Dragon Rampant?
World Communism—The Disintegration of a Secular Faith. By Richard Lowenthal. (0.U.P., 42s.) The Communism of Mao Tse-tung. By Arthur A. Cohen. (Chicago U.P., 37s. 6d.) Communist China's Crusade. By Guy Wint. (Pall Mall Press, 21s.) Communist China : The Early Years, 1949-55.
By A. Doak Barnett. (Pall Mall Press, 42s.) MARX and Engels were the prophets of a 'secular faith,' but Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung were supposed to practise it, wielding both Book and Sword. These first three books show how the inherent contradictions of their position have unfolded into the conflict between Moscow, Bel- grade and Peking, bringing polycentrism to the Communist West, and Messianism to the East.
Professor Lowenthal's book is essentially a collection of papers which analysed the disinte- gration of the Communist world over the last ten years. He has brought them up-to-date and in- cluded the latest disclosures in the notes—which, incidentally, show how accurate his original Kremlinology was. He compares Lenin with the early Caliphs of Islam: was he a prophet who had won an empire, or a Czar armed with a new universalist doctrine? He hardly knew himself, and in any case he could abandon neither doctrine nor state interest.
Stalin dealt with this dilemma by simply making the primacy of Soviet state interest an essential part of the doctrine. Lenin's party, divorced from any real social base, somehow 'represented' the Russian proletariat, and since it was building 'socialism in one country,' the 'fatherland of the toilers' could represent the interests of all the chosen people, the world's working class. It followed from this identification of the church with a territorial state that Communism could only be propagated along with Russian military and political power, by revolution from above. But this formula collapsed when Tito and Mao won independent power by the technique of rural guerrilla warfare—revolution from below.
Inverting Stalin's formula, Khrushchev ex- pected the influence of the Soviet state to increase along with the social revolution in other countries, especially in the East. But Mao would not fit into this scheme, and now himself claims to represent the interests not simply of the world's 'toilers,' but of 90 per cent of the world's people. This formula, like Stalin's, is an elaboration of the myth originally produced to rationalise Mao's dictatorship in a more limited sphere. His party- in-arms began life as an itinerant armed band of uprooted peasants and soldiers devoid of any 'social base': it was quite reasonable to say that it was leading a United Front of all 'awakened' classes, rather than just representing the prole- tariat. But the party was not implementing the dictatorship of this New Democratic United Front 'in one country'; it was leading an army, a movement to liberate the country; this is why 'Maoism' differs from Stalinism.
Mr. Cohen quotes extensively from Chinese and Russian sources to show that Mao may have applied Marxist-Leninism brilliantly in practice, but contributed little to theory; then he says that , the dichotomy between theory and practice is ambiguous. More to the point, he demonstrates how practical situations and decisions determined Mao's 'doctrine' or the revision of it. In his essay 'On Contradiction' (1952) Mao discusses the need for a long-term co-existence between the bour- geoisie and his party in the New Democratic United Front, but as usual he raises the discus- sion to a high level of abstraction, balancing 'unity' against 'struggle.' After Stalin's death in 1953 the Chinese suddenly learnt that the period of New Democracy had ended in 1949, and the 'building of socialism' had already begun. This meant that the private sector of the economy would not co-exist for a long period with the state sector, but would undergo 'socialist trans- formation' forthwith.
A campaign is now being waged in China against party officials and intellectuals who apparently stood out in 1953 for the original idea of a long-term United Front and mixed economy. The switch from 'unity' to 'struggle' which began in 1953 has never been fully explained. Cohen blames Mao's perfidy and conceit, but his charges seem entirely subjective. A turning-point seems to have come in 1957 when Mao's campaign for rectification of the bureaucracy by the people turned into a remoulding of the people by the bureaucracy; after this blow to the United Front concept, Mao's original ideology seems to have become increasingly irrelevant to China's real problem—building socialism in one embattled country. But his position as Messiah (and patron of the bureaucrats) has been maintained by build- ing him up as the leader of an international
United Front of peoples sill! struggling for libera- tion, As a result, China conducts her foreign affairs on two levels, diplomatic or national and revolutionary or, one might almost say, mytholo- gical.
Professor Dutt's• scholarly account of this phenomenon is based on fifteen years' study, including three in China. He shows that China's Afro-Asian policy is simply 'New Democracy' writ large, and notes that the Chinese leaders always tend to 'elevate national problems to an ideological level,' as in their relations with Nehru. This suggests that the shifts and ambiguities of Chinese foreign policy may sometimes be due to mediwval thinking rather than duplicity.
The last two books are reissues of earlier works. Mr. Wint has enlarged and brought right up to date his excellent Dragon and Sickle of 1958; its broad scope and plain English are a welcome change from the jargon-studded pages of the usual specialist studies on contemporary China, but there are some weird misprints. It describes how the present rulers of China came to power, and how their relations with the outside world— especially with Russia and India—have developed up to the present day. Professor Barnett observed the establishment and consolidation of the new regime from 1949 to 1955, at first on the spot and then from Hong Kong; during this period he wrote a series of reports and articles which now appear in book form with a short 'epilogue' covering events up to last year. His account of the regime's methods of mass mobilisation and indoctrination is still useful; his discussion of its early economic policy and the related question of 'Party unity and centralisation of power' is interesting in the light of recent events—especially the stIggestion that Mao's actual governmental power was diminished to the benefit of Liu Shao- ch'i and the bureaucracy as early as 1954, when the Constitution of the Republic was adopted after a severe struggle within the party and the purge of some of its senior leaders.
W. A. C. ADIE
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