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The Historical Position of Communist China: Doctrine and Reality Author(s): Karl A. Wittfogel Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Oct., 1954), pp. 463-474 Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1405130 Accessed: 22-04-2018 19:56 UTC

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The Historical Position of Communist China: Doctrine and Reality

by Karl A. Wittfogel

N THE FIRST of October, 1949, the Chinese Communists* climaxed their military success by establishing on the main-

land a new revolutionary government, the "Chinese People's Republic." While this government included a number of splinter parties, it was-and is-undisguisedly dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The new rulers, who quickly destroyed the old system of political control, are today drastically reorganizing the country's social and economic relations. And they are planning to go far beyond the changes accomplished to date.

Under these circumstances, the institutional historian may rea- sonably ask: What kind of society did the Communists set up on the Chinese mainland? Can this "new" China, which, for brevity's sake will be referred to as "Communist China," be equated with any known socio-historical conformation? And can the societal goal toward which Communist China is moving be predicted with any degree of scientific precision?

To arrive at a satisfactory answer it is advisable to state first what the Chinese Communists themselves consider the roots of their present conditions and what they envisage as the future Chinese society. This done, we shall note the profound discrepan- cies that exist between these ideas and the developmental concepts of their supreme authorities, Marx and Lenin. A critical evalua- tion of these discrepancies will aid us in independently defining the peculiarity and developmental position of the society which today prevails on the Chinese mainland.

II

The Chinese Communists claim that Chinese society passed through the stages of slavery and feudalism, until, in 1949, the Communist victory initiated "a new society and a new state."1

* The main ideas of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Far Eastern Association in New York City, April 15, 1954.

1 The Common Program and Other Documents of the First Plenary Session of The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, p. 1. (Peking, 1950).

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There is still some difference of opinion concerning the duration of the period of slavery;2 but this does not concern us here. The official doctrine is definite in declaring that Chinese feudalism pre- sents several peculiarities and that, in the 19th century, it was modi- fied under the impact of Western imperialism. After the Opium War China became a "semi-feudal" and "semi-colonial society"; and while the "semi-colonial" conditions seriously crippled the growth of a moder indigenous capitalism, they did not altogether prevent it. The Chinese People's Republic expropriated the com- pradores and the government-attached "bureaucratic capitalists"; but, for the time being, it is permitting the "national bourgeoisie" to supplement the state-owned economy. To supplement, not to dominate it. The state-owned economy which is "of a Socialist nature," constitutes "the leading force of the entire social econ- omy."3 Chinese society, which, despite the presence of capitalist elements, never reached the stage of capitalism, will skip this stage altogether. Aided by the socialist Soviet Union, it will move di- rectly toward socialism.

Thus, present-day Communist China is a "democratic" society on its way to socialism. Complete government ownership and management in industry and the collectivization of farming will mark the end of the transitional period and the beginning of a full-fledged Chinese socialist society.

This is the official doctrine. It is, in all essentials, taken from the arsenal of the Comintern, whose theoreticians since 1920-the year before the Chinese Communist Party was founded-have systematically analyzed the conditions of "colonial and semi-co- lonial" countries and the stages and conditions of the Communist- led revolution. It does not exhibit any originality, "Maoist" or otherwise. But it gives the Chinese Communists an immense self- confidence and sense of direction; for, according to this doctrine, social development is unilineal and irresistible, and the Chinese Communists, like their comrades elsewhere, are the glorious tools of history. They guide their suffering fellow-men from the dark

2 Cf. Mao Tse-tung: Hsiian-Chi (Selected Works) II: 594 (Peking, 1952); Kuo Mo-jo: Chung-kuo Ku-tai Sh2-hui Yen-chiu (A Study of the Society of Ancient China), pp. 112 ff. (Shanghai, 1931).

8 Common Program: 11.

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valley of class oppression and exploitation to the bright and happy heights of socialist human relations and eventually to the paradise of a classless society.

III

Persons not familiar with the theoretical background of Com- munism may vigorously object to the policy of the Chinese Com- munists; but they will not criticize them on the level of doctrinal orthodoxy. The Chinese Communists, they may say, invoke Marx and Lenin for their Ideas about society and history; and since Mao and his followers call themselves Marxist-Leninists, they are at least ideologically consistent, whatever else they may be.

This conclusion is as strong-and as weak-as the premises on which it rests. Manifestly the argument cuts two ways. If the evidence should show, as I think it does, that the ideas of Marx, Engels, and up to a point, also Lenin, do not justify the develop- mental self-confidence of the Chinese-and the Russian-Com- munists, and if the evidence should show furthermore that the top-ranking Chinese and Russian ideologists are eager to hide Marx's true views on these matters, as I also think it does, then we are here faced with a highly significant indirect confession of weakness. Then the Chinese and Russian Communists, who claim a progressive, proto-socialist or socialist character for their domains, must be profoundly insecure regarding their socio-historical role and purpose. Indeed the very ideas which they try so hard to hide should provide important clues as to what the top-ranking Com- munist ideologists really think about their developmental position.

IV

The London Marx, who, in the fifties, was already working on his magnum opus and who, in the sixties and seventies, wrote Das Kapital, would have scornfully rejected the unilineal develop- mental scheme (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) maintained and spread today by Communist ideologists within their orbit and, whenever possible, also in the non-Communist world. True, in the Communist Manifesto (in 1848) Marx suggested something like a unilineal course of history. But after settling permanently in England in 1849 and more thoroughly studying the classical econ-

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omists, he followed classical precedent in assuming the existence of an "Asiatic" or "Oriental" society, an institutional configura- tion, which arose independently of, and was different from, West- ern antiquity and feudalism. In contrast to slave-holding antiquity, Asiatic society did not decline. In contrast to feudalism, it re- mained stagnant, and it perpetuated its agrarian way of life for millennia.4

Thus the author of Das Kapital viewed societal development as a multilineal process. And he insisted that, different from the private-property-based Western class societies, in Asia an over- whelmingly strong despotic state dominated property, production, revenue, and social relations. According to Marx, the typical Orientally despotic state rested on two features: 1) government management of large-scale irrigation works and 2) a population that is "dispersed . . . over the surface of the country and agglom- erated in small [village] centers by the domestic union of agricul- tural and manufacturing pursuits."5

Remembering this, we should have no difficulty in understand- ing why Marx employed the expression "completely Asiatic" with regard to Chinese conditions,6 or why Marx and Engels designated Tsarist Russia as "semi-Asiatic."7 The classical economists were

aware of huge hydraulic works in Egypt, India, and China;8 but there were no comparable developments in Russia. Thus of his two key features of Asiatic society Marx found in Russia only the sec- ond, the "dispersed" peasants. Without discussing here the pecu- liarities of what I call the "marginal" Oriental society, we may say that Marx obviously considered these "dispersed" peasants, who in their village communities combined small agriculture and domestic industry and who tilled the communally-held land, a suf-

4 For the whole paragraph, see Karl A. Wittfogel: Oriental Society and Oriental Despotism, chap. IX (ms.). (Quoted hereafter as Wittfogel, OSOD).

5 Marx, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853. 6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Gesammelte Schriften 1852 bis 1862,

ed. by N. Rjasanoff I: 189. (Stuttgart, 1920). (Quoted hereafter as Marx and Engels 1920). Italics mine.

7 Op. cit.: 160 and 197. Cf. also Karl Marx: "Revelations of the Diplo- matic History of the Eighteenth Century," The Free Press IV: 227. (1857). Italics mine.

8 See Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, pp. 646 and 688 ff. (New York, 1937). Marx may also have found references to the hydraulic aspect of Chinese agriculture and government in Hegel's Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte II: 286 and 298. (Leipzig, 1920).

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ficient foundation for the Oriental despotism of Tsarist Russia." Marx considered communal landownership typical for the vil-

lages of Asiatic society. But there were exceptions-among them, China. In one of his most significant statements about "Asiatic production," Marx noted that, in India, the combination of small agriculture and domestic industry is supplemented by a "village pattern based on communal property of land"; and he added that this "was the original pattern also in China."'?

The relevance of these ideas for the developmental position of China and Russia is manifest. If, in Marx's and Engels' opinion, slavery in Asia was a secondary phenomenon that essentially ap peared as domestic slavery,11 and if feudalism was either alto- gether absent'2 or a subordinate feature that did not preclude general "Oriental" conditions,13 then we may well be astonished to find the Chinese Communists, who claim to be Marxists, fitting China into a scheme of development that proceeds from slavery to feudalism and capitalism. If, furthermore, in Marx's and Engels' opinion, Russia was not a feudal, but a semi-Asiatic coun- try, then the Soviet-promoted escalator scheme of unilineal devel- opment does not fit the Marxian premises in the Russian case either.

For good reasons, the Communist ideologists are extremely em- barrassed by the concept of a specific "Asiatic" society. This con- cept was upheld not only by Marx during his middle and late years, and despite some waverings, by Engels, but, for more than twenty years, also by Lenin, and early in his political career even by Stalin. It was on the basis of this concept that Lenin, in 1906 and 1907, debated with Plekhanov the possibility of an "Asiatic restoration," that is, the possibility of a return to Orientally des- potic forms of state control over land and peasants, should the fought-for second Russian revolution take a retrogressive turn.14

9 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Russian Menace to Europe, A Collection of Articles ... by Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz, pp. 211 ff. and 233. (Glencoe, Ill., 1952).

10 Karl Marx: Das Kapital III, 1: 318. (Hamburg, 1919). 11 Karl Marx: Grundrisse der Kritik der Polieischen Oekonomie (Rohent-

wurf) 1857-1858, p. 392. (Moscow, 1939); Friedrich Engels: Herren Eugen Diihrings Umwiilzung der Wissenschaft. Dialektik der Natur 1873-1886, p. 162. (Stuttgart, 1921).

12 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe III, 1: 480. (Moscow 1927 ff.).

13 Marx and Engels 1920 I: 147, 475. 14 See Wittfogel, OSOD, chap. IX (ms.).

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Marx was paralyzed by the idea that, in Oriental society, the functional bureaucracy is the ruling class. It was at this point that he dropped crucial insights gained by Richard Jones and John Stuart Mill.'5 And Lenin was increasingly frightened by the nightmare of the Aziatchina, the "Asiatic system." When, during World War I, Lenin saw the second revolution approaching, he ruthlessly threw out Marx' and his own previous views on the Asiatic system and on its significance for the development of Russia. State and Revolution and the lecture on The State in 1919 do not discuss Oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production, which he had readily mentioned in his writings up to 1914. Instead, Lenin presented the unilineal escalator scheme (slavery-feudalism-capitalism), an extraordinary performance coming, as it did, from someone who, in Russia, combatted Orien- tal despotism and feared an Asiatic restoration.16

V

Is the idea of an Asiatic restoration also applicable to China? Prior to answering this question, we shall first, from the stand- point of Marx and Lenin, weigh the claim of the Chinese Com- munists that their rule, by initiating a socialist economy, paves the way for a socialist society. Using Marx's and Lenin's definition of socialism, we arrive at a conclusion very different from that offered by present-day Communist ideologists.

Socialism is planned economy, managed in the first phase by a strong state, plus popular control over those who, during this phase, and as the representatives of the strong state, control and manage the decisive means of production. It is planning plus effective popular control. This, in a nutshell, is Marx's concept of socialism. Without doubt it is Utopian in its treatment of the power issue;17

15 See Karl A. Wittfogel: "The Ruling Bureaucracy of Oriental Despotism: A Phenomena that Paralyzed Marx," Review of Politics 15, no. 3: 352 ff. (1953).

16 Wittfogel, OSOD, chap. IX (ms.). 17 And it suffered the very fate which Marx and Engels ascribed to early

Utopian socialism. Marx's socialist ideas were progressive in their criti- cism of the early industrial system; but, to use the language of the Communist Manifesto, they lost "all practical value and all theoretical justification," when a new historical situation required, not the blind promotion of total statism, but its critical rejection. Marxism then became what the Manifesto, with re- spect to earlier socialist groups, designates as "reactionary" Utopianism. (For a discussion of the Utopian core in Marxism, see Wittfogel, OSOD, chap. IX.)

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but it does postulate as an essential feature effective control over the planners. The authors of the Communist Manifesto identified the workers and the revolutionary state; and they were bitterly attacked by the Anarchists for thus camouflaging a new enslave- ment of the workers. In 1871, and under the influence of the Anarchists, Marx insisted that the state of the period of transition, in order to fulfil its socialist task, had to be rigidly controlled by the people and that, following the example of the Paris Com- mune, the transitional state should have no bureaucracy, no police, and no standing army.

A few years later, Engels, elaborating on the rise of despotic government, argued: The men who as public functionaries estab- lish their power above, and independent of, the people, cease to be the "servants" of the commonwealth. They become its "master." Engels illustrates his point primarily by reference to Oriental rulers, whose position was not less despotic because it was based on such necessary functions as the maintenance of large irrigation works.18

Thus, according to both Marx and Engels, state control over the decisive means of production is socialist only when the repre- sentatives of the functional state are genuinely controlled by the people. Otherwise, the regime will be a despotism, which, as has been the case in Asiatic society, can impose the cruelest forms of exploitation and oppression.

VI

It is widely known that prior to the Bolshevik revolution Lenin supported this view. It is not as widely known that, prior to 1905, he declared "primitive democracy" and a state of the Commune type to be unworkable; and that without rational explanation he changed his position after the fateful year 1905, when, rejecting the cautious Menshevik approach, he proposed a short-cut to socialism via a "democratic" dictatorship headed by a small pro- letariat and supported by a large revolutionary peasantry.19

18 Engels 1935: 183. 19 Lenin first formulated this turn in Two Tactics, a book whose political

implications for "backward" countries, such as China and India, are crucial. See Karl A. Wittfogel: "The Influence of Leninism-Stalinism on China," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 277, p. 25. (1951).

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In countering Plekhanov's warning that such a dictatorship, instead of initiating socialism, might produce a restoration of Rus- sia's "semi-Asiatic" past, Lenin conceded that, unless buttressed by socialist revolutions in the leading industrial countries of Western Europe, the revolutionary dictatorship he envisaged could not, in the long run, escape an "Asiatic restoration." For a brief period, such a restoration might be warded off by radical democratic measures (no bureaucracy, no standing army), which had to be key features of the aimed-at new "democracy." Conforming to Marx's idea of 1871 concerning the proto-socialist state, Lenin later added the third condition: no police. Whatever the deeper relations between Lenin the socialist and Lenin the power strategist may have been, between 1906 and 1917 Lenin declared that primi- tive democracy was an essential prerequisite for the proto-socialist character of the dictatorship he was striving to establish.

The Bolsheviks did indeed establish such a dictatorship. But immediately after their victory they created a ruling bureaucracy that, together with the new Soviet police and standing army, blocked all attempts at popular control. To use Engels' formula: they initiated a regime, whose functionaries, instead of being "servants" of the new society, were its "masters."

VII

From the standpoint of those Bolsheviks who really believed what they said they believed, this development was upsetting. Cer- tain arguments of the early intra-party opposition groups indicate that not a few sincere "subjective socialists"20 were profoundly dis- turbed by the conditions they themselves had helped to bring about. Bukharin protested as early as April 1918 against "bureau- cratic centralization" and the danger of an "enslavement of the working class."21 In 1921, after the Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin too admitted his concern about the growing menace of the new bureaucracy.22 And in 1922, a year before he was completely

20 In 1912 Lenin applied this term to Sun Yat-sen, whose socialist inten- tions he considered both sincere and illusionary (see V. I. Lenin: Sochinenia XVIII: 146 [4th ed. Moscow, 1941-1950]. [Quoted hereafter as Lenin, S]).

21 W. I. Lenin: Samtliche Werke (German edition) XXII: 646-ff. (Wien- Berlin, later Moscow-Leningrad). (Quoted hereafter as Lenin, SWG).

22 Lenin, S XXXII: 329 ff.

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incapacitated, he was not sure whether the small group of Old Bolsheviks was still leading the new "bureaucratic machine," or whether the bureaucratic representatives of an "alien" culture had not already won out. "Who controls whom?"23 His answer shows him doubtful as to who actually was in the saddle. The victory of what he called the "non-proletarian" elements in party and state was prevented only by the "undivided prestige" of "the Old Guard of the Party"-a prestige that could be destroyed by "a very slight internal struggle within this stratum."24 Not long afterwards, Lenin died. And the subsequent struggle not only crushed the "undivided prestige" of the Old Guard-it physically destroyed the great majority of its members.

VIII

According to Marx's criteria, which Lenin accepted until 1917, the October Revolution established not a proto-socialist government, but a despotic apparatus state, whose representatives were soon able to operate as an exclusive (monopoly) bureaucracy. For the many persons of good will who, living outside the Soviet Union, hoped that the Bolshevik "experiment" would blaze new trails to social justice, insight into this fact comes as a rude shock. And this shock is not made more bearable by the realization that the Bolshevik leaders consciously took strategic risks that they knew could lead to an "Asiatic" restoration.

The implications of all this for the evaluation of Communist China are most serious. Lenin himself indicates the difficulty of building socialism in backward agrarian countries such as China and India. In 1920 he repeated what all Marxists believed, that, left to their own devices, these backward countries could not di- rectly advance to socialism. They could do so only if properly helped by "the victorious proletariat of the Soviet Republics."25 A year later he found the proletariat of the U. S. S. R. threatened by the new "non-proletarian" bureaucracy. And a year later still, he saw this new bureaucracy as overwhelmingly strong. How then could the new Soviet apparatchiki (men of the apparatus) be ex- pected to introduce, in China and India, a socialism, which they

23 Lenin, S XXXIII: 258. 24 Lenin, S XXXIII: 229. 25 Lenin, S XXXI: 219.

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themselves had strangled at home? Instead of the socialist-pro- letarian chain reaction, which Lenin had expected in 1920, did not the Soviet apparatus state initiate, in the "colonial and semi- colonial countries," a chain reaction of an entirely different type? Who now led whom, and where?

In his speech on the Food Tax on April 21, 1921, Lenin made the only attempt I know of to define the "economic root"-in other words, the class character-of the new Soviet bureaucracy. Avoiding all labels and obviously speaking to the initiated, Lenin rejected the idea that the new bureaucracy might have a bourgeois- military (formerly he would have said: a Bonapartist) quality. Instead he considered it to be based on "the fragmented and dis- persed character of small production."26 The formula reminds us of Marx's and Engels' references to Tsarist Russia. It reminds us that, until 1914, Lenin had used similar words to define Russia's Oriental despotism. As if to dispel all doubts, Lenin in 1921 stated: "Capitalism is evil, compared with socialism. Capitalism is good, compared with mediaeval production, compared with small production, compared with a bureaucracy connected with dispersed small producers."27

This is a not very Aesopian allusion to Marx's concept of Ori- ental despotism. Using criteria, which Marx and Engels had pro- vided and which in 1906-7, he had considered in his discussion with Plekhanov, Lenin evidently viewed the U.S.S.R. as heading for an "Asiatic restoration."

Shall we, expanding on Lenin's frightened insights, conclude that a victorious (socialistically disguised) Asiatic restoration in the Soviet Union brought into being in Communist China another (socialistically disguised) version of an Asiatic restoration? Shall we, accepting Lenin's veiled "Asiatic" interpretation of the U.S.S.R., say that Mao Tse-tung's China, far from being proto- socialist, is nothing but another version of an Asiatic restoration?

IX

With the negative part of this appraisal, we certainly have no quarrel. If the Chinese Communists have derived their idea of

26 Lenin, S XXXII: 330. 27 Lenin, S XXXII: 329. Italics mine.

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socialism from an openly totalitarian system, then they would have been consistent, when they called their new despotic and oppressive class society "socialist." Hitler was consistent, in terms of his own definitions, when he referred to himself as a "socialist." But the Chinese Communists, like their Soviet comrades, invoke Marx and Lenin as supreme authorities for their brand of socialism. This being the case, the conclusion is unavoidable that Communist China has nothing to do with the proto-socialist society which Marxism envisaged as the first step toward socialism proper.

But if Communist China is neither a socialist nor a proto- socialist society, what is it? Accepting broadly the classical concept of an "Oriental" society and the idea of multilineal development and admitting an important common denominator, monopoly bureaucracy, for the modem Communist state and Oriental des- potism, I nevertheless feel that it is not permissible to equate these two institutional orders.

Oriental society is essentially agrarian. The Communist ap- paratus society either is, or strives to be, strongly industrial. In Oriental society, the government in core areas usually manages heavy water-works; but it does not operate the economy of the individual peasant. At most, Oriental society is semi-managerial. While it possesses total political power, it exerts only a limited social and intellectual control over its subjects.

In the Communist apparatus state, the government first aims to establish managerial control over industry; and in a country with a marginal (non-hydraulic) Oriental background, such as Russia, the new society may at first also be semi-managerial, but semi-managerial in the industrial sense and with new mechanized devices for social and intellectual control. In an industrially "back- ward" country with a hydraulic agriculture, such as China, the state-operated sector of industry may expand more slowly (al- though in mainland China, after less than five years, the greater part of all large-scale industry is already controlled by the govern- ment).28 But where, as in China, some methods of Oriental state-

28 "Of the total value of industrial output in 1952, state-owned industry accounted for 50 per cent; joint state and privately owned industry for 5 per cent; cooperatives for 3 per cent; and private industry for 42 per cent. Of the total value of output of the larger industrial enterprises, state-owned industry accounted for 60 per cent; joint state and privately owned industry 6 per cent; co-operatives, 3 per cent; and private industry, 31 per cent." (Communique

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craft, including forced labor service, have been employed until today, the "socialization" of agriculture is definitely facilitated. In 1952, in the "old liberated" (northern) part of China, party- directed "mutual aid" teams and cooperatives already included about two-thirds of all peasants.29 Thus we have in Communist China a "mixed" semi-managerial system of the new type, and one that probably involves tighter patterns of social and intellectual control than were practiced in the U.S.S.R. prior to the collec- tivization.

Collectivization definitely crushes the individual peasant and adds agriculture to the state-controlled economy. Some conces- sions to the peasant notwithstanding, the U. S. S. R. today is a total managerial apparatus society that for all practical purposes combines total political power with almost total social and intel- lectual control. In due time, and with certain modifications, Com- munist China-unchecked by external forces-will also reach this goal.

X

To honor its "Marxist" promoters, the new society may be given a Marxian label. In an attempt to determine the social relations of Asiatic society, Marx once used the formula "general slavery."30 The semi-managerial character of Oriental despotism makes this term inappropriate for Asiatic society. It is much more

suitable for the Communist apparatus societies of today. Going far beyond what Plekhanov and Lenin called a "semi-Asiatic" or "Asiatic" restoration, these societies proceed-unevenly, but stead- ily-toward a political, social, and economic conformation that can indeed be designated as a system of general (state) slavery.

on National Economic Cultural and Educational Rehabilitation and Develop- ment in 1952, issued by the State Statistical Bureau of the Central People's Government, September 28, 1953, Supplement to Peoples China, no. 20, p. 2 (1953). (Quoted hereafter as Communique on ... Development).

29 "State farms and the movement to organize mutual-aid teams and co- operatives continued to develop in 1952. There were 2,219 state farms in the country, of which 52 were mechanized; 3,663 agricultural producers' co- operatives; and over 8,300,000 mutual-aid teams of various types. In 1952, in the old liberated areas, more than 65 per cent of the total number of peasant households and in the newly liberated areas, about 25 per cent were organized into mutual-aid teams and co-operatives" (Communique on . . Develop- ment, p. 4).

30 Marx 1939: 395.

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