(1) The "cultural revolution" constitutes a momentous dividing line in the political evolution of the People's Republic of China. It marks the irreparable shattering of the nucleus of veteran Communists clustered around Mao, which led the Chinese Communist party in the civil war, founded the republic, and overturned capitalist rule, and which, since the victory over Chiang Kai-shek, has run the economy, governed the country, and directed the state and party apparatus. The "cultural revolution" tore this nucleus into contending fragments that cannot be put together.
Initiated in September 1965 by the Maoist faction in the Chinese Communist party leadership, it reached its major objective with the expulsion of Liu Shao-chi from the party at the October 13-31, 1968 "enlarged" twelfth plenum of the Central Committee. Liu, the chief of state, Mao's first lieutenant and main interpreter for several decades, his designated heir until the factional struggle broke into the open, was singled out as the central target of attack under such epithets as "the Khrushchev of China," the "first person in a position of authority who has taken the capitalist road," and, finally, as the "enlarged" twelfth plenum put it, "the renegade, traitor and scab Liu Shao-
Mao has defined the internal struggle which has convulsed China as "in essence a great political revolution under the conditions of socialism made by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes; it is a continuation of the prolonged struggle waged by the Chinese Communist party and the masses of revolutionary people under its leadership against the Kuomintang reactionaries, a continuation of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie." (Peking Review, No. 43, Oct. 25, 1968.)
This official version bears little resemblance to the truth. The "cultural revolution" is not a "political revolution" for the promotion of workers democracy; it was not made "under the conditions of socialism"; it was not undertaken by the proletariat as the continuation of its struggle against the bourgeoisie. The suggestion that the opposition, which was denied the most elementary rights of proletarian democracy, represented the "Kuomintang reactionaries" is a slander.
The "cultural revolution" represented a phase of sharp public conflict in an intrabureaucratic struggle between divergent tendencies in the topmost circles of the Chinese Communist party leadership which eventually affected every sector of Chinese society. It constituted the greatest single crisis experienced by the bureaucratic regime since its establishment and expressed an important weakening of that bureaucratic regime, both as the result of its inner contradictions and of a widespread mobilization of the masses.
(2) The sharpness of the intrabureaucratic struggle in China, and the large-scale intervention of the masses in that struggle, can only be understood against the background of objective contradictions and problems which had accumulated since the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, a growing trend of conflicts in Chinese society and a growing discontent among the Chinese masses.
The Chinese People's Republic has registered major accomplishments and made remarkable advances in many fields since the military victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, especially when measured against the relative stagnation of such colonial countries as India, Indonesia and Brazil where capitalism has not been overthrown. However, the colossal problems of economic, social, political and cultural development confronting so backward a country as China, with its huge population, were far from having been solved, and the authoritarian methods practiced by the Maoist leadership have in addition seriously hampered the working out of such solutions.
The main contradictions which the People's Republic of China had to face during the last decade were the following ones:
(a). The contradiction between the rate of growth of the economy, which was still too low, and the rate of growth of the population, which threatened to bring to a near standstill the annual per capita rate of growth of real consumption.
(b) The contradiction between the objective necessity to socialize the surplus product of agriculture, for purposes of accelerated economic and industrial development, and the political need to achieve this socialization with the approval of the majority of the peasantry.
(c) The contradiction between the objective necessity to interest materially the bulk of the poor and middle peasantry in increasing agricultural production, and the inevitable tendency to increased inequality and private accumulation which results from these "material incentives."
(d) The contradiction between the general low level of consumption of the mass of the people and the increasing bureaucratic privileges appropriated by the ruling strata in the fifties, and even the early sixties, under conditions of great hardship for the mass of the population.
(e) The contradiction between the objective needs of an accelerated industrialization and the obstacle to this same industrialization suddenly created by the abrupt and brutal decision of the Kremlin, decreeing an eco. nomic blockade of China.
(f) The contradiction between the rapid expansion of literacy and the increase in general level of education of the Chinese youth on the one hand, and the still relatively low number of skilled jobs available in China.
All these contradictions were intensified by the damage done to Chinese agriculture and economy during the second phase of the Great Leap Forward and the near-famine period at the beginning of the sixties. They created an explosive situation in the country, in which a process of political differentiation and increased political activity of the masses became possible. In this situation, conditions for a genuine political revolution against 'he ruling bureaucracy matured. The "cultural revolution" constitutes objectively an attempt by the Mao faction to divert the social forces pushing in that direction from an overthrow of the bureaucracy into a reform of the bureaucracy.
(3) Some of the exploding social contradictions accumulated in China during the last decade would have manifested themselves, whatever the domestic and international conditions faced by the country or the nature of the leadership. Others were greatly sharpened by the autocratic and paternalistic nature of that leadership. All were heavily increased by the sudden isolation into which the People's Republic of China was precipitated in the late fifties by the Kremlin's abrupt suppression of all economic and military assistance to China.
This criminal act by the Soviet bureaucracy, extending to the state level the factional struggle between that bureaucracy and the Chinese CP inside the world Communist movement, was a stab in the back of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese people, at the very moment when they were confronted with near-famine at home and increased aggressive pressure from U.S. imperialism abroad. The historic responsibility for breaking up the Sino-Soviet alliance, and the advantages which imperialism could draw from this breakup, lie at the door of the Kremlin.
The leadership of the Chinese CP, educated in the Stalinist school, has always accepted the theory of "building socialism in one country." However, in the fifties, the importance of the help which the other workers states could give to the economic growth and the military defense of the People's Republic of China made the dangerous implications of that theory inside China less important than in the USSR in the late twenties and the thirties (its international implications detrimental to world revolution continued to manifest themselves even then). The reversion of the Maoist leadership to a policy of "self-reliance" and large-scale economic autarchy and self-sufficiency is only a rationalization of the consequences of the Kremlin's blockade and the tremendous burden imposed on China by the need to develop its own nuclear weapons, given the refusal of the Soviet bureaucracy to assist it in this field.
The more radical line pursued by the Chinese leadership towards world revolutionary developments since the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict which, on several important questions, brought it nearer to the positions of revolutionary Marxism (an analysis confirmed in 1968 by Peking's attitude, in contrast to the Kremlin's towards the May revolution in France, the prerevolutionary struggles in India, the Mexican students' struggles and the rising political revolution in the CSSR leading to the Warsaw Pact countries' occupation of Czechoslovakia), reflects both the specific relationship of imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy towards the People's Republic of China, and the objective impact of the rising tide of world revolution on the Chinese masses.
It is however also true that the bureaucratic character of the Mao faction has added to the international isolation of the People's Republic of China and increased the contradictions and political conflicts inside the CP of China.
Although Peking maintained its resolution to defend the USSR against imperialism and the Kremlin failed to reiterate similar assurances to the People's Republic of China, Mao himself is also responsible for the absence of a consistent policy favoring an anti-imperialist united front in Vietnam, thereby harming the defense of the Vietnamese revolution and the political influence of the CP of China in the world Communist movement.
In place of conducting a policy stimulating a consistent development of the world revolution, which could have brought new socialist allies into being and carried the struggle for socialism into the main strongholds of the capitalist system, the policy led the Maoist tendencies in Pakistan several times to oppose the mass movements that developed there.
This helped prepare for the catastrophe in Indonesia, the worst defeat suffered by the world revolution since Stalin permitted Hitler to come to power without a struggle. The development of the cult of Mao, the glorification of Stalin, and opposition to de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union crippled the defense of the Chinese revolution in other lands, reduced Peking's prestige and influence, and gravely injured the cause of socialism internationally.
The extension of the Sino-Soviet conflict from the level of parties and ideology to that of states culminated in the bloody incidents on the Ussuri which went far beyond anything previous. It must be remembered in connection with this that the main responsibility for the rupture between China and the USSR falls on the Soviet bureaucracy, which, moreover, has not hesitated to seek diplomatic solidarity from the capitalist governments. But the Chinese riposte over the border difference was likewise determined by bureaucratic interests and prestige considerations and was inspired in the final analysis by the concept of "socialism in one country." Thus considerable injury was dealt the cause of socialism by both the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies.
It can even not be excluded, moreover, that a change of line of U.S. imperialism towards China would lead to a significant modification of revolutionary militancy advised by the Chinese leadership to its followers abroad—a normalization of relations at state level with the USA in itself of course cannot be criticized.
The setbacks in foreign affairs heightened the stresses and strains created by the sharpened tensions within Chinese society between the different layers of the peasantry as well as between the peasantry and the state, and between the working class, the student youth, the intellectuals and the bureaucracy in the urban centers. These multiple pressures generated deep differences on domestic and foreign policy in the leadership of the party, government and armed forces. The correctness of Mao's past decisions and his omniscience came under increasing questioning.
(4) Because of the fragmentary, contradictory and unconfirmed nature of the information available, it is difficult and hazardous to attempt a precise delineation of the evolution and content of the disagreements inside the leadership of the CP of China. The available evidence indicates that a number of oppositional tendencies were involved. The Maoist machine has not permitted their spokesmen—or they have not dared or cared-to state their positions or platforms publicly, frankly or fully.
The voluminous Maoist polemics, filled with self-contradictions, present obviously falsified accounts and distorted interpretations of the opinions of their opponents and critics. It is, for example, absurd to think that the head of state Liu Shao-chi, the mayor of Peking, Peng Chen, and other Political Bureau members such as Teng Hsiao-ping and Tao Chu (the leading Chinese Communists most publicly identified with the Sino-Soviet clashes), the deposed military leaders, the better-known disgraced Communist intellectuals, and other alleged "renegades, enemy agents or counterrevolutionary revisionists" conspired or aspired to bring back capitalism on behalf of "the imperialists and the Kuomintang reaction-
Even though the roots, history and specific character of the differences remain obscure and unverified, the consequences of the conflicts they precipitated are clear. The central leading team has been broken up. A period of uncertainty as to the eventual composition and orientation of China's leadership has now opened. Great new forces have been set in motion.
The high officials around Liu apparently sought to close ranks against Mao following the disastrous results of the Great Leap Forward. Liu and his close associates took fright at the appalling consequences of this adventure, counseled retreat, and succeeded in switching over to a more prudent economic course. During this readjustment, the Liu grouping took control of the party apparatus and pushed Mao to one side. Their aim, evidently, was to take him away from the helm and reduce his status to that of a figurehead while utilizing his prestige to lend maximum authority to their decisions and course of action. Thus they assiduously protected his public reputation for infallibility, which later facilitated a comeback for Mao.
By 1965 Mao felt that he was in position to break Liu's hold upon the regime and regain his lost supremacy. By exploiting his immense prestige, by maneuvering between the diverse tendencies and cutting them down one after another, by slandering Liu and his men through a relentless propaganda campaign, Mao succeeded in isolating them and eroding their bases of support among the masses. in the party, the army and the provinces and completing their downfall. The objective basis of this success lies in Mao's capacity to mobilize larger masses, especially of the youth, and to exploit the hatred which had been accumulated in the people against the bureaucracy as a whole. The Liu faction was paralyzed by sticking to the bureaucratic rules and by its inability to question the Mao myth, which it had itself largely contributed to create.
(5) The factional warfare which burst forth in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy passed beyond the confines of the ruling circles in the middle of 1966 after the showdown in the eleventh Central Committee plenum of early August which adopted the 16-point decision on the "cultural revolution." In their maneuvers, they sought support among layers extending far outside the party. A social upheaval was touched off. This unfolded in successive waves, starting with the mustering of the student youth organized from above in the Red Guards, spreading to the industrial workers in the big cities during December 1966-January 1967, stirring up parts of the peasantry, and also involving certain sectors of the armed forces.
These interlinked commotions drastically upset the equilibrium of the bureaucratic regime. Despite the present victory of Mao's faction, the turbulent events have weakened its position and power. The regime will not be able to regain the prestige and stability enjoyed before Mao launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." The internecine struggles and the accompanying Maoist propaganda have served to generate new revolutionary energies within the youth and the vanguard elements among the working masses which will not be easily or quickly subdued.
The real situation in China is quite different from the simplistic interpretations offered by various circles. Mao's supporters, and those who take his propaganda at face value, claim that he is promoting an antibureaucratic political revolution against agents of the class enemy, a revolution which aims at and is effectively realizing a wider democracy for the popular masses.
This flies in the face of obvious facts. The authoritarian manner in which the "cultural revolution" was launched, conducted, guided and concluded; the suppression of dissenters, coupled with the conscienceless deformation of the views of the anti-Mao tendencies; the outrageous cult of Mao; the absence of elections and democratic institutions controlled by the workers and peasants; the increased authority of the army under Lin Piao-all testify to the bureaucratic characteristics and direction of the political course taken by the Maoist faction, which has dwindled down to a small core of the old leadership.
Likewise in error are those who view Mao's present position as nothing but a replica of Stalin's tyrannical personal dictatorship. While the bureaucratic ruling castes of the USSR and China have much in common, there are profound differences between the historical situation which enabled Stalin to consolidate his power and the international and domestic context in which Mao advanced the slogan of "seizure of power" by the Red Guards. In China today, the mobilizations of the masses under the impetus of the upheaval, limited as they have been, have altered the relationship of forces between the bureaucracy and the people to the advantage of the latter. The move ment of the masses weakened the bureaucratic regime. This outcome differs from Stalin's rise during the late twenties and early thirties when the masses were crushed and beheaded and fell into a state of unrelieved political passivity which did not appreciably change until after Stalin's death.
The triumph of Mao's faction has by no means eradicated the power of the diversified opposition. Resisters of all sorts remain deeply entrenched in the party, the unions, the army, the universities, the regional committees, the provincial governments, the state apparatus, and in the countryside.
As against this, however, the army, under Lin Piao, Mao's new heir apparent and chief lieutenant, has gained greatly in political weight. By virtue of its interventions in the conflicts between the contending bureaucratic factions and between the masses in motion and the regime, the army—at the expense of the leading role of the party has become the mainstay of Mao's rulership, the chief arbiter and principal centralizing force in the country.
This is one of the most dangerous consequences of the "cultural revolution." However, Mao tends to reduce again this great weight gained by the army during the previous period, by putting the emphasis on the reconstruction of the party as the mainstay of the regime and the necessity of a single central leadership for all power apparatuses.
(6) The "cultural revolution" was prepared and launched by Mao and his liegemen to eliminate the most resolute and persistent critics of his domestic and foreign policy, to give a free hand to his pared-down faction in the top leadership, and, by way of concession to the masses, to curb the worst abuses of the bureaucratic overlords he had himself trained, encouraged and shielded. Having been placed in a minority in the Political Bureau, Mao took the risk of bypassing the official cadres of the party and state apparatus where his opponents were entrenched, going over their heads, and mobilizing the students of the universities and high schools as the instrument to reestablish his control over the country.
Throughout its course, the Red Guard movement was highly contradictory.
The fact. that the Red Guard movement was initiated from above and not by the youth themselves, that in general it did not have to confront either the police or the armed forces, greatly facilitated the efforts of other sectors of the bureaucracy to counter Mao's factional action by setting up Red Guard groups under their own auspices. Since all the groups were formed under the guise of carrying out Mao's directives and Mao's "thought," it was difficult for broader masses to understand their political differences. Nevertheless many of the groups became differentiated sufficiently in their interpretations of Mao's doctrines to come into conflicts that were at times very sharp.
Where civil strife ended in violent confrontations, whether through differences among the Red Guards or more generally through the incapacity of Mao's partisans to actually "seize power" where opposing forces were strongly entrenched, the army moved in. Thus behind the Red Guard movement stood the army as the final authority, sometimes manipulating the bands of youth, at other times, restraining them or even reversing what they had done.
It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to view the Red Guard movement as merely a pliant instrument of factional politics in the domestic strife that featured the "cultural revolution." The Chinese student youth had many grievances comparable to those of youth in other lands today. These included social discrimination in the selection of the student body, inadequate living quarters, lack of campus autonomy, and scant opportunities after graduation. They resented haughty and uncontrolled bureaucratic authority; they wanted greater democracy; they wanted a political revolution to open the road to socialist democracy; they identified their fate with that of the world revolution.
This explains why Mao had such difficulty retaining control of the Red Guard movement and curbing it once it had served the main purposes he envisioned. The Red Guard movement acquired a logic of its own.
Roaming the countryside on their own, engaging in actions of a violent nature against echelons of the bureaucracy, millions of youth gained in self-confidence and boldness. The most unmanageable of these elements passed beyond the specific objectives set for them by their bureaucratic patrons and even collided with them. Their tendency to move in the direction of critical thought and independent political action was observable in many of the wall posters and mimeographed or printed publications put out by the Red Guards and in some of the "seizures of power" in which they engaged. The movement became so dangerous to Mao's objectives that he finally found it advisable to demobilize the Red Guards and send them back to the classrooms or the countryside for labor.
However, ferment persists among them. The most advanced and revolutionary-minded members of this new generation, who received their political baptism in the "cultural revolution," may later detonate further mass actions against the Chinese bureaucracy as a whole, including the Maoist victors.
Nevertheless, of much greater significance than the Red Guard demonstrations were the mobilizations of the proletarian masses from December 1966 through February 1967. Taking advantage of the splits among the contending factions on top and spurred into action by one or another of them, sectors of the work force began to put forward their own economic and social demands and move along independent lines. This action flared into general strikes in transportation and many plants in Shanghai, Nanking, and other industrial centers.
The movement from below, which in its further development would have threatened the control of the Maoist leadership, was stopped short by combined methods of manipulation and repression. The brevity of the massive strikes does not diminish their historic import. They signaled the end of political apathy among the industrial workers and the resumption of their autonomous action.
(7) The two principal groupings vying for supremacy in the party, state apparatus and the army centered around Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi. On the fringes of these two groupings stand oppositional tendencies of rightist or leftist coloration.
Neither of the chief factions contending for supremacy within the Chinese Communist bureaucracy is actually striving for socialist democracy or has a program of genuine revolutionary policies at home and abroad. By Marxist standards, neither of the chief factions deserves political support against its rival. From the available information—and it is admittedly scanty and inadequate—neither faction can be judged to be more progressive than the other.
As long as Liu's group retained supremacy it practiced the abominable customs of bureaucratic command learned in the school of Stalinism. Its doctrines and practices were indistinguishable from those of the previous period when Mao was in direct control. The pent-up hatred among the youth, the workers and peasants enabled Mao to arouse these forces against the bureaucratic majority without much trouble.
While the Mao faction has issued calls for rebellion and appeals to the initiative of the masses, its deeds do not harmonize with its words. Mao's objective was to regain supremacy for his faction and line in the bureaucracy, not overthrow the bureaucracy. This explains why he followed the Stalinist methods of slander, physical violence and the fostering of cultism in his struggle and strictly limited his appeals to the masses. Whenever and wherever any segment of the people, whether among the youth, the proletariat, the peasantry or the intellectuals, has showed signs of slipping away from domination and direction by Mao to act on its own account, it has been restrained and called to order, sometimes by repressive measures.
The promise held out in section 9 of the original 16-point program in the official declaration of the "cultural revolution," adopted by the August 1966 Central Committee plenum, of "a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune," which would usher in an extensive democracy, sounds like a mockery today. Not only have no such elections been held but the very idea is now scoffed at. ("Blind faith in elections is also a form of conservative thinking.")
Instead of instituting an expanded workers democracy on the model of the Paris Commune, Mao has reorganized the bureaucratic regime under the auspices of "the triple alliance," regulated by the army and presided over by that part of the cadres loyal to his faction. The "revolutionary committees" set up during the "cultural revolution" have not been elected by the working masses themselves and kept under their surveillance by measures of democratic control but have been constituted by compromise between contending factions under the supervision of the Mao-Lin Piao hard core.
There have been reports of elements on the left flanks of the contending top factions, both among Mao's followers and among the workers and intellectuals sympathetic to Liu and other disgraced leaders, who have revolutionary ideas and inclinations and who could form the nuclei of a genuinely antibureaucratic opposition. These revolutionists deserve international support. However, under current conditions, it is extremely difficult for such dispersed left Communists to come together, to communicate with one another, to work out a common program, select leaders, and undertake a consistent line of organized activity.
(8) The Maoists accuse their adversaries of "revisionism." But the very arguments they invoke to justify their current course show that they are as guilty as their opponents of blatantly revising a number of the basic tenets of Marxism.
(a) In countries that have overthrown the bourgeoisie and abolished private ownership of the means of production, they assert that capitalism can be restored by gradual and peaceful processes through machinations and false policies of one or another tendency in the leadership of the Communist parties. This discards or disregards the Marxist theory of the state which asserts that such fundamental changes cannot be accomplished either gradually or peacefully.
(b) They identify the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution with capitalist restoration. In explaining this phenomenon, the Maoists lapse, moreover, into an extreme voluntarism, enormously exaggerating the social weight of ideology. Mao locates the chief cause of the danger of bureaucratic degeneration and capitalist restoration, not in the material foundations of the socio-economic order, but in the realm of ideology. He proclaims that if revisionism is not rooted out on the theoretical, scientific, artistic and literary levels, it will inevitably lead to the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marxists have never believed that the ideas of those reactionary classes which have lost economic and political power as the result of a social revolution are capable of gradually changing the class nature and structure of the state. A colossal counterrevolution of this kind could occur only through a civil war between the former possessing classes and the toiling masses in which the masses were crushed; or through the hypothetical generation of a new bourgeoisie which became strong enough economically to launch a civil war and topple the workers state. This has not happened, and it is far from happening, not only in China but in other workers states whose leaderships are at odds with Peking, whatever the incipient tendencies may be in these countries in the direction of capitalism.
(c) No less voluntaristic is the Maoist belief that incessant appeals to the spirit of sacrifice, the idealism and enthusiasm of the toiling masses can in and of themselves suffice to surmount the immensely difficult problems arising from the inadequate development of the productive forces in China during the transition from capitalism to socialism.
(d) In defiance of the historical lessons drawn by Lenin in State and Revolution, the Maoists proclaim that in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism the class struggle is bound to intensify and not diminish, and can even go on for hundreds of years. This "theory" serves to justify intensifications of the role of the state as a repressive instrument. The state, instead of withering away under socialism as Engels forecast, will endure for an indefinite period, if Mao is correct. Thus a "theoretical" excuse is provided for the worst bureaucratic excesses and abuses of power.
(e) The strategy of world revolution expounded by Mao and Lin Piao extols the insurrectionary movements of the peasantry in the backward colonial areas and systematically underrates or dismisses the key role which the industrial working class in the advanced countries must play in overthrowing the power of imperialism and helping to create the new socialist society.
(f) In the field of culture properly speaking, the Chinese leadership has advanced anti-Marxist positions of a Zhdanov type, defending the notion of "proletarian culture" and bureaucratically submitting literature, art, and science to the "party line."
(9) The "cultural revolution" has given widespread currency to the idea that a workers state can become subjected to deformation and degeneration after the conquest of power, an idea that was previously propagated only by the world Trotskyist movement. Coming after the antibureaucratic campaigns in Yugoslavia and Cuba, the Maoist propaganda on this point, distorted though it is, has focused attention upon one of the most crucial problems confronting a victorious socialist revolution: how to protect and promote workers democracy.
The need for a political revolution where state power has been usurped by a bureaucracy and all avenues of democratic control have been closed to the masses has been made clearer and more understandable to broad sections of the international Communist movement and the revolutionary vanguard. This lesson has been reinforced by the abrupt and brutal halting of the drive toward democratization in Czechoslovakia in 1968 by the Soviet occupation.
If the "cultural revolution" has helped popularize and win acceptance of the notion of political revolution in the bureaucratized workers states, its course and outcome under the tutelage of Mao Tse-tung demonstrates that the methods pursued by his faction lead to the opposite result. It is impossible to eradicate bureaucracy by bureaucratic means. The "cultural revolution" has ended in an attempt to stop the mass movement and to restore a new form of bureaucratic rule, under the guise of the "triple alliance," instead of the rule of the old party and state bureaucracy which had, in its majority, supported Liu. This "triple alliance" is in reality a compromise between the Maoist faction and parts of the old majority faction, a compromise initiated when the masses started to intervene autonomously into the struggle and thereby threatened the whole bureaucratic rule.
There is no other road for effective struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution and the authoritarian regimes it spawns than the program outlined by Lenin and Trotsky; that is, the consolidation and institutionalization of workers power on the basis of democratically elected councils, the widest proletarian democracy, the right of various socialist tendencies and parties to exist legally within that constitutional framework, the limitation and progressive abolition of inequality in remuneration, the management of the economy by the workers themselves, the planned development of the productive forces, and the international extension of the revolution, above all, to the centers of imperialism.
(10) The position of the Fourth International on the Chinese revolution, which has been set forth in numerous documents and declarations in recent years, can be summarized as follows:
The Fourth International has been a firm supporter of the socialist revolution in China from its beginning. Its partisans within China and throughout the world stand for the unconditional defense of the People's Republic of China against military attack by U.S. imperialism or any of its vassal states.
The Fourth International holds the Kremlin leadership primarily responsible for the Sino-Soviet split, condemns its vengeful withdrawal of economic aid from China, and its continued diplomatic deals with Washington, Paris, New Delhi and other bourgeois governments against the People's Republic of China.
At the same time, the Fourth International criticizes the ultrasectarian attitude and bitter-end factionalism exhibited by Peking in its relations with other workers states that do not fully endorse its policies. Especially harmful has been its stubborn refusal to propose or participate in joint action with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other Communist countries against U.S. intervention in Vietnam because of political disagreements with them, although some practical agreements on military assistance to Vietnam were finally concluded.
While not forgetting that the Chinese leadership is led by the defense of its own interests to inspire among its partisans in the world a more militant line than Moscow's, the Fourth International criticizes the bureaucratic centrist nature of the policy. In seeking to gain influence in the colonial and ex-colonial countries, Peking uses a strongly anti-imperialist language and actually grants material aid to the guerrilla forces in several countries.
This has not only created an image far to the left of Moscow but also objectively favored anti-imperialist struggles in various parts of the world, especially Southeast Asia, the Arab countries and Africa. Likewise, the sharp campaign which Peking unleashed against the right-wing opportunist line of the Communist parties following Moscow's lead, and against some key features of the bureaucratic rule in Eastern Europe, has objectively contributed to deepening the world crisis of Stalinism and to facilitating the upsurge of a new youth vanguard the world over. Inside that youth vanguard the general sympathy for China and Maoist criticism of the Kremlin's revisionism remains deep, even if extreme organizational sectarianism and political infantilism have prevented the orthodox Maoists from stabilizing important youth organizations anywhere.
On the other hand, Peking's basic policy has continued to imply support to whatever bourgeois government in a semicolonial country happens to diplomatically collaborate with China (yesterday Indonesia, today Pakistan and Tanzania), which leads to disastrous results for the revolutionary class struggle in these countries.
The conduct of the Chinese Communist party leadership since it came to power proves that it has not shaken off its Stalinist heritage. These bureaucrats do not hesitate to subordinate the welfare of the Chinese masses and the interests of the international revolution and socialism to the protection and promotion of their own power and privileges.
Analogous features mark the policies and behavior of the Maoist groups that have appeared in numerous countries since the Sino-Soviet split. They mix adventurism with opportunism. They have shown themselves incapable of critical or independent thought along Marxist lines. As a result, most of them display little internal cohesion and tend generally to splinter into warring fragments.
The experience of the "cultural revolution" offers fresh evidence that also in China, the bureaucracy cannot be removed by reforms. It will have to be removed from power by the new vanguard of genuine revolutionaries now in the process of formation in China who will come to the head of the aroused and organized masses in the subsequent development of an authentic antibureaucratic revolution. Such a resurgent independent movement will break the grip of the bureaucracy over China's economic, political and cultural life and really expand and consolidate the workers democracy which the "cultural revolution" promised in its propaganda but lamentably failed to deliver.