The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher 1967
I planned originally to deal in this lecture with the impact of the Russian revolution on the colonial and semi-colonial peoples of the East. But working on this subject, I found it so wide and many-sided as to be almost unmanageable within so small a compass; and so I shall confine myself to one question only, the one on which the theme has come to be focused: the relationship between the Russian and the Chinese revolutions.
The Chinese revolution is in a sense a child of the Russian. I know that some Sinologues will vehemently object to this statement; and I readily admit that their objections are valid within certain limits. Obviously, an historic phenomenon of this magnitude has its deepest roots in its own country, in the conditions of the society of which it is the product. This needs to be strongly emphasised, especially because until quite recently it was customary in the West to treat Chinese Communism as something of a Russian puppet. But we should not, on the other hand, treat it as a movement closed within itself, which can be understood only in terms of its national environment. We must not allow the Great Wall to dominate our own thinking about the Chinese revolution. Earlier I tried to trace the many filiations between the Russian revolution and the intellectual and political history of Western Europe. I quoted to you Lenin’s great acknowledgment of the debt the Russian revolution owed to the West, and Trotsky’s words about Europe’s ‘export of its most advanced ideology to Russia’. Now, the impact of the Russian revolution on China was incomparably more direct and powerful than that of Western Europe on revolutionary Russia.
The Russian revolution triumphed at a moment when the Chinese revolution was in an impasse. When the Chinese overthrew the Manchu dynasty in 1911, they attempted to solve their national problem by means of a purely bourgeois revolution. The attempt failed. China was proclaimed a republic; but her great social and political issues remained unresolved; and they were presently aggravated. The nation sank ever deeper into dependence on foreign powers; the warlords and compradores tore it to pieces; and the peasantry, destitute and oppressed, had no chance of changing or improving the condition in which it lived. The purely bourgeois revolution had demonstrated its impotence; and no one was more conscious of this than Sun Yat-sen, its leader. Then, in 1919, came the great national protest against the Treaty of Versailles and the movement against the perpetuation of China’s subjection to the great powers. This was still an attempt to revive the ‘purely’ bourgeois revolution, although it was inspired by Chen Tu-hsiu, the future founder of the Chinese Communist Party. That movement too reached a dead end. In the next year a crucial event occurred: from Moscow the Second Congress of the International called on the colonial and semi-colonial peoples of the East to rise or to prepare for revolution. The great ‘import’ of Bolshevik ideology to China began; and this was soon to be followed by the importation of Russian military skill and technology. Russia had by her example shown China the way out of the impasse; China too had to go beyond the purely bourgeois revolution. Anti-imperialism, redistribution of the land, the hegemonic role of the industrial workers in revolution, the formation of a Communist Party, and a close alliance with the Soviet Union — these were the new prospects that suddenly opened before Chinese radicals. Even Sun Yat-sen subscribed to some of these new aims, though not without trepidation.
Until then Marxism had exercised almost no influence in China. A few disjointed ideas of Fabian and Methodist socialism had come down in a trickle to the intelligentsia of Shanghai, Canton and Peking. But it was only in 1921, seventy-three years after its original publication, that the Communist Manifesto appeared in Chinese for the first time. [12] Western European Marxism, with its concentration on the class struggle in the advanced industrial countries, could hardly strike any chord in the radical intelligentsia of a semi-colonial peasant nation. It was from the Russians, and in the Russian version, that the Chinese took their Marxism. As Mr E H Carr rightly points out in his great History of the Soviet Union, it was Lenin who for the first time formulated a Marxist programme of action that was immediately relevant to the peoples of the East. He was able to do this because of his Narodnik-like sensitivity to the problems of the peasantry, and because of his wholly original grasp of the significance of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Bolshevism faced both West and East. We have seen that facing the West and considering the prospects of socialism there, Lenin insisted that the nation-state formed too narrow a base for socialist transformation. Up to 1924 all the great manifestoes of the Communist International culminated in a call for the Socialist United States of Europe. In the East, however, the situation was different. Its peoples still lived in the pre-industrial and even pre-bourgeois epoch, fragmented by quasi-feudal particularisms, tribal patriarchalism, caste systems and warlordism. If for the West the nation-state, the great achievement of the past, was already an obstacle to progress, for the peoples of the East this achievement still lay in the future and was an essential condition of progress. But if in the West the modern nation-state was the product of bourgeois revolution, the East had to go beyond that revolution in order to attain it. This was the great new lesson Moscow broadcast in the early 1920s. Even so, Moscow did not view the Chinese or any other Eastern revolution as a purely national struggle, but as part of an international process; and it still attributed to the proletarian socialist revolution of the West the leading part in the worldwide struggle. Bolshevism projected its own experience upon the world scene. In Russia the revolution had taken place in both town and country; but the directing initiative, intelligence and will had come from the town; and this, the Bolsheviks thought, would repeat itself on a global scale, where the industrial West was the ‘town’ writ large, while the undeveloped East was the ‘country’.
The next Chinese revolution, which occurred in the years 1925-27, seemed to confirm this expectation. Britain was at that time shaken by the greatest class struggles in her history, the longest and the most stubborn miners’ strike on record and the General Strike of 1926. In China the alignment of the social forces broadly resembled the Russian pattern: the country was ablaze with agrarian revolt; but the urban workers were the driving force of the revolution. It is necessary to recall this important, but now forgotten or ignored, fact. Much of recent Chinese history has, unfortunately, been rewritten by Maoists and Stalinists alike; and not only have many historic personalities been turned into Orwellian unpersons, but an entire social class — the Chinese industrial proletariat of the 1920s — has been deleted from the historical record and turned into an unclass. We shall presently see why this has happened.
The fate of the revolution of the 1920s was tragic enough. Not only was it defeated; but before its defeat it had been driven back into the impasse of the purely bourgeois revolution, from which Leninism had just shown the way out. Stalin and his associates and agents in China drove it back there. We in the West do not have to rely on Stalinist or Maoist ‘rewrites’ of history; so I assume that you are familiar with the broad outline of the events; and I shall only recall here that Stalin’s policy centred on the idea that the Chinese revolution must have purely bourgeois objectives and that it should be based on the so-called ‘bloc of four classes’. In fact, Moscow forced the reluctant Chinese Communists to submit unconditionally to the direction and discipline of the Kuomintang; to accept General Chiang Kai-shek as the national leader and hero; to refrain from encouraging agrarian revolts; and finally, in 1927, to disarm the insurgent workers in the cities. In this way the first great, victorious proletarian uprising in Asia, the Commune of Shanghai, was suppressed. This was followed by a wholesale massacre of Communists and insurgent workers and by the debacle of the revolution.
It has been argued that, regardless of Stalin’s policy, the revolution of 1925-27 was doomed anyhow, because of its inherent ‘immaturity’. The historian cannot in a post mortem disentangle the objective causes of an event like this from the subjective ones, from men’s policies and moves; he cannot say which of these factors decided the outcome of the struggle. The fact is that whether the defeat of the revolution was inevitable in 1927 or not, Stalinism did all it could to make it so. In the East no less than in the West, Stalinist policy was actuated by the fear of destroying or upsetting the status quo, and by the desire to avoid deep involvement in grave social conflicts abroad that might lead to ‘international complications’. In the East, no less than in the West, Stalinism worked to produce a stalemate in the class struggle.
In China, however, a stalemate was impossible. The revolution had been crushed in the cities; but the counter-revolution was unable to consolidate its victory. The social structure of the country was shattered. The peasant revolts continued. The regime of the Kuomintang was rickety and corrupt. And then, in the course of fifteen years, the Japanese invasion dealt blow after blow to the social structure and the political regime. Nothing could arrest the process of decomposition.
The defeat of 1927, however, and subsequent events set the scene for a revolution very different from that of the 1920s, and very different also from the Russian pattern of 1905 and 1917. In the late 1920s, after the massacre of its members, the Communist Party found it extremely difficult to rebuild its urban strongholds. In the 1930s, the Japanese, having conquered coastal China, embarked upon forcible de-industrialisation of the occupied cities, dismantled the factories, and thus caused a dispersal of the urban workers. Even before that, however, Mao urged the Communist Party to turn its back upon the cities and to invest all its energies in partisan warfare, which was to be waged in the rural areas where the peasantry was in uproar. His political strategy was summed up, after many years, in the celebrated phrase that in China the revolution must be carried not from town to country, but from country to town.
Was this strategy a stroke of political genius? Or was it, perhaps, an adventurer’s desperate gamble? Its eventual success makes it appear to have been the former. But in the light of the circumstances of the time it was indeed a dubious gamble. Stalinist Moscow treated it for a long time as a harmless aberration which did not even merit excommunication as a heresy. Incidentally, Mao repaid this indulgence by observing outwardly all the devotions of the Stalin cult. As Stalin saw it, Mao’s partisans, though they came to control considerable rural areas, had no chance whatsoever of carrying the revolution from country to town and of overthrowing the Kuomintang. Stalin was glad to use them as a bargaining counter in his dealings with Chiang Kai-shek; and so he offered them a little cheap publicity in the newspapers of the Comintern, but otherwise gave them no assistance. He looked upon Mao as upon a queer pawn on his chessboard, placed in one of its less important corners.
And, in truth, Mao’s strategy needed for its success an extraordinary combination or coincidence of circumstances, such as he neither foresaw nor could have foreseen. It took fifteen years of Japanese invasion and occupation, fifteen years during which China was dismembered and plunged in chaos; and it took a world war and Japan’s defeat, to enable Mao’s partisans to survive and gain strength; and to bring the Kuomintang to that point of collapse at which a peasant army could push it over. Normally, in our epoch — and this had been so even in undeveloped China — the town dominates the country economically, administratively and militarily to such an extent that attempts to carry revolution from country to town are doomed beforehand. But in 1948 and 1949, when the partisans entered Nanking, Tiensin, Shanghai, Canton and Peking they moved into a virtual vacuum. The Kuomintang’s disintegration was complete. This is what Stalin failed to grasp even in 1948, when in vain he urged Mao to make peace with Chiang Kai-shek and agree to the incorporation of the partisans in Chiang’s army. Afraid once again of ‘complications’ — of massive American intervention in Far Eastern areas adjacent to Soviet frontiers — Stalin was still — in 1948! — trying to recapture the Chinese status quo of 1928.
In the meantime the character of the revolution and the outlook of Chinese Communism had changed radically. Mao’s party bore, in ideology and organisation, little resemblance either to Lenin’s party or to Stalin’s. Lenin’s party had its roots deep in the working class. Mao’s was based almost exclusively on the peasantry. The Bolsheviks had grown up within a multi-party system which had existed, half-submerged, in Tsarist Russia; and they had been accustomed to the give and take of intense controversy with their opponents, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, Liberals and others. The Maoists, living for over twenty years in complete isolation, entrenched in their mountain fastnesses, caves and villages, had become wholly introverted. They had no Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries to confront in direct debate. Their polemics against the Kuomintang were in the nature of war propaganda that had to be conducted against an enemy rather than an ideological controversy with a serious opponent. The party cadres formed the commanding corps of the partisans. Everything in their life was subordinated to the imperative needs of an armed contest. The organisation, the discipline, the habits of thought, the day-to-day conduct of affairs were militarised. Unconventional and revolutionary though their militarism was, it stood in striking contrast to the predominantly civilian character of the Bolshevik Party. If Bolshevism had become monolithic through a long series of painful political and moral crises, after the suppression of many internal oppositions, Maoism had little to suppress in its own ranks; its monolithic character was a natural and unconstrained growth. And so, although outwardly Maoism resembled Stalinism, the similarity concealed deep differences.
Sinologues often compare Mao’s partisans with the Chinese peasant armies that over the ages rose and overthrew dynasties to put their own leaders on the throne. No doubt, the partisans are in some ways descendants of those armies. In China too the past has refracted itself in the revolution — the past with its traditions of the Mandarinate as well as of the peasant risings. If Stalinism was the amalgam of Marxism with the savage barbarism of the old Russia, Maoism may be considered as an amalgam of Leninism with China’s primitive patriarchalism and ancestral cults. Maoism is, in any case, far more deeply permeated by native custom and habit than the urban Communism of the 1920s had been. Even a literary comparison of the writings of Mao and Chen Tu-hsiu, Mao’s predecessor in the party leadership, reveals the difference: Mao’s idiom is far more archaic than Chen Tu-hsiu’s, whose language was closer to that of the European, especially the Russian, Marxists of the pre-Stalin era. (Not for nothing does Mao compose his poems in the classical Mandarin style.)
Great though the power of the past over the present may be, however, we need not exaggerate it. In China as in Russia, the amalgam of a modern revolutionary ideology with primordial native tradition is the phenomenon of an epoch of transition. Here and there society has been in the throes of a transformation which reduces or destroys the force of custom and habit. Here and there the rulers have used tradition for purposes which uproot the traditional way of life. We have seen how industrialisation, urbanisation and mass education render the Stalinist amalgam inacceptable to Soviet society; and it may be assumed that in this, if in nothing else, the Soviet Union prefigures the image of China’s not too remote future.
In any case, Mao’s partisans, unlike the old rebellious peasant armies, have not left the patriarchal structure of Chinese society intact. They were the agents of a modern bourgeois revolution which could not be contained within bourgeois limits; and they initiated a socialist revolution. They produced in fact the second great act of the international upheaval that had begun in Russia in 1917.
How was it that they were able to produce it? In Russia the double revolution was the outcome of an Homeric struggle waged primarily by the industrial workers, who were led by their genuine socialist vanguard. Mao’s party, we know, had no connexion with any industrial proletariat; and the latter played no significant part in the events of 1948-49. The peasantry stood for the redistribution of the land and private property. The so-called national bourgeoisie, disheartened and demoralised by the Kuomintang’s corruption and disintegration, entertained the hope that Maoism would not go beyond the limits of bourgeois revolution. To sum up, in 1948-49 no basic social class in China strove to establish socialism.
In embarking upon the socialist revolution the Maoists enacted the role which the Bolsheviks had assumed only some years after 1917, that of trustees and guardians of an almost non-existent industrial working class. In so far as they enjoyed the peasantry’s support, the Maoists were not an isolated revolutionary élite, without any social class behind them. But the peasantry, its individualism focused on the rural economy, was, at best, indifferent to what was happening in the town.
In going far beyond the peasantry’s horizon, the Maoists were actuated by at least three motives: a) the ideological commitments into which they had entered in their early, formative years; b) considerations of national interest; and c) imperatives of international security. In their young years, while they underwent the influence of the Leninist school of thought, they had absorbed the ideas of proletarian socialism. During the decades of their immersion in rural China they had little or no use for those ideas, and they identified themselves with the peasantry’s individualism. But, having re-entered the cities as China’s rulers, they could not allow themselves to be guided just by that individualism, which, translated into urban terms, meant private enterprise in industry and trade. They were struggling to unify the nation, to create a centralised government, to build a modern nation-state. They could not base it on a stunted native capitalism vulnerable to Western pressures. Nationalised industry and banking provided a far safer foundation for national independence and a unitary state, for industrialisation and China’s re-emergence as a great power. Although in theory these objectives were compatible with a purely bourgeois revolution, a semi-colonial nation could not, in this century, attain them by bourgeois means. (Characteristically, Mao did not expropriate the capitalists without compensation: he has paid them to this day an indemnity in the form of long-term dividends, and has accorded them managerial posts in the economy. This fact, however, does not by itself detract from the socialist character of the revolution.) Finally, considerations of international security drove the new China towards the Soviet Union. Up to the moment of victory the Maoists had fought Kuomintang armies which were ‘advised’ by American generals and equipped with American weapons; occasionally, they had to do battle against American Marines as well. The United States upheld Chiang as the counter-revolutionary Pretender. The Cold War was rising to its pitch; and the world was dividing into two blocs. In these circumstances China’s security lay in a close alliance with the Soviet Union and in Soviet economic aid; and this necessitated the adjustment of her social and political structure to that of the Soviet Union.
It was not easy for the new China to achieve close alliance with the USSR. The relations between the two Communist powers were strained and surrounded by ambiguity from the outset. The national egoism of Stalin’s government was the major cause of the strains. Even if Mao and his comrades were willing to forget how Stalin had used them in the 1920s, and how he had then treated the partisans and obstructed their final bid for power, they could not easily reconcile themselves to the position the Russians held in the Far East since Japan’s defeat. The Russians had re-established their predominance in Manchuria; they held the Far Eastern Railway and Port Arthur; and they had dismantled and carried away as ‘war booty’ the industrial plant of Manchuria — that province was then China’s only industrial base, on which her economic development depended. Nor did Moscow show any sign of willingness to relinquish its hold on Soviet Mongolia, although in the past all Soviet leaders had given many solemn pledges that one day, when the revolution had won in China, the whole of Mongolia would be united in a single republic federated with China. In all this there were the makings of a conflict far graver than that into which Stalin and Tito had just plunged, a conflict as grave as that which was to turn Khrushchev and Mao against each other a decade later. However, in 1950 neither Stalin nor Mao could afford to fall out. Stalin was wary of driving the Maoists and the Titoists into a common front; and Mao was so anxious to obtain Soviet good will and assistance that he struck a compromise with Stalin and clinched the alliance. The Soviet Union acted as the guarantor of the Chinese revolution and of its socialist character.
The Chinese revolution was, of course, fraught with all the contradictions which troubled the Russian revolution, those between its bourgeois and its socialist aspects and those inherent in any attempt to establish socialism in an undeveloped country. Similar circumstances produced similar results. Hence, despite their differences, the affinity between Maoism and Stalinism. Both acted within the single-party system, as holders of a power monopoly, and as guardians and trustees of the socialist interest, although Mao, having had no real experience of a multi-party system and no tradition of European Marxism behind him, acted that role with far less guilt and with far greater ease than Stalin. And Maoism, like Stalinism, reflected the backwardness of its native environment, which it would take the revolution a very long time to digest and overcome.
The alliance, for all its ambiguity, brought vital benefits to both partners. Stalin had obtained not only the Chinese accession to the principle of exclusive Soviet leadership in the socialist camp; he also gained, through special Soviet-Chinese joint stock companies, a direct influence on the conduct of China’s economic and political affairs. These mixed companies could not but hurt the susceptibilities of many Chinese, to whom they looked like new versions of old-fashioned Western concessions. Nevertheless, thanks to Soviet aid, the new China was not as isolated in the world as Bolshevik Russia had been in the years after 1917. The Western blockade could not impose on her the hardships it had once imposed on Russia. China was not at the outset reduced to her own desperately inadequate resources. Soviet engineering and scientific-managerial advice and Soviet training of Chinese specialists and workers eased the start of China’s industrialisation, lightened for her the burden of primitive accumulation, and speeded up her ‘take off’. Consequently, China did not have to pay the high price for pioneering in socialism that Russia had paid, even though the Chinese started from far lower levels of economic and cultural development. Mao’s government did not have to cut as deeply into the peasantry’s income as Stalin’s did, in order to provide the sinews of industrialisation; nor did it have to keep the urban consumers on such short rations. These circumstances (and others which I cannot go into here) account for the fact that in the first decade of the revolution, social and political relations, especially those between town and country, were less tense in China than they had been in Russia.
Nothing seemed to stand in the way of an even closer association between the two powers, especially when, after Stalin’s death, his successors disbanded the joint stock companies, renounced direct control, and waived most of the humiliating conditions that Stalin had attached to aid. Indeed, the time seemed auspicious for the establishment of something like a socialist commonwealth stretching from the seas of China to the Elbe. In such a commonwealth one-third of mankind would have jointly planned its economic and social development on the basis of a broad rational division of labour and of an intensive exchange of goods and services. Socialism might at last have begun to turn into ‘an international event’.
So ambitious an undertaking would, no doubt, have met with a host of difficulties, arising out of the huge discrepancies between the economic structures and standards of living and between the levels of civilisation and the national traditions of the many participating nations. The cleavage between the haves and the have-nots, the most burdensome part of the legacy that socialist revolution inherits from the past, would have made itself felt in any case. The have-nots, the Chinese in the first instance, were bound to press for an equalisation of the economic levels and standards of living within the commonwealth; and their demands could not but clash with rising consumer expectations in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. But these should not have been insuperable obstacles to a serious socialist attempt to transcend the nation-state economically. A broad division of labour and intensive exchange were sure to yield considerable advantages to all members of the commonwealth, to economise resources, to save energies, and to create new margins of wealth and new economic elbow-room for all.
Nothing stood in the way of such a design except the inertia of national self-sufficiency and bureaucratic arrogance. In describing how the thinking of any bureaucracy is tied to the nation-state, is shaped by it and is limited by it, I said earlier that even the spread of revolution could not cure Stalinist policy of its national egoism and ideological isolationism; and that to these ills the policy of Stalin’s successors still remains the heir. Even if the concept of Socialism in One Country has long since lost all relevance, the mood behind it, and the way of thinking and the style of political action inspired by it have survived. Nowhere has this shown itself more strikingly than in Russo-Chinese relations. I shall refer here to only one event in that sphere, the sudden cancellation by Khrushchev’s government, in July 1960, of all economic aid to China and the recall from China of all Soviet specialists, technicians and engineers. The blow this dealt to China was probably far more cruel than had been, say, the brief and violent impact of Soviet armed intervention in Hungary. As the specialists and engineers had been ordered to deprive the Chinese of all Soviet construction plans, blueprints and patents, a vast number of Chinese industrial enterprises was at a stroke brought to a standstill. The Chinese had invested heavily in the factories and plants under construction; these investments were frozen. Masses of half-installed machinery and unfinished buildings were left to rust and rot. For a poverty-stricken nation, only beginning to equip itself, this was a crippling loss. For about five years China’s industrialisation was interrupted; it was slowed down for a much longer period. Millions of workers were condemned to idleness and privations and had to trek back to the villages at a time when these were suffering from floods, droughts and poor harvests. I cannot help recalling in this context the extraordinary premonition with which Lenin, in 1922, in one of his last writings, worried about the effect that the actions of ‘Dzerzhymorda — the Great Russian chauvinist and bureaucratic bully’, might one day have ‘among those hundreds of millions of the peoples of Asia who will in the near future move to the forefront of the historic stage’.
The Maoists have repaid the Russians in their own coin, the coin of national egotism. What we have heard from China ever since has been less and less the rational argument in the controversy over the ends and means of socialism, and more and more the cry of offended and enraged national pride, the cry of the wounded and humiliated. The traumatic shock of 1960 has stirred and brought out of the Maoists all their long pent-up and suppressed resentments against the Russians. It has also forced out of them some of their negative character traits, especially their inveterate Oriental conceit and their contempt for the West, as part of which they have come to see the Soviet Union.
At the heart of the conflict lie the different attitudes of the two powers towards the international status quo. The Russians have continued all these years their old search for national security within the international status quo. It has been, I trust, sufficiently demonstrated that this policy has not been an innovation of Stalin’s successors; it has not been that feat of ‘Khrushchevite revisionism’ that the Maoists denounce. The revisionism is Stalinist in origin; it goes back to the 1920s and to Socialism in One Country. Ever since then Soviet policy has sought to avoid at all cost any deep and risky involvement in the class struggles and social and political conflicts of the outside world. This has been, amid all its varying motives and amid all the changing circumstances of the times, its one constant preoccupation. To it, over twenty years, Stalin had subordinated the strategy and tactics of the Comintern; and then, in the period between 1943 and 1953, all the interests of all Communist parties. In relation to China, Stalin beat all records of ‘revisionism’, first in 1927 and then in 1948. In his pursuit of security, he tried as a rule to preserve, and even to stabilise, any existing international balance of power. As he operated in an epoch of violent dislocation and change, he had to adjust his policy to an ever new status quo; and he did so again and again in an essentially conservative manner. In the 1930s he adjusted his policy, and that of the Popular Fronts, to the defence of the Versailles system, when the latter was threatened by Nazism. Between 1939 and 1941 he ‘adjusted’ himself to the predominance of the Third Reich in Europe. And, finally, he geared his policy to the preservation of the status quo created by the Yalta and Potsdam pacts. It is still this status quo, or what has survived of it, that Stalin’s successors seek to shore up against the forces disrupting it from inside.
Yet, to the new China this status quo is necessarily unacceptable. Dating back from the time before the Chinese revolution, it was based on the implicit acknowledgment of American predominance in the Pacific area. It does not take into account the Chinese revolution and its consequences. This is the status quo under which China remains the outlaw of international diplomacy; under which she is excluded from the United Nations, blockaded by American fleets and air forces, surrounded by American military bases, and subjected to economic boycott. Moscow, invoking the dangers of nuclear war, is anxious to stabilise this status quo, if need be by imposing a tacit standstill on class struggle and anti-imperialist ‘wars of liberation’. China has every motive to encourage, within limits, those forces in Asia and elsewhere that are hostile to the status quo. She has no interest in imposing any standstill on class struggle and wars of liberation. Hence the basic incompatibility of Russian and Chinese policies. Hence the loud quarrel, partly real but partly spurious, about revisionism. Hence the accusation that the Russians, when they seek an accommodation with the West, align themselves with American imperialism against the Chinese revolution and against the peoples that are still oppressed by imperialism. Hence the final Chinese challenge to the Russian leadership of the ‘socialist camp’, and the Maoist claim to leadership.
Yet two souls seem to dwell in Maoism: one internationalist, the other seemingly full of Oriental conceit. Their opposition to the status quo and to Russian power politics has induced the Maoists to take up a radical stance and to voice against Moscow the watchwords and slogans of revolutionary-proletarian internationalism. But their own background and experience, their deep immersion in the backwardness of their national milieu, their fresh — yet so old — exalted pride in their nation-state, the prize they have won in their epic struggle, their lack of deep roots in the working class or in any authentically Marxist tradition — all this disposes them towards a national narrow-mindedness and a sacred egoism quite as intense as the Stalinist; and so they, too, are inclined to subordinate the interests of foreign Communist or revolutionary movements to their own raison d'état and their own power politics. Even their image of socialism bears the Stalinist imprint: it is the image of a Socialism in One Country, enclosed by their own Great Wall. [13]
How fiercely Maoism has been torn by its own contradictions and how the conflict with the Soviet Union has brought its inner tensions to explosion is now evident. The Chinese ‘epicentre of revolution’ is sending out fresh tremors which shake the whole of Chinese society, touch the Soviet Union, and affect the rest of the world. What are these tremors going to produce? A regime which, as the inspirers of the so-called Red Guards promised, would be more egalitarian, less bureaucratic, more directly controlled by the mass of the people, in a word, a regime more socialist than the one under which the Soviet Union has lived? A renascent and purified revolution? Or, was the colossal turmoil we witnessed in 1965-66 only one of those irrational convulsions, typical of bourgeois revolution, when men and parties are unable to control the violent swings of the political pendulum? Were the Red Guards, crowding for month after month the squares and streets of Chinese cities, the new Enragés or the Diggers and Levellers of our century? Were they going to win at last? Or did they, when the long paroxysm of utopian fervour and activity was over, drop exhausted and leave the stage to the high and mighty saviour of law and order? Or are perhaps all our historical precedents irrelevant to this drama? Whatever the answer, the conflict between the bourgeois and socialist aspects of the revolution is still unresolved; it goes far deeper than it went in Russia. For one thing, the bourgeois element looms larger in China, represented as it is by the peasantry, which still makes up four-fifths of the nation, and by the numerous and influential survivors of urban capitalism. For another, the anti-bureaucratic and egalitarian momentum of the socialist trend also appears to be greater than it has been in Russia for a very long time. The antagonisms and the collisions, with immense masses of people involved, developed for a time with a stormy spontaneity such as the Soviet Union had not known since its early days — a spontaneity that brings back to one’s mind the turbulent crowds of Paris in 1794, in the period of the internecine Jacobin struggles. No matter how this awe-inspiring spectacle ends, and towards what new crossroads it may impel the Soviet Union as well as China, one lesson of these events seems clear: the abolition of man’s domination by man can no more be a purely Chinese event than it could be a purely Russian one. It can come about, if at all, only as a truly international event, as a fact of universal history.