Agriculture is the foundation of the Chinese economy and more than 80% of China’s people till the land. Although agriculture was not the central battleground of the Cultural Revolution (education, industry, and culture were), it has been profoundly transformed by class struggle, led by the Party.
The two-line struggle in agriculture has centered on the Peoples’ Commune Movement that was begun in the late 1950’s. The revisionists headed by Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping put forward the “theory of productive forces” claiming that it was impossible to advance towards socialist ways of collective farming until agriculture was mechanized and the productive forces in industry and agriculture were advanced to a high degree, that the economic and political conditions in the countryside did not permit change yet. Chairman Mao has consistently maintained that in order not to regress to capitalism it was necessary to continually advance toward the elimination of its social basis in the countryside – small production – and work toward the development of collective farming and the Peoples’ Communes. In 1958, despite the protests of Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, and P’eng Teh-huai, the movement to build Peoples’ Communes was launched. Within two years, 90% of the peasants had joined the movement and Peoples’ Communes were built throughout China. In 1962, taking advantage of three years of draught, natural disaster, bad harvests, and the Soviet revisionists’ ripping up of contracts, Liu Schao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping advocated a retreat from the Commune movement and whipped up the evil wind of “san zi yi bao” – the extension of plots for private use and of free markets, the increase of small enterprises with sole responsibility for their own profits or losses, and the fixing of farm output quotas for individual households with each on its own. They also pushed for the “four freedoms” . . freedom to practice usury, hire labor, buy and sell land and engage in private enterprise. The revisionist leaders in the countryside suggested:
The landlords have no land and the rich peasants are no longer rich. What’s the use of grasping class struggle? We all live by earning work points; so long as production is being done, well then all’s fine.(PR #22, 1976, p. 11)
The revisionists did not worry about consolidating collectivization in agriculture so long as the brigades were making money.
During the Cultural Revolution, collective agriculture came into full swing again, with many brigades carrying out massive water and land changing efforts (irrigation and leveling out hills for mechanized, collective farming). Class struggle, correct line, and revolutionary spirit were re-emphasized and work points and personal profits were de-emphasized. The Tachai production brigade was raised as a red banner and example to the people of China.
The poor and lower middle peasants of Tachai showed all of China how the determining factor in collectivization and production is self-reliance and the revolutionary consciousness of the people, class struggle between the bourgeois line and the Marxist-Leninist line in building agriculture, and not personal material incentives or dependence on aid from the state. Mechanization was certainly not a prerequisite for development of collective agriculture.
There are three levels of ownership in the Peoples’ Commune: the commune, the production brigade, and the production team. Today the team is the basic unit, but to eradicate the capitalist social basis in the countryside, the goal is to move the basic unit of accounting up to the brigade and then the commune level. This is done through class struggle between the bourgeois line and the Marxist line in agriculture, building industry at the commune and brigade level, expanding collective agricultural work projects to the brigade and commune level, limiting the free market and raising the state’s role in the trading of agricultural products, mechanizing agriculture, raising production, and raising the peoples’ consciousness and collective spirit through socialist education and political night schools.
The revisionists, in an effort to maintain the old capitalist-type relations, oppose every move to advance. They oppose limiting the free market and advocate systems of personal material incentives. They oppose massive political education and class struggle between the bourgeois line and the Marxist line. They say that once production goes up, mechanization and electrification are completed, land changing and capital construction are carried out that the socialist transformation of the communes will happen automatically. They promote literacy classes, for example (as does everyone) but oppose political night school.
The revisionist program in agriculture, although it pretends to adhere to the Party’s aim of further advancement of collectivization and the transformation of the communes, in actuality denies the essential element in making socialist collectivization possible, ideological and political struggle. Their program emphasizes only mechanization, electrification, land changing, irrigation and capital construction. As we know, all these advancements alone are no guarantee that development will proceed along socialist lines. The best examples of this are the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., where agriculture is large-scale, mechanized, and electrification but certainly not socialist.
Emphasizing the leading role of political struggle in the socialist development of agriculture, Chairman Mao said:
Opposition to selfish spontaneous tendencies towards capitalism and promotion of the spirit of socialism, which makes the principle of linking the collective with the individual interest the criterion for judging all words and deeds . . such are the ideological and political guarantees for the gradual transition from the scattered, small-peasant economy to the large-scale cooperative economy . . [This task] should be performed not in isolation from our economic measures but in conjunction with them. . .Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work. This is particularly true at a time when the social and economic system is undergoing fundamental change. The agricultural cooperative movement has been a severe ideological and political struggle from the very beginning. No cooperative can be established without going through such a struggle. . After a cooperative is established, it must go through many more struggles before it can be consolidated. Even then, the moment it relaxes its efforts it may collapse. (Selected Readings, p. 429)
A long article about mechanization in agriculture that presents the program of the present leaders, in PR #9, 1977 (p. 13) contains this passage:
The realization of farm mechanisation will greatly raise labour productivity. Lenin pointed out in A Great Beginning: ’In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new social system’ . . Thus the material conditions are created for the gradual transition from the present system of ownership which takes the production team as the basic accounting unit to that in which the brigade or the commune is the basic accounting unit and finally to the system of ownership by the whole people.
The present Chinese leaders have already learned a trick that the revisionists in the Soviet Union have been using for years – quoting Lenin out of context to pretend that he also supported the “theory of productive forces.” The fact is that in the article A Great Beginning, from which the above quote is (mis)taken, Lenin is talking about the “subbotniks,” a movement of highly conscious communist workers who rejected material incentives to help socialist construction by performing unpaid extra labor on their own initiative. Far from arguing that only the development of the productive forces can lay the basis for the development of socialist relations of production, as the Chinese leaders are doing, he was arguing that the Russian workers were, through class struggle and socialist consciousness, creating “new shoots of communism” within a few years after the revolution. He was saying that labor’s productivity as developed by collective proletarian revolutionary spirit was it decisive factor in the victory of socialism over capitalism. Lenin goes on in the same article to say:
The mistake the ’Berne’ yellow International makes is that its leaders accept the class struggle and the leading role of the proletariat only in word and are afraid to think it out to its logical conclusion. They are afraid of that inevitable conclusion which particularly terrifies the bourgeoisie, and which is absolutely unacceptable to them. They are afraid to admit that the dictatorship of the proletariat is also a period of class struggle, which is inevitable as long as classes have not been abolished.
The author of the article on mechanization typically mis-uses the teachings of Lenin, emphasizing only one half the dialectic – production and not revolution. S/he emphasizes only mechanization and not political struggle and socialist education and twists the history of the two-line struggle in agriculture, claiming the struggle is one between pro-mechanization and anti-mechanization forces, and lumping the “gang of four” with Liu Shao-chi and Lin saying all opposed mechanization. This is extremely misleading. Liu Shao-chi opposed collectivization, using the backward state of mechanization as a pretext. Before the Peoples’ Communes were formed, he, along with Teng Hsiao-ping and Peng Teh-huai, claimed the communes could not be created until agriculture was mechanized. After the movement began, Liu Shao-chi complained: “Now it appears that the Peoples’ Communes should be operated. The problem is that we must not set up too many of them at one stroke or go too fast.” When this failed, he and Teng Hsiao-ping tried to destroy the communes, encouraging private plots and free trade, saying the communes were not practical until mechanized. This bourgeois line was defeated during the Cultural Revolution. Now the author of the article says that only once mechanization is completed are the “conditions created” for advancing agricultural ownership from the team to the brigade and commune level.
To claim that the “gang of four” opposed mechanization is absurd. Everyone in China, including Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, Lin Piao, Hua Kuo-feng, and the “gang of four” support mechanization and agree that furthering mechanization is an immediate and important goal in agriculture. This is not the question. The question is whether to put off the further transformation of productive relations in agriculture until this is accomplished, thereby allowing the soil for capitalist restoration to grow unchecked in the countryside.
The revisionists real aim is not to further mechanization (although they will undoubtedly do this); it is to oppose the further transformation of the communes by claiming that only complete mechanization will create the necessary conditions. The present leaders, in the tradition of P’eng Teh-huai, Liu Shao-chi, and Teng Hsiao-ping, now criticize the “gang of four” for wanting to move “too fast” in advancing collectivization and the socialist transformation of the communes.
They negated the expositions of Chairman Mao and Chairman Hua concerning the transition in the system of ownership in the Peoples’ Communes [from production team to brigade to commune] and spread the nonsense that the changes in the system of ownership could take place under any economic and political conditions. (PR #6, 1977, p. 5)
This passage mis-uses Chairman Mao’s name to try to pass off a retread of the revisionist “theory of productive forces” that mechanization must precede further socialist transformation. The present leaders echo all the goals in agriculture that the CCP has strived for over the years. No revisionist leader has ever renounced these goals because to do so would be a complete exposure of their bourgeois ideology. However, in reality they push the “theory of productive forces”, oppose further transformation “at the present time”, push material incentives, and vigorously try to crush the class struggle against the bourgeoisie, attacking the Left forces that are the vanguard of this struggle.
Over the last two years there has been intense struggle on the agricultural front. In 1964, Chairman Mao had exemplified Tachai production brigade as a brilliant example of how to depend on self-reliance, collective spirit and political education and class struggle to oppose Liu Shao-chi’s bankrupt “theory of productive forces” and called on the whole nation to “Learn from Tachai in Agriculture”. Since then, brigades and communes throughout the country have been striving to change the land and learn from Tachai’s experience in class struggle and socialist education. However, just as Liu Shao-chi tried to use the Socialist Education Movement launched by Chairman Mao in 1963 to send out his own work teams to communes around the country to propagate revisionist ideas in a agriculture, the revisionists in 1975 took advantage of the Learn-from-Tachai movement to send their own work teams around the country to try to distort the Learn-from-Tachai movement to their own revisionist ends. How this was carried out was depicted clearly in fictional form in a story called “The Undaunted” in the magazine Chinese Literature (#9, 1976).
The story shows how a work team comes in to a local county and allies with the county Party Secretary, who was criticized during the Cultural Revolution but retained his post after making a self-criticism. They try to propagate the “theory of productive forces,” emphasizing only leveling mountains and not learning from Tachai’s political work or struggle against the revisionist line. They institute a system strongly promoting material incentives for working on the land-changing project. When the leaders from one commune protest about the revisionist method of organization the work team promotes, the county Party Secretary produces an important “talk” from the Center saying that all Party organizations on all levels must be “put right”, and immediately aims the spearhead of his attack at those who criticized methods employed by the work program. The county Party Secretary declares that the “ultraLeft” ideas must be wiped out, that the Cultural Revolution was long past and a new situation was at hand. The same contradictions arise that arose during the Cultural Revolution, and when the county Party Secretary tries to purge the commune leaders that oppose his plan, the commune unites to study the directives of Chairman Mao since the Cultural revolution, criticize revisionism, and oppose the plan of the work team. The story ends unfinished, with the county Party Secretary, the work team, and the commune members in conflict.
During the struggle to beat back the Right deviationist wind, the Party committee of the Tachai Production Brigade vigorously reiterated the Party’s principle of class struggle in an article published in China Reconstructs. Their statement is in marked contrast to those written by individuals from Tachai or anonymously by “the people from Tachai” that have appeared in the PR since the purge (see PR #46, 1976, and PR #6, 1977). The recent articles in PR have unashamedly centered their attacks on the personality of Chiang Ching and have mentioned class struggle only once or twice, and then only to denounce the “gang of four” and not to attack concrete political problems in their commune
The Party branch of the Tachai Production Brigade said in September of 1976:
Since China entered the period of socialist revolution, Tachai has met many obstacles on its way forward. Though some obstacles came from the overthrown landlords and rich peasants, and counter-revolutionaries and bad elements, the main ones were from the bourgeoisie within the Party. When we first set up a people’s commune in Tachai, the capitalist-roaders within the Party following Liu Shao-chi’s revisionist line tried to stop us. In 1964 Liu Shao-chi used the socialist education movement to hit out wildly at Tachai.
Teng Hsiao-ping was of the same kind as Liu Shao-chi. Last year when a Right deviationist wind was stirred up to reverse the correct verdicts of the Cultural revolution, he distorted Tachai’s fundamental experience and didn’t have a single word to say about class struggle and the two-line struggle, only preaching the theory of productive forces in a vain attempt to undermine the Learn-from-Tachai mass movement. All this clearly shows us that the bourgeoisie within the Party using a part of power they have usurped to restore capitalism is much more dangerous than the bourgeoisie in society at large. . .
Criticizing Teng Hsiao-ping, Chairman Mao pointed out, ’He knows nothing of Marxism-Leninism; he represents the bourgeoisie.’
. . We often remind ourselves that Tachai’s success has come from struggle. Repeated struggles are the powerful motive force propelling the socialist society forward. Struggle is a guarantee for the victory in continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only with struggle can we combat a prevent revisionism and consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat. Class conciliation, class amalgamation and class capitulation will only lead to restoration and retrogression. . in the historical period of socialism, class struggle will be a complicated and long term one, sometimes very intense. We must never discard class struggle. No matter what lies Teng Hsiao-ping tried to fabricate, our determination to struggle will not be moved. We have struggled for the past 30 years to build up to the present Tachai. We’ll march forward by continuing the struggle. We must struggle against revisionism and capitalism every year, every month and every day. We’ll keep on struggling until communism arrives, and nobody can stop us. (China Reconstructs, September, 1976, pp. 12-14)
It is important to note that while the new leaders try to give the impression that the “gang of four” oppose Learning-from-Tachai, what they are really trying to do is distort the Learning-from-Tachai movement and use it for their own revisionist ends. This is what the Party committee of the Tachai Production Brigade and the “gang of four” opposed.
The new leaders have published statements by individuals from Tachai, but we have seen no statements from the Tachai Party committee written since the purge. In PR #43 (Oct. 22, 1976), the new leaders write about Tachai (pp. 6-7) cleverly confusing “cadres and commune members” with the “Party branch” to give the impression that all of Tachai supports the new government. The Party committee will no doubt be “rectified,” but it is significant that the new leaders have, in the months since the beginning of the purge, been unable to use statements by the Party committee in their campaign against the “gang of four”.
In an article titled “A Year of Advance Amid Storms” (PR #7, 1977), the Learn-from-Tachai movement is lauded and the author gives the impression that it is the work teams sent to the countryside since 1975 that are pushing for socialist construction and that the “gang of four” and their supporters have only disrupted progress. The opposition to the work teams by Leftist leaders in the communes is described as disruptive to the advance toward socialism. The liberal use of anti-capitalist phrases gives the article a nice-sounding progressive tone and helps to cover up the actual purpose of the work teams, which is to oppose class struggle against capitalist-roaders in the communes and label the Leftists as class enemies and counter-revolutionaries.
Other recent articles about agriculture claim that the “gang of four” wanted to break up communes and promoted individualism. This is absurd and even contradicts the present leaders’ criticism of them for wanting to “collectivize too fast.” The use of such demagoguery by the present government cannot be over-emphasized. Especially those of us who are not “on the scene” must be diligent in searching for the underlying issues at stake in the struggles of the Chinese people on every front.