proletarian attitude today, not proletarian origin in the past, to be liberated from mistakes and rejoined to the movement.Still less is class hereditary. Some ex-landlords have been found to harbour dreams of restoration and to pass on to their sons title-deeds and records of the lands they once owned to show them what their inheritance ought to have been, but this is not allowed to tar all landlords’ children. When I asked a young functionary for examples of the kind of mistakes cadres made, he took his own case: ‘As I am a poor peasant’s son, I thought I had no need to make revolution. I thought I was a superior person, and I protested against landlords’ children being allowed to join the Red Guards. Now I realize that that was wrong. We should draw a sharp line between family and individual.’

Some of the bad characters who infiltrated the Red Guards and made mischief turned out to come from highly placed Party families – a well-known phenomenon in the Soviet Union. The onus of proof is on everyone to show by his conduct that he is a true proletarian, attitude of mind and behaviour.were landlords or reactionaries in the past. In the arts, the dominance of politics produces a dreary philistinism and in literature a stupid black and white morality, smothering all the subtlety and grace of Chinese traditions. Behind this lurks a more solid point. How can China stand alone in the face of the hideous threat of American aggression? Mere prudence dictates some ideological concessions to the Soviets (which, indeed, the Rightists would welcome for their own sake) to regain the support of a powerful ally. Arguments such as these may touch a responding chord in any Western breasts, but in China today all questions are deduced to one: is this the road back to capitalism or on to socialism?(Note: The text appears to be from a Western Marxist analysis of the Cultural Revolution, possibly Joan Robinson’s “The Cultural Revolution in China”.

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