As is generally known, in the last two years the Party of Labor of Albania has done an about-face on its stands toward Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party prior to 1976. After upholding Mao and the CPC as great banners of socialist construction over a long period of time, now without a single word of self-criticism Enver Hoxha and the PLA have reversed fields and are claiming that Mao was never a Marxist-Leninist and the CPC nothing more than a bunch of progressive democrats. The few polemics the PLA has offered to back up these contentions are shallow and shoddy.
But the situation in the international communist movement is such that many of the parties which are new and had been looking toward the leadership and guidance of the PLA and CPC in the 60s and 70s have simply spun around themselves to keep in step with this reversal by the PLA, these flimsy charges, and tried to outdo one another in showing subservience to the new line and paying homage to Tirana.
Among the upholders of the new line we find a polemic circulated by a former member of the Marxist-Leninist Collective, Jim Washington. While ambitious in scope, firm in its opinions, and more extensive in the areas it covers than the PLA’s polemics to date, the pamphlet (titled “Socialism Cannot Be Built in Alliance with the Bourgeoisie”) falls flat. It suffers from a haphazard method which includes offering theses with no supporting evidence, misreading sources, and a refusal or inability to deal with Soviet experience in socialist construction. We are criticizing the pamphlet in this defense of New Democracy and the transition to socialism in China not because of any particular merit to JW’s arguments or the paper’s influence (little as far as we can see) but because it is the most developed attack we have seen from within the U.S. M-L movement on the Chinese construction of socialism following 1949.
We have selected several topics to focus on and so will not address every aspect of New Democracy or of JW’s pamphlet. However, we have tried to take up the major points about New Democracy and those contested by JW.
Our polemic is divided into three main parts.
In the opening section we examine Lenin’s views on the transition to socialism, including the use of state capitalism in the transition period, and Mao’s theory of New Democracy in light of Soviet experience.
The second part of the paper forms the bulk of the argument and is divided into five smaller sections. The first documents the progressive restriction of the national bourgeoisie and capitalism in the first years after the CPC won state power in 1949. It explodes JW’s and the PLA’s contention that during these years the national bourgeoisie grew stronger as the country allegedly went down the capitalist road of development rather than utilizing state capitalism to move onto the socialist path of development. In the next sub-section we briefly refute JW’s claim that the national bourgeoisie largely stage-managed the Wu Fan campaign which was directed at them. In the third we critically examine the Hundred Flowers campaign and touch on the Anti-Rightist campaign that followed it and their implications for party rectification. The fourth subsection traces the emergence of two lines on the transition to socialism, refuting JW’s assertion that there was a distinct Liu-Teng wing of the party from 1949 on. The final part of this section examines the Great Leap Forward and what we view as the temporary Rightist dominance of the party during 1960-62.
The last section of the paper outlines our tentative views on the seeds or roots of revisionism in the CPC during the years 1949-1960 in particular.
We view this effort as part of the theoretical struggle now under way in the international communist movement to defend all that was achieved by Mao and the CPC in recent decades against the overwhelmingly incorrect charges that have been tossed about by the pro-Albanian parties and groups. At the same time we must take note of and grasp the actual weaknesses and mistakes of Mao and the CPC—as well as those of the PLA. This struggle must be directed toward the emergence of a principled international tendency which can help the badly splintered and floundering international movement to regroup and forge ahead.
XMLC and A. Green
September 28, 1980