The aftermath of Mao’s death and rethinking everything about Maoism.
Mao's death in 1976, the rejection of the cultural revolution and economic reforms in China led me, like so many others Maoists, to call into question most of Maoist ideas.
Mao died in October of 1976, only a few months after I had joined AMADA. This in itself was to be expected given how decrepit he looked when he met Nixon. The big shock was when within weeks of his death, the Gang of Four who had been leading the Cultural Revolution (Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, Wang Hongwen a worker from Shanghai who had become very influential, Yao Wenyuan, the head of propaganda and Zhang Qunqiao, Shanghai’s party leader) were arrested and the leaders of the Communist Party under Hua Guofeng started criticizing the Cultural Revolution. This criticism went in many directions, but concluded that many things heralded by the Cultural Revolution were nothing else but a fraud.[1] This was very shocking to me. Even more shocking was that the AMADA leaders slavishly followed the new Chinese line without too much critical thinking. I thought that the Chinese leaders had deceived the world about the Cultural Revolution and one needed to pause and think the whole thing through. This episode was for me the beginning of a complete rethinking of my Maoist beliefs.
Last public picture of Mao in 1976 not long before his death.
One of the ideas I had had the most difficulty with was the idea that capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union. This was a slogan and I never read any serious text explaining what capitalist restoration implied. Some leftist thinkers wrote that the Soviet Union was a form of state capitalism with a bureaucratic command structure. But if the bureaucratic economic apparatus built by the Communist Party was a form of state capitalism, couldn’t one say the same about the Chinese economic planning apparatus? Either the Soviet and the Chinese system were both socialist or they were both capitalist. If bureaucratic command of the economy by the communists represented state capitalism, what exactly should socialist central planning look like? These questions and many others kept popping up in my head, and I was not able to find a satisfactory solution.
Also, I felt dissatisfied with our work as journalists. The internet did not exist at the time and we spent part of each day reading newspapers, cutting out articles and archiving them. We would not be able to use these archives efficiently for a very long time since this was a big investment in our time. I had much more fun going as a journalist to visit factories on strike, interviewing the workers and taking pictures for the newspaper. This was always original work and there were many strikes and actions in those days. As a full-time journalist, I not only did a lot of field work, but I also had the opportunity to do research on many issues. I was naturally drawn to economic issues like the effects of the oil shocks, the crisis of the steel sector that was killing Wallonia’s manufacturing sector as well as issues of economic development.[2] Very often, the decisions of our editorial board were countered by the Politburo, ordering us to stop working on a particular investigation and publishing instead long ideological articles written by top leader Ludo Martens. Once, I was annoyed when a politburo member came to me and said: “Find data to prove that ….” (I forgot the topic). I answered that the data might deliver a different conclusion and one should never “doctor” any data.
At meetings between the editorial board and the politburo, I often raised questions I had doubts over. The leaders found this annoying. I insisted. I just could not accept that no discussion could take place about the 180 degree changes that had taken place in China and how one should rethink everything we had believed in.
Of course, I was not the only one to start doubting about Maoism. The changes taking place after Mao’s death as well as the early success of market-oriented economic reforms in China were a challenge for all Maoists outside China. Debates started taking place within most Maoist parties at the time. It is within this intellectual atmosphere that AMADA became the PTB-PVDA (Parti du Travail de Belgique-Partij van de Arbeid van België – Labor party of Belgium) and held its first Congress. There was a lot of confusion at that Congress. For example, there was a clash between Flemish and Francophones when some Flemish delegates requested that the Party include in its program amnesty for the collaborators of WWII. Eventually, the request was defeated. Heddy, supported by many women inside the organization, including powerful female working class members, had requested gender parity in the leading organs. Ludo Martens fumed that this was anti-Leninist and could not be tolerated. The motion failed albeit with a large minority. While the PTB-PVDA was being founded, many Maoist organizations in Europe were dissolved by their members. This was the case of the KBW and KPD, the two largest organizations in Germany, with which I had been in contact as AMADA representative given my knowledge of German.
Given my own doubts and questioning, I announced I would resign from my full time job as journalist and go to university to study economics with as primary goal to understand how the socialist economy was supposed to work, what to think of theories of state capitalism, etc.. Fortunately, Heddy was able to finance my studies wiht her salary. She had actively encouraged me to go to university. She once said with characteristic blunt honesty: ””One can see you are smart, but one can also see you did not go to university".
What I had been able to read from Marxist authors about Maoist theses of capitalist restoration in the USSR left me deeply dissatisfied. Charles Bettelheim, the economist the closest to the Maoists started a multi-volume book trying to explain how capitalism had been restored in Russia. In the middle of his endeavor, he changed his views and sided with those of Solzhenitsyn on Soviet totalitarianism. He never got to the part where capitalism was supposed to have been restored.[3] Students of Bettelheim, Bernard Chavance and Jacques Sapir had written doctoral theses on state capitalism in Russia, but I could barely find any convincing argument and found that what they called state capitalism was simply the Soviet central planning system.[4] Moreover, they argued that the fact that prices still existed was a proof that capitalism had not been abolished. But this was an extremely weak argument. Markets had been abolished for the most part and prices were purely used as accounting devices.[5] The “smoking gun” for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union were the so-called Liberman 1965 reforms that introduced profit as a “success indicator” in planning. This did not mean in any way that firms were accumulating capital through profit. Traditionally, managers in the Soviet Union had been given as main success indicator the output produced. Now, a profit indicator was added to encourage firms to minimize costs, but managers were not even given a share of profits, they just got a bonus based partly on their profit indicator. Moreover, these Liberman reforms were already abolished in 1968, three years after their introduction. I was appalled to find that there was not a single even decent argument to support the ideas expressed by Mao on capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union. I would be eventually led to conclude (see next week’s post) that, contrary to Maoist ideas, there had not been any capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union.
The only book I read with interest at the time about “real existing socialism” was “Die Alternative” by Rudolf Bahro, an East German Marxist who wrote about alienation, oppression and submissiveness in East Germany. He wrote it in hiding and published it in the West to which he fled to join the Green party. Bahro did not consider that the East German economic system was capitalist, but rather some sort of bureaucratic system. Milovan Djilas had written in 1957 an interesting book “The New Class” about the emergence of a class of privileged bureaucrats in Yugoslavia. Hungarian intellectuals Konrad and Szelenyi had written a similar better argued book “The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power” which was a sociological analysis of how a new elite was forming in Eastern European communist regimes. They were both jailed in Hungary for publishing this book. Szelenyi was banned from Hungary and became a very famous sociologist in the US whom I had the chance to get to know and befriend later in the 1990s before he retired.[6] Reading all this only fed my intellectual curiosity. Even these few very good books did not touch on the fundamentals of the Soviet economic system. Understanding that system became an obsession for me.
(To be continued)
[1] There are too many examples, but here are a few. The barefeet doctor movement was against modern medicine, scenes of anesthesia with traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture were a fraud. Same thing with the model farm commune Dazhai and others like that. Many of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution had been corrected by Zhou Enlai before his death, but now the Cultural Revolution was criticized as fundamentally wrong.
[2] A trip in Tanzania taught me a lot about issues in African agriculture and the failure of the collectivization policies of president Nyerere.
[3] I later got to meet him many times in Paris during the tumultuous years of the perestroika and the fall of communism 1988-1991. He was a charming old man, but I never got to understand how he had held such prestige in France in the sixties.
[4] The most original research I had read at the time was the doctoral thesis of Gérard Duchêne. While his ideas about state capitalism were not very deep, he delivered a very original analysis of the role of economic ministries in Soviet planning, which influenced my own doctoral thesis later on.
[5] Many Marxist authors argued about whether the “law of value” was still working under socialism. These were all very theoretical considerations that did not seem to make any sense at all except to hint at the fact that maybe the market should still be used under socialism.
[6] Szelenyi even tried to convince me to replace him as Dean of Social Sciences in NYU Abu Dhabi in 2012 when he retired.