William Haryanto's List: China and Soviet Russia Relations

• Allow me first of all to remind you how severely the classics of Marxism-Leninism denounced every manifestation of the cult of the individual.
• Sometime later Engels wrote: "Both Marx and I have always been against any public manifestation with regard to individuals, with the exception of cases when it had an important purpose. We most strongly opposed such manifestations which during our lifetime concerned us personally."
• Lenin's traits - patient work with people, stubborn and painstaking education of them, the ability to induce people to follow him without using compulsion, but rather through the ideological influence on them of the whole collective - were entirely foreign to Stalin. He discarded the Leninist method of convincing and educating, he abandoned the method of ideological struggle for that of administrative violence, mass repressions and terror. He acted on an increasingly larger scale and more stubbornly through punitive organs, at the same time often violating all existing norms of morality and of Soviet laws.
• t is clear that here Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power. Instead of proving his political correctness and mobilising the masses, he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet Government.

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• The theory of 'socialism in one country' is not just a 'theory' - it is the theoretical expression of the interests of the bureaucracy of a workers' state. Thus, the theory, originated (for all intents and purposes) by Stalin, contained an unintended internal contradiction. 

   This contradiction manifested itself in the development of relations between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties. At first, the significance of 'socialism in one country' for Communist Parties outside of the USSR was that they were obliged to subordinate their own interests to those of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, in order to defend and build socialism in the USSR. Thus, for Communist Parties outside the USSR, 'socialism in one country' was an expression of internationalism - the subordination of the interests of a national section of the working class to the needs of the working class internationally. 

  • Possible thesis made from this?
• The issue is not supposed national differences between the two leading parties, but the different historical development of the revolution in Russia and China, and its conjuncture with the development of the workers' bureaucracy in the different countries.
• • Interesting to note

• The main geo-political and historical differences between the Chinese and Russian Revolutions at this time, reflected through the standpoints of their bureaucratic leaderships were: 

   
  1. the different level of development of the productive forces - China was more backward. In 1956-1960, the USSR was at a stage in the development of the productive forces at which national resources were no longer able to develop the economy in isolation from the world economy, and the capacity of bureaucratic command to develop the economy was becoming exhausted, while China was at an earlier stage in the construction of a planned economy; 
• the dominant role of the peasantry in the Chinese revolution, as opposed to the Russian Revolution. The working class was the leading force in both cases, but the Russian Revolution was made in the cities, and was taken out to the countryside; the Chinese Revolution was made in the countryside, and rolled in from the countryside to the cities;
• the different perspective in relation to imperialism - the USSR now felt less threatened, both internally and externally, but wanted trade with the West, while the Chinese rightly felt immediately threatened by imperialism.
• Despite these differences in the development of the Russian and Chinese revolution, the leadership of the Chinese Revolution was an integral and generic part of the Communist International created by the Russian Revolution, and corrupted by the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
• The Soviet Union provided some technical assistance to China in its industrialisation program, but this aid was grudging and insufficient. Unlike the European countries occupied by the Soviet Red Army, the Chinese were very much masters of their own destiny.
• • Is that the reason why Communist China still exist?
• The USSR had definite economic, political and military interests in aiding the Chinese, the more so while the Cold War kept them isolated from the world market.

• By the mid-1950s, the situation in China had somewhat stabilised, and the immediate threat from the imperialist wars in Korea and Vietnam had receded. The Chinese capitalists had been expropriated in 1952-3, and the Trotskyists (and their families) all rounded up and imprisoned at the same time. The remaining Kuomintang on the mainland had been eliminated. 

   In 1953, the Communist Party and government officials were all graded on a twenty-six level hierarchy, with information, privileges and salaries (in a ratio of 20:1) precisely graduated from top to bottom. For the first time in history, China seemed to have a strong and stable national government. 
• However, Mao Zedong was extremely alarmed by the turn taken by Khrushchev. He perceived that the Soviet economy was being allowed to fall behind, uprisings had taken place in Europe, and Khrushchev was seeking peace with imperialism. These policies meant for Mao that China had to be prepared to go it alone, and that the time was ripe for a 'Great Leap Forward'.
• • Kruschev's involvement with the west was a cause of the Great Leap Forward? OMG?!?!
• “Great Leap Forward” policy borrowed elements from the history of the USSR in a uniquely Chinese combination. Forced collectivisation from Stalin’s “third period”; ultra-centralisation expressed through an exaggerated cult of the leader; Stakhanovism from the early 30s and workers' brigades from the “military communism” period; and the uniquely Chinese policy of establishing communes as relatively self-sufficient economic units, incorporating light industry and construction projects.
• The plan failed disastrously. Fundamentally because it was misconceived, based as it was upon bureaucratic command and the utopian perspective of building Socialism in isolation in a backward country and having no regard for a planned development of all sectors of the economy. The entire population was mobilised to produce one commodity, symbolic of industrialisation - steel.
• stocks were soon exhausted, and by the time food ran out, it was too late to rescue the harvest. Ten million people died in one year as a result of the disastrous harvests. An estimated 30 million died of famine during the period of the Great Leap Forward.
• The steel project was extended to “socialist miracles” in every branch of industry, every one a figment of imaginative double-speak and collective self-deception, in which no-one dared to tell the King he had no clothes.
• • Wow, thoughtcrime!
• There is a considerable degree of commonality between the policies pursued by Khrushchev and Mao’s policies during this period, particularly in the arenas of economics, science and technology.
• However, in the arena of ideology and international relations, Mao and Khrushchev’s policies were heading off in entirely different directions.
• • Destalinization
• Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes was perceived by the Chinese Stalinist leadership as extremely threatening, given the fact that they were drawing the ideological justification for their policy from Stalin’s role in Soviet history.
• Mao was attempting to adopt the cloak of Stalin, just as Khrushchev was smearing this cloak with mud.
• The policy of the “great Leap Forward” was imposing considerable hardship on the people, and it did not help them at all to have 'Comrade Khrushchev' encouraging other comrades to look critically at the historical dogma upon which it was justified.
• • Two leaders fighting each other instead of solving problems the people they resolve to help. Ironic.
• When the Chinese challenged Khrushchev’s position and his proposed changes in economic policy, both sides found supporters within the other camp. Consequently, the ideological dispute rapidly escalated into a split, and Khrushchev withdrew Soviet technical support to China in August 1960. This was the final blow for the Great Leap Forward, which was abandoned a few months later.
• The failure of the Great Leap Forward was a huge blow for the CCP and Mao Zedong in particular.
• Nevertheless, the Chinese people had made their own revolution. They had united the country and freed China from foreign intervention. And there were a thousand million members of the Chinese Revolution. This represented an enormous social force, independent of imperialism and independent of the Soviet bureaucracy
• Much like Stalin when he invented the perspective of 'socialism in one country', the Chinese CP made a virtue out of the necessity of their international isolation. Mao now challenged Khrushchev for the leadership of the international Stalinist movement. The principle logic behind this challenge was to further the foreign policy objectives of the Chinese bureaucracy, just as had been the case with the Comintern.
• the Sino-Soviet split triggered splits in virtually every national section of the movement. The Stalinist monolith was broken. Hitherto, fragmentation had seemed to be the characteristic of formations to the left of Stalinism. Now, there seemed to be no limit to the extent to which the Stalinist movement itself was capable of fragmenting.
• fundamental thesis is that the USSR was transformed into a capitalist state by means of the election of Nikita Khrushchev as its national leader.
• a national democratic revolution, led by the Communist Party, based on a peasant army, which grew over into the establishment of a deformed workers' state resting on the peasant masses.
• • Animal Farm mottos
• there should be no over-simplification and vulgarisation in the understanding of the thought that party differences ... are nothing but a struggle for influence of antagonistic classes.
• • Godwin's Law except nazis are now bourgeoise
• the Chinese leadership felt obliged to carry their polemic against Khrushchev’s policies to the point of ascribing a bourgeois class origin to them. Once a socialist has publicly ascribed bourgeois class origins to an opposing argument, all possibility of compromise or fraternal discussion has been closed off.
• The Chinese characterised Khrushchev as a 'capitalist roader' and the Soviet Union as a 'social-imperialist' state. In its foreign policy, and in the propaganda of their sympathisers in the capitalist world, the USSR was portrayed as a worse enemy of the working class than imperialism itself, the 'greatest danger to world peace' (read 'number one target for war'), etc etc.
• Under these conditions, the possibility of Communists in a capitalist country maintaining a united front policy against the common enemy was scant indeed.
• That the USSR was not 'socialist' was of course true. Nor was China. That Khrushchev’s policies threatened to open the way to capitalist restoration may well have been true; but that he actually did restore capitalism is patent nonsense. That in Khrushchev Mao confronted the leader of a imperialist power is nonsense.
• The USSR was not an imperialist country in the sense defined by Lenin, in the sense understood by Marxism.

• In his famous work, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin gave a very precise definition of imperialism: 

   
  1. the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 
  2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; 
  3. the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 
  4. the formation of international monopolistic capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and 
  5. the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. 
    

   'Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed'. ^[122]
• Lenin described imperialism specifically as the highest, or last, stage of capitalism,
• nd at the same time it has taken humanity into an epoch of decay and destruction.

• In the first place, the post-war USSR arose not out of a colonial power or out of capitalism, but by the degeneration of a workers state; not through the concentration of capital but through its expropriation. 

   Secondly, the penetration of the products of the USSR into the countries it dominated did not take place by export of capital (investment in local industries and repatriation of profits). Trade between the USSR and its “satellites” was organised by bureaucrats by means of planned export and import of products, not by a “financial oligarchy” exporting and importing capital. 

   Thirdly, the backward nature of the Soviet economy meant that it was the USSR that supplied raw materials, oil and gas, to the countries it dominated, in exchange for manufactured goods and machinery, rather than the other way around. 
• The isolation of a country from the world market and the world-wide division of labour is not the method of imperialism.
• This economic domination of a country was certainly a feature of colonialism, but imperialism corresponds to the breaking down of this exclusive colonialist relation (such as pertained to the way Portugal maintained its colonies up until 1974) and its replacement by domination which is founded on “free trade” and capital investment.
• • Qing Dynasty's neo-Confucianism all over again?!?!
• For the Soviet Union, a degree of liberalisation, especially in science, education and technology, and decentralisation of planning was essential. Otherwise, the bureaucratically controlled Soviet economy was going down the tube. The Chinese bureaucracy felt no such need.
• In September 1965, Mao’s closest associate, army leader Lin Biao, made a speech urging school pupils to criticise 'bourgeois liberalism and Khrushchevism'.
• The youth particularly were mobilised against any and all tendencies towards independent thought or action in every sphere of Chinese life. All cultural, scientific and educational work was paralysed. Production plummeted as workers spent long sessions in the study of Mao’s 'thoughts'.
• • More than a cult

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