Shubel Morgan: On “On the Theory of the Productive Forces,” Part 5c

(source: Shubelmorgan.wordpress.com)

The “Hate America Campaign.” That’s what the United Snakes State Department called China’s offensive to eradicate bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the educators.(1) Would that those reactionary goons have been correct.

The Chinese Communist Party’s struggle to ideologically re-educate the educators began before liberation in the areas under CCP control. After liberation this effort became an all out nation-wide campaign.

Political classes were set up at all universities and all members of the universities – administrators, professors, students, and all staff – were required to attend. Similar political classes were initiated at primary and secondary schools. Revolutionary dramas were staged in the schools and other proletarian agitation was conducted. Criticism and self criticism sessions were held in which teachers were encouraged to examine their bourgeois ideas. Students were encouraged to criticize backward thinking of teachers. During school holidays teachers were required to attend special political classes. “Revolutionary universities” were established for the sole purpose of intense re-education of the educators. Teachers were also sent out into the villages to learn from the masses and to propagate proletarian ideology.(2)

Much of this campaign of ideological remolding was in name aimed at the “love America” ideology rampant among Chinese educators.

But … Well, here’s a representative example of the political line of the CCP in this campaign. This is from one professor’s self criticism.

Because of my worship-America and pro-America ideology, I forfeited my national stand during the anti-Japanese war and fell into the embrace of American imperialism. … When I spent my first four years in the United States, I was able to see only the superficial things, like the skyscrapers, the motorcars, and the shamelessly dissolute and free-spending life of the exploiting class, but not the tragic oppression of the toiling people by the monopolistic capitalists. I did not realize that the exploiting class had to squeeze the broad masses of the American people and to steal their fruits of toil before they could afford to live a free-spending life.(3)

This self criticism echoes the complaint of the Deputy Minister that we reviewed in Part 5b, that Chinese teachers “do not see the poverty of the American working people.” Here’s yet another educator who overlooked the amerikan proletariat. Who was right there in amerikkka for four entire years and still somehow missed that overwhelming majority of impoverished “American working people.” Who somehow in all those years just hadn’t come across the “tragic oppression” of those “broad masses” of “toiling people.”

The political line of the Chinese Communist Party in the educational rectification campaign (as in all other spheres) was just this: against imperialism and imperialists, for the general populaces of the imperialist nations, because those general populations were exploited “toiling people.”

This political line entailed the assumption that hundreds of thousands of Amerikan and European trained Chinese educators had each one just had a bit of bad luck in not encountering a first world proletariat in all their travels and studies. That was surely an odd coincidence of oversight, but it could be rectified by educating them (and the Chinese masses generally) as to what they had so curiously missed. So they were told by the CCP that an amerikan proletariat exists. They were told that “the exploiting class had to squeeze the broad masses of the American people and to steal their fruits of toil.”

Comrade Mao himself held this line. So, when criticizing those educators and other elements of Chinese society who spread the ideology of “love-America,” Comrade Mao himself formulated the accusation like this:

They are the very people who have illusions about the United States. They are unwilling to draw a distinction between the U.S. imperialists, who are in power, and the American people, who are not …(4)

The distinction demanded by the CCP line on the first world was in fact the demand for a trumped up class analysis that indicted the imperialists as exploiters but exonerated the first world labor aristocracy as exploited.

Here, of course, Comrade Mao is criticizing the line that exonerates the imperialists by not distinguishing them from their “good”, “exploited” populaces. Tragically, by explicitly letting the first world labor aristocracy off the hook, Comrade Mao’s and the CCP’s line implicitly lets imperialism itself off the hook. If the vast wealth of the first world aristocracy is denied, then the source of this wealth – the extent of imperialist super-profit extraction from the Third World – must perforce be denied.

And that vast first world labor aristocracy wealth was denied by the CCP, which just flat lied to the Chinese people in claiming that amerikkkans and other first worlders were “laboring masses” and “great” people.

As Maoists-Third Worldists we cannot shirk our duty to the international proletariat by calling this trumped up class analysis anything other than a flat-out lie on the part of the CCP. We cannot pretend the CCP was somehow unaware that first worlders were among the world’s richest people. Whole generations of China’s elites, responsible for imparting information about the world to the young, had known and preached about the rich “American way of life.” Hell, we’ve already seen that Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing and Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee, made widespread Chinese knowledge of first world labor aristocracy wealth the very basis of his own nefarious push for capitalist restoration.

In the context of such widespread knowledge of first worlder wealth, the CCP’s false claims about “laboring masses” could only serve as a stamp of approval for imperialist parasitism, a wink and a nod at first world labor aristocracy exploitation of the Third World. The CCP’s fabricated first world class analysis opened wide the door to a bogus “acceptable” explanation of first worlder wealth, the theory of the productive forces.

We are not at this point prepared to claim that the CCP’s promotion of first world labor aristocracy ideology was the most powerful force paving the road to capitalist restoration in China. We’ve already acknowledged the ongoing presence of other reactionary ideologies in China against which the genuine Maoists of the time were forced to contend. At the same time, we question whether even feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism, and Confucianism combined could begin to offer the illusory payoff of material riches (in exchange for forgetting class struggle) held out by the bloody hand of the international theory of the productive forces as powered by the first world labor aristocracy.

To be sure, we are only in the infant stage of investigating and analyzing the role of the pernicious ideology of the international TOPF to the defeat of socialism in the People’s Republic. That we are only now initiating such critical studies is itself a testament to the victory of this imperialist ideology over the ICM throughout the last century.

But the international proletariat is done with the deadly revisionism that waves the red flag with one hand and the reactionary flag of the first world labor aristocracy with the other. It is past time to name names and call out the bullshit.

The Chinese Communist Party claimed they could build socialism while embracing the international theory of the productive forces as powered by the first world labor aristocracy. Maoism-Third Worldism calls that out right here and now as bullshit.

Today even Third World forces professing People’s War claim they can achieve proletarian victory without an all out fight against the first wordlist ideology that was instrumental in defeating socialism in China. In Part 6, Maoism-Third Worldism calls out those bullshitters as well.

(1) The “Hate America” Campaign in Communist China (Washington, D.C: Office of Intelligence Research of the United States Department of State, 1952) cited in Stuart Fraser (Ed) Chinese Communist Education: Records of the First Decade (Nashville, 1965), p.140.

(2) Hsia, Adrain. The Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York, 1972), pp. 78-80.

(3) Chou P’ei-yuan, ‘Criticizing My Decadent Bourgeois Ideology’ in Stuart Fraser (Ed) Chinese Communist Education: Records of the First Decade (Nashville, 1965), p.142.

(4) Mao Tse-tung, ‘Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle’ in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), vol. IV, p. 428.