China’s Communist Party, Capitalist Success, and Maoist Legacy

IS COMMUNISM AUTHORITARIAN CAPITALISM?

On July 1, 1921, the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in Shanghai. Twelve men gathered in a villa in the French Concession, then (and now) the richest part of the city. Today, the Party has over 90 million members, and it has changed not only the history of China but the history of the entire world. The main stages in its development are well known: In the late 1920s, Mao Zedong took over and reoriented the Party from city workers to poor farmers; in the mid-1930s, the Long March, although a retreat, established a link between the Party and people across China; in 1949, the revolution won; from 1958 until 1975, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution tried to enforce fast economic and social change but failed and caused millions of deaths; starting in 1978, after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping opened the country to capitalism under continued political control by the Party. When, in the late 1980s, this economic liberalization gave birth to political demands for democratization, the Tiananmen crackdown reasserted the Party’s control.

China in recent decades is arguably one of the greatest economic success stories in human history—hundreds of millions were raised from poverty into middle-class existence. How did China achieve it? The twentieth-century Left was defined by its opposition to two fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital, with its aggressive individualism and alienating dynamics; and authoritarian-bureaucratic state power. What we get in today’s China is exactly the combination of these two features in an extreme form: a strong authoritarian state with wild capitalist dynamics. Ironically, China should have the most efficient form of Socialism today. Chinese authorities continue to reprint the Marxist classics, from Marx to Mao, in hundreds of thousands of copies, but if you take these texts seriously and act upon them, as some young students did when they tried to organize workers against abuses of state power, you are arrested. In today’s China, one of the main functions of the Communist Party is to prevent workers from organizing a resistance against capital—a wonderfully schizophrenic situation.

The irony is that for Marx, Communism arises when capitalist relations of production become an obstacle to the further development of the means of production, meaning Communism can only be secured by a (sudden or gradual) progression away from a capitalist market economy and toward a socialized economy. Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” turn Marx around, arguing that at a certain point one has to return to capitalism to enable the economic development of Socialism.

Years ago, a Chinese social theorist with links to Deng’s daughter told me an interesting anecdote. When Deng was dying, an acolyte visited him and asked what he thought was his greatest act. The assistant expected the usual answer, that he would mention the economic opening he created that brought development to China. To their surprise, he answered: “No, it was that when the leadership decided to open up the economy, I resisted the temptation to go all the way and also open up political life to multiparty democracy.” According to some sources, this tendency to go all the way was strong in some Party circles, and the decision to maintain Party control was in no way preordained.

We should resist the liberal temptation to dream about how if China also opened up to a political democracy, its economic progress would have been even faster. What if a political democracy generated new instabilities and tensions that would have hampered economic progress? What if this (capitalist) progress was feasible only in a society dominated by a strong authoritarian power? Recall the classical Marxist thesis on early modern England: It was in the bourgeoisie’s interest to leave political power to the aristocracy and to keep economic power for itself. Maybe something homologous is going on in today’s China. It was in the interest of the new capitalists to leave political power to the Communist Party, the best protector of the interests of capitalism.

It may appear that between the Cultural Revolution and Deng’s reforms, China went from one extreme to another. However, there is profound structural homology between the permanent self-revolutionizing Maoist and the struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. Here, one is tempted to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht’s pun: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?” What are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, which is the permanent dissolution of all life-forms, necessitated by the capitalist reproduction?

Today, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is that it is repeating itself as the comedy of the rapid and capitalist Great Leap Forward into modernization. The old slogan “iron foundry into every village” has re-emerged as “a skyscraper onto every street.” Or, to put it in a brutally ironic way, the liquidation of the enemies in the Maoist purges gives way to the liquidation of the market sales (“Everything must go!”).

Some naïve Leftists claim that it is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and Maoism in general that acts as a counterforce to unbridled capitalism, preventing its worst excesses and maintaining a minimum of social solidarity. What if, however, the case is exactly the opposite? What if the Cultural Revolution, with its brutal erasure of past traditions, was the “shock” that created the conditions for a capitalist explosion? What if Naomi Klein has to add China to her list of states in which a natural, military, or social catastrophe cleared the slate for a new capitalist explosion? The supreme irony of history is thus that it was Mao himself, by tearing apart the fabric of traditional society, who created the ideological conditions for rapid capitalist development. What was his call to the people, especially the young ones, in the Cultural Revolution? “Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what to do, you have the right to rebel! So think and act for yourselves, destroy cultural relics, denounce and attack not only your elders but also government and Party officials! Swipe away the repressive state mechanisms and organize yourself in communes!”