"The Rise to Power of Revisionism Means the Rise to Power of the Bourgeoisie" 

The Contemporary Significance of a Quotation from Chairman Mao

By Hong Bei. Renjing Net. Translated by Vero Publishing.

On April 22, 1970, to commemorate the centenary of the birth of the great teacher Lenin, the editorial departments of the People's Daily, Red Flag and the Liberation Army Daily jointly published an editorial titled "Leninism or Social-Imperialism? In Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of the Great Lenin."[1] According to the Chronicle of Mao Zedong (1949–1976), the great leader Chairman Mao personally reviewed and revised this editorial.

The editorial stated: "Just as the revisionism of Bernstein and Kautsky emerged after the death of Engels, so the revisionism of Khrushchev and Brezhnev emerged after the death of Stalin." It exposed the way the Soviet revisionist chieftains of the day pretended to commemorate Lenin while in fact usurping his name to push their revisionist and social-imperialist policies, and declared this a gross insult to Lenin! To explain this phenomenon of commemorating Lenin on the surface while betraying him in fact, the editorial quoted Lenin: "It has often happened in history that, after the death of revolutionary leaders who were popular among the oppressed classes, their enemies have attempted to appropriate their names so as to deceive the oppressed classes."

After reviewing how Khrushchev's revisionist clique usurped power after Stalin's death, and how infighting within the Soviet revisionist clique led to Brezhnev replacing Khrushchev, the editorial quoted a statement by Chairman Mao: "The rise to power of revisionism means the rise to power of the bourgeoisie."

This statement of Chairman Mao's has great practical guiding significance for us today in identifying and resisting revisionism and capitalist restoration. Let us try to explain this significance from two angles.

On the one hand, some friends in our "left" ranks today hold that "revisionism" is a mistaken current of thought within the workers' movement or within a Communist Party, whereas the bourgeois parties and powerholders now in charge of the former socialist countries that have changed color are bourgeois parties and bourgeois representatives pure and simple. To call these powerholders revisionists, they argue, would be to treat their parties as still Communist Parties, which easily confuses right and wrong and conceals the nature of these bourgeois parties. Friends of this view therefore accept only such descriptions as "capitalist restoration," "bourgeois party" and "agents of the bourgeoisie," and reject calling the promoters and executors of capitalist restoration "revisionists."

Having studied this statement of Chairman Mao's, we can see that the path runs from the first signs of revisionism, revisionist currents of thought and individual revisionists within the workers' movement or a Communist Party, to revisionist thinking gaining the upper hand and revisionists seizing power, so that "the Party turns revisionist and the country changes color" and capitalist restoration becomes an accomplished fact. This is a process from quantitative to qualitative change. If there are merely some revisionist currents or revisionist forces within the Party, one cannot yet speak of "the bourgeoisie coming to power" or "capitalist restoration." But once revisionists usurp the Party and seize power, the change has become qualitative, and that is equivalent to "the bourgeoisie coming to power." We need not deliberately set the terms "revisionism" and "capitalist restoration" against each other, still less forbid the use of "revisionism" in order to highlight "capitalist restoration." So long as in practice we judge accurately the degree of quantitative change, and whether qualitative change has been reached, we are in accord with the meaning of Chairman Mao's statement.

On the other hand, there is an individual in the "left" ranks who ignores the reality of capitalist restoration and insists that within the ruling parties of the former socialist countries that have turned revisionist there is merely a revisionist line, and that these parties cannot simply be equated with bourgeois parties. This comrade's argument is clearly an attempt to find grounds for his theory of "saving the Party to save the country." Without having made a detailed study of any ruling party of a former socialist country, he subjectively deduces that since there may be "capitalist-roaders" in the Party, there must also be "socialist-roaders"; since there are "corrupt forces" in the Party, there must also be "healthy forces." These theories of his are, to put it kindly, nonsense spoken with eyes closed and without investigation or study; to put it unkindly, they have ulterior motives and seek to make people harbor political illusions about the revisionist powerholders.

If we dissect this comrade's sophistry, we find that he is in fact blurring the line between quantitative and qualitative change described above, insisting that what is already an accomplished qualitative change is merely quantitative. To dress up his argument, this comrade has also quoted Chairman Mao, who once said: "The broad masses of the Soviet people, Party members and cadres are good and want revolution. Revisionist rule will not last long." In this comrade's view, this statement seems to show that Chairman Mao did not believe at the time that the Soviet Union had taken the road of capitalist restoration, and that he still regarded the Soviet party as good and not thoroughly revisionist. Having studied Chairman Mao's statement that "the rise to power of revisionism means the rise to power of the bourgeoisie," we can see clearly Chairman Mao's judgment of the nature of the Soviet party and state at that time.

Moreover, the People's Daily editorial of April 22, 1970 also quoted another statement by Chairman Mao: "The Soviet Union today is under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the German fascist type, a dictatorship of the Hitler type." The editorial further pointed out: "After the Soviet revisionist renegade clique usurped the leadership of the Soviet Party and state, the Soviet bourgeois privileged stratum greatly expanded its political and economic power and came to occupy the dominant position in the Party, the government, the army and the economic and cultural fields. From it there formed a bureaucrat-monopoly capitalist class, a new type of big bourgeoisie, which controls the whole state machine and disposes of the entire wealth of society." "Using the state power under their control, this new type of bureaucrat-monopoly capitalist class has turned socialist ownership into ownership by capitalist-roaders, and the socialist economy into a capitalist economy and a state-monopoly capitalist economy. In the name of the 'state,' they unscrupulously plunder the national treasury, use every means to swallow up at will the fruits of the Soviet people's labor, and live in luxury and dissipation, riding roughshod over the people."

The editorial's account of the state and nature of Soviet society at that time, and especially Chairman Mao's judgment that the Soviet Union was already a "dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie," further confirms Chairman Mao's assessment of the Soviet Union at that time, and so delivers a further slap in the face to that comrade's argument.

According to Lenin's thought, the ice could be broken at the weak links of the capitalist world system, and people's democratic or socialist revolution could first triumph in one or a few countries, which would then set about building socialism. Within such a country, after the socialist transformation of the means of production has been basically completed and the counter-revolutionary forces basically eliminated, do classes and class struggle still exist? Is there still a struggle between two roads? Is there a danger of capitalist restoration? If so, where does this struggle mainly manifest itself, and where does the danger mainly come from? Lenin did not have time to answer these questions in practice, and Stalin did not answer them correctly. It was Chairman Mao who, through observing and studying several socialist countries and their ruling parties, including the Soviet Union, China and Hungary, gave the answer.

Can a country that has won the initial victory of the socialist revolution see "the Party turn revisionist and the country change color"? And if this happens, how should one respond? The editorial noted: "During the period of Stolypin reaction, Lenin wrote that the struggle of the Russian working class 'may develop quickly, it may develop slowly,' 'but in any case it is moving towards revolution.' Today the conflict and antagonism between the new type of bureaucrat-monopoly capitalist class in the Soviet Union and the enslaved proletariat, working peasants and revolutionary intellectuals is growing sharper by the day. The development of class struggle is independent of human will, and sooner or later it will lead to revolution." Although the Soviet Union later did not see a people's revolution as the editorial anticipated, but rather a bourgeois "color revolution," led by the capitalist-roaders within the former Soviet Communist Party down the road of "changing the banner and the flag," the other road was not impossible.

In October 1965, speaking with the first secretaries of the regional bureaus, Chairman Mao said: "What will you do if revisionism appears in the Central Committee? This is quite possible, and it is the most dangerous thing. If revisionism appears in the Central Committee, you must rebel ..." At the beginning of 1976, Chairman Mao pointed out once more: "Will there still be revolution a hundred years from now? A thousand years from now? There will always be revolution. There will always be some people who feel oppressed: junior officials, students, workers, peasants and soldiers who do not like big shots oppressing them. That is why they want revolution!" This was Chairman Mao's summing-up of past history, and his hope for the future. What is to be done once capitalism is restored? The answer Chairman Mao gave was rebellion and revolution. Where is there any shadow of "saving the Party to save the country"?!

A few years ago a so-called "quotation from Chairman Mao" circulated in society: "The rise to power of revisionism is the rise to power of capitalism, and the worst capitalism at that, fascism. If such a Communist Party does not serve the people but hangs up a sheep's head to sell dog meat, then the people will organize themselves spontaneously ... overthrow its criminal rule in China, and wipe out completely, cleanly and thoroughly all the bureaucratic, comprador and traitorous forces attached to the treacherous clique." Although these words were not spoken by Chairman Mao, they accord with his views and thought, they accord with the reality of a series of former socialist countries over the more than forty years since his death, and they represent the wishes of the peoples of the former socialist countries. Though not a quotation from Chairman Mao, this passage is a hundred times wiser than that comrade's sophistry that a revisionist party "cannot simply be equated with a bourgeois party."

Translator's Notes

1.   "Leninism or Social-Imperialism?" An official English translation of the 1970 joint editorial was published in Peking Review, No. 17, April 24, 1970, and as a Foreign Languages Press pamphlet. The quotations from the editorial and from Chairman Mao in this article are translated here from the Chinese, and their wording may differ slightly from the official version. Readers who need the official text should consult that source.

Other terms.

•         "Saving the Party to save the country" (保党救国). The position, within the Chinese left, that the Communist Party can be reformed from within, as against the view that it has already become a bourgeois party.

•         "Changing the banner and the flag" (改旗易帜). A standard Chinese political phrase for abandoning socialism, used of the Soviet collapse in 1991.

•         "Hanging up a sheep's head to sell dog meat" (挂羊头卖狗肉). A proverb for false advertising: displaying one thing and selling another.

•         Stolypin reaction. The period of political repression in Russia from 1907 to 1910 under Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, after the defeat of the 1905 revolution.

•         The apocryphal "quotation." As the author himself notes, the passage beginning "The rise to power of revisionism is the rise to power of capitalism, and the worst capitalism at that" is not genuinely Mao's, though it circulated widely online as such.