Chris: “The Red Guards no doubt believed they were advancing socialism. But their actions set back the struggle for socialism.” Yes, and Dayne above also makes the point that, whatever their motives, the ultimate victors were the privileged, the big bureaucracy that set about capitalist restoration. But it seems to me the link is not only that the inevitable reaction to the chaos and the excesses paved the way ideologically for reaction against its supposed “socialist” motives. Frankly, the violence and destruction unleashed by the Mao faction and its Red Guards is what destroyed the basis of the “deformed workers’ state” long before the economic restoration began in earnest.
I think this is underlined in what Ben Walters wrote: “The bureaucracies that mediated between elites and ordinary people were either in tatters or so cowed as to make direct control frictionless. In sum, an alliance between a disempowered elite and a mostly-young and educated lower-middle class (using the still lower-class youth as enforcers) upended the middle section of society’s bureaucracy, to long-lasting effect … the targets of this “revolution” were not the uppermost elites, but middle management, bureaucrats, and systems of social control that intermediated between elites and the populace.” Add to them the universities themselves (closed down for years) and the killing of so many academics and intellectuals. What was eliminated, in other words, were the very organs of the ‘deformed workers state’. One may object that I am identifying the “bureaucracy” (lower levels) with the “workers’ state”, but the point is, as Lenin famously put it, “workers’ state” is only an “abstraction”, and he said this before the Stalinist degeneracy; and in China, there was never a 1917-type workers’ revolution in the first place. Unless anyone thinks the working class ever held any degree of power in any sense in China after 1949, then the distinction between ‘lower bureaucracy’ and ‘workers state’ is irrelevant. The *deformed* “workers state” is more closely embodied in the lower levels of bureaucracy, middle management, academics etc than in the top level of bureaucracy, unless we are believers in enlightened despotism. Many of these middle and lower levels of bureaucracy likely were direct participants in the revolution, many probably originated among the better organised, more advanced and literate sectors of the working class and peasantry, however we define ‘deformed workers state’, it would have been precisely among these layers that the socialist ideals of the revolution were still embodied in some form, being still the first generation of the revolution. By mobilising mindless “Red” thugs all over the country to carry out massive, arbitrary, chaotic violence and smash this layer to bits, the top bureaucracy thus removed the layers which may have put up some kind of resistance to capitalist restoration, or at least to the kinds of acceptance of extreme inequality that came with it. Not necessarily, for sure. They may have divided, their reactions mixed. But a hell of a lot more so than the thin layer at the top. The fact that it was the allegedly “anti-revisionist” wing of the bureaucracy that led the SA-type movement, whereas it was the restored ‘revisionist” wing under Deng that later carried through the capitalist turn, is essentially irrelevant: we are talking about social forces, not alleged political proclivities at the top. I realise this is not only a rejection of the entire new left adulation of the GPCR as some kind of anti-bureaucratic socialist revolution or “revolution within the revolution” etc against “capitalist roader” element of the bureaucracy – those illusions have been largely rejected for decades anyway – but goes somewhat further: this objectively *counterrevolutionary* mass violence is precisely the point that cleared the way for capitalist restoration, removed not “capitalist roaders” but the main potential barrier to that road. I think this is also partially why capitalist restoration could be achieved “without violence” – the old Trotskyist insistence that a “workers’ state” could no more be overthrown by a restored capitalism without violence than a capitalist state can be overthrown by the working class peacefully. The violence - on a huge, countrywide scale – took place a decade and a half before even the initial tame turn towards “markets”. The process, in other words, took place in stages, with a big delay in between the political and the economic (regardless of what was in the heads of those who led the political phase of smashing the deformed ‘workers state’). If we extend this elsewhere, perhaps the 1930s in the USSR, 1956 for Hungary, 1968 for Czechoslovakia etc represented similar “political counterrevolutions within the (already Stalinist) political counterrevolution.” By 1989-91, any need for violence in restoration was long gone. On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 7:56 AM Chris Slee <[email protected]> wrote: > The Red Guards no doubt believed they were advancing socialism. But their > actions set back the struggle for socialism. > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6032): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6032 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80250914/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
