3. The Cultural Revolution as the Paramount Form of Class Struggle in Socialism and How Enver Hoxha Denies It

Donnerstag, 19.03.2020, 16:07 Uhr

As a Method of Strengthening the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Is the Creative Further Development of Marxism-Leninism by Mao Tsetung

It is inevitable that after the socialist revolution, a part of the old bureaucracy, the bourgeois scientists and possibly the dispossessed bourgeoisie will have to be called on to help build socialism. This cannot be avoided especially in such large countries as the Soviet Union and China, where the largest part of the population is petty-bourgeois, where many petty bourgeois elements penetrate the Communist Party and move into positions in government, management and administration. Very early Lenin recognized this danger. In April 1918 he wrote in "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government":

"It goes without saying that the element of petty-bourgeois disorganisation (which must inevitably be apparent to some extent in every proletarian revolution, and which is especially apparent in our revolution, owing to the petty-bourgeois character of our country, its backwardness and the consequences of a reactionary war) cannot but leave its impress upon the Soviets as well.
We must work unremittingly to develop the organisation of the Soviets and of the Soviet government. There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into 'parliamentarians', or else into bureaucrats. We must combat this by drawing all the members of the Soviets into the practical work of the administration.…
The fight against the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet form of organisation is assured by the firmness of the connection between the Soviets and the 'people', meaning by that the working and exploited people, and by the flexibility and elasticity of this connection." (72)

Seeing the danger of the petty-bourgeois degeneration of the bureaucracy, Lenin saw the best means of encountering this danger in mobilizing and revolutionizing the masses. The workers and poor peasants must have the right
to elect and dismiss their officials
to control the work of the officials
to put qualified workers into responsible positions

In order to put the dictatorship of the proletariat into practice, the workers must take all power into their hands and must perfect themselves in exercising power. With great concern Lenin wrote to Sokolov:

"Bureaucrats are smart fellows, many scoundrels among them are extremely cunning. You won't catch them with your bare hands."(73)

In the following years Stalin carried out the struggle against bureaucracy with the help of the State Security Service, but even they could not give a decisive blow to bureaucracy because the masses weren't mobilized to master the degenerate petty-bourgeois bureaucrats.

After Stalin's death the bureaucracy under Khrushchev usurped power, abolished the dictatorship of the proletariat and restored capitalism of a new type. As a consequence of this development, Mao Tsetung conceived the concept of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In China, too, the bureaucracy had degenerated to a great part and become petty bourgeois. Not only in government, administration and management, but even in top positions in the Communist Party, bureaucrats who were taking the capitalist road could be found. Even old and experienced revolutionaries succumbed to petty-bourgeois mentality, which by the long tradition of bourgeois ideology will come up over and over. Their material privileges made possible a petty-bourgeois life-style and gave rise to egoism. Bourgeois ambition and a lust for power drew them away from the masses and made it impossible for them to understand the wants and needs of the common people. The bureaucracy within the Party became the biggest danger to the existence of socialism. This bureaucracy developed step by step to a new class of capitalist roaders, bringing about the danger of capitalist restoration, if not stopped on time.

Mao Tsetung drove back this development in several campaigns. He concludes:

"In the past we waged struggles in rural areas, in factories, in the cultural field, and we carried out the socialist education movement. But all this failed to solve the problem, because we did not find a form, a method, to arouse the broad masses to expose our dark aspect openly, in an all-round way, and from below."(74)

The petty-bourgeois bureaucrats in the Party, government and management had already taken control of many sectors and set up their counter-revolutionary headquarters in the Party under the leadership of Liu Shao-chi. The new bourgeoisie was threatening to take power. At this point the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was initiated and personally led by Mao Tsetung, which unfolded the broad masses, especially the young militant Red Guards.

In the 16-Point-Resolution of the Central Committee of the CP of China on August 8, 1966, the Party members were called upon to mobilize the masses;

"Trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative.… Make the fullest use of big-character posters and great debates to argue matters out, so that the masses can clarify the correct views, criticize the wrong views and expose all the ghosts and monsters. In this way the masses will be able to raise their political consciousness in the course of the struggle, enhance their abilities and talents, distinguish right from wrong and draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy."(75)

Beginning in the schools and universities of the country, the Cultural Revolution spread rapidly to all provinces and into all cities and villages, propagating Mao Tsetung Thought. The Red Guards distributed the Little Red Book, the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, into the remotest villages and exposed the representatives of the bourgeois line. The report to the 9th Congress of the CPC, held on April 14, 1969, gives an account of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution:

"Under the guidance of Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line, the broad revolutionary masses plunged into the fight. In Peking University a big-character poster was written in response to the call of the Central Committee. And soon big-character posters criticizing reactionary bourgeois ideas mushroomed all over the country. Then Red Guards rose and came forward in large numbers and revolutionary young people became courageous and daring pathbreakers.… And now, at Chairman Mao's call that 'The working class must exercise leadership in everything', the working class, which is the main force in the proletarian revolution, and its staunch ally the poor and lower-middle peasants have mounted the political stage of struggle-criticism-transformation in the superstructure. From July 27, 1968, mighty contingents of the working class marched to places long dominated by the persons in power taking the capitalist road and to all places where intellectuals were predominant in number. It was a great revolutionary action."(76)

Under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, the proletariat of a socialist country succeeded for the first time not only in defeating the old bourgeoisie but also in fighting back the newly developed bourgeoisie within the ranks of the Communist Party. But the fight was not yet hard enough, as was shown by the development of bureaucracy later on.

Let us summarize:

"The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is:

1. the highest form of class struggle in socialist society;

2. the awakening and rapid development of socialist consciousness in the masses by means of criticism and self-criticism and by studying and, at the same time, putting into practice Mao Zedong Thought;

3. the concrete form of exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat to prevent the bureaucratization of the Party, the government and management apparatus (against capitalist-roaders in power);

4. the building of an ideological-political barrier against the danger of capitalist restoration.

The concept of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a great contribution to Marxism-Leninism under the conditions of class struggle in socialism. This class struggle manifests itself as a dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the sharpest control over the bureaucracy…." (77)

The new Chinese leadership under Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping has succeeded in pushing through its revisionist line and liquidating the achievements of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, has reversed the changes made in the Party leadership and in government and economic management, rehabilitating bureaucrats, intellectuals and bourgeois elements back into these positions. The rehabilitation of class enemies reached its peak in the posthumous rehabilitation of the arch-revisionist Liu Shao-chi. The Communique of the 5th Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CP of China takes position:

"Comrade Liu Shaoqi, former Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Chairman of the People's Republic of China, and a great Marxist and proletarian revolutionary, was loyal to the Party and the people at all times over the past decades, devoted all his energy to the revolutionary cause of the proletariat and made indelible contributions to China's new-democratic revolution and its socialist revolution and construction. Because the appraisal of the situation in the Party and the country on the eve of the Cultural Revolution was contrary to fact, an entirely wrong and groundless inference was made, asserting that there was within the Party a counter-revolutionary revisionist line and then that there was a so-called bourgeois headquarters headed by Comrade Liu Shaoqi. … This biggest frame-up our Party has ever known in its history must be completely overturned."(78)