Political Economy of Socialism

Harsh Thakor

Veteran Chinese communist Zhang Chunqiao died of throat cancer on April 21, 2005, at the age of 88.Thus, communists across the world commemorated his 20th death anniversary in April. Marxists also commemorate the 50th anniversary of historic document ‘On Exercising the All-Around Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, written in January 1975 and publishing of the Shanghai textbook of political economy, also published in 1975.

Despite Zhang’s distinguished career as a communist theoretician and organiser, his death was given no official fanfare in China. He was in prison from 1976 to 1998, and lived his final years in obscurity.

Zhang Chun Qiao’s life is an example of a relentless Communist revolutionary who could withstand the most perilous conditions, handling the most complex of situations. Till the last drop of his blood he waved the banner of Maoism in waging a revolutionary struggle within a Socialist state, devising a perfect blending of polemical mastery with revolutionary creativity.

Zhang was a Shanghai journalist who had joined the party in the late 1930s. He fought as a guerrilla fighter behind the enemy lines in the war against the Japanese occupation.

In November 1965, one of the publications that Zhang edited published an essay by Yao Wenyuan criticising a play that had been published four years earlier. The critique of the play was to politically counterpose elements within the Communist Party that advocated using elements of capitalism–for example, private ownership of land–to develop the economy.

The essay was the precursor in triggering an intense struggle against who were termed as “capitalist roaders” within the CCP. Those in the party who believed in the socialist road of the Chinese revolution–Mao included–launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a means of bringing the masses into the fold of what had been up to that point an inner-party struggle.

Zhang traversed different phases and circumstances when providing leadership to the complex battles that kept the capitalist-roaders at bay while working to eradicate the social remnants inherent from the old society.

Zhang played a key role in this struggle as one of the key members of the Group in Charge of the Cultural Revolution. The GCCR was formally responsible to the CCP’s Central Committee, charged in August 1966 with carrying out the party’s “Sixteen Point Decision.”

Based in Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao played an integral role in expanding the base of the Cultural Revolution from a student-based movement to the working class.

In late 1966, Zhang was deputed with task of setting up the “Shanghai Commune,” modelled after the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune had been recognised as a new form of state by revolutionary leaders Karl Marx and V I Lenin.

The students and workers who had mobilised to push forward the Chinese revolution were to be the base of a new type of government. No longer would bureaucratic elements administer the party and state from behind closed doors, separate from the masses.

Zhang embarked on work in Shanghai organising the Workers Headquarters, bringing factory committees into the forefront of the Cultural Revolution mobilisation.

In 1967, as the Cultural Revolution progressed, he led an ground shaking event known as the January Storm. After months of intense débâte to résolve the issues, rebels from Shanghai’s factories, as well as the neighbourhoods and schools, toppled the old city administration, a stronghold of the capitalist-roaders. Led by revolutionary party members, at first they tried to establish the Shanghai Commune. This was based on the model of the 1871 Paris Commune, the first, short-lived working-class revolution, where there was no professional army and all officials were elected and subject to immediate recall at any time.

In 1975, as the struggle was blossoming at a new height, Zhang published ‘On Exercising the All-Around Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, a short but dense text that had an explosive political effect.

It explored the contradictory nature of socialism, the manner it investigated by the contention of elements of the old society and the new. Zhang diagnosed Mao’s understanding of socialism as a society in transition.

It made a most comprehensive analysis of the prevailing conditions and the root cause of revisionism and explained Mao’s concept of continuing the dictatorship of the Proletariat was an extension of Leninism. It explored and diagnosed most intensively the roots of the ideology of both Marx and Lenin of combating the bourgeoisie within the party and morally supported a cultural revolution.

First of all, he wrote, socialist ownership had not been completely established, especially in the countryside, and it could be easily lost. Secondly, the relations between people in production also had to continuously change, with working people having to be increasingly drawn into the management of production and, the administration of the entire society. Further, the relations of distribution also had to change, so that in stages society could begin to leave behind the principle of paying people according to their work.

It analysed how in the absence of persistent struggle to advance in all the relations between people and not just ownership, and struggle in the sphere of culture and ideas against the outlook and habits inherited from the old society, socialist ownership would be overturned and the old relationships, instead of being gradually wiped out, would be restored with vengeance.

It investigated how the most vital contradiction in socialist society was within the party itself, between those patronising ideas and policies representing the interests of a new bourgeoisie, and the representatives of the proletariat, the working class that cannot emancipate itself without revolutionising all relations among people throughout the globe. This manifests itself in a struggle between two ideological and political currents that would drive society in opposite directions.

For one thing Zhang was unable to properly establish a united front to combat the capitalist roaders, with powerful left sectarian tendencies surfacing. Insufficient focus was placed on establishing or correcting errors in practising Massline.

No effective fortified infrastructure was built to insulate the movement and replenish forces.

Broad based mobilisation of the working class was ineffective in the struggles and for a considerable period the revolutionary Committees were defunct. Influence of rightist forces in the Army was not repealed. Excesses were not checked.

Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai Textbook on Socialist Political Economy written in 1975 is one of the most comprehensive explorations by the Maoist revolutionaries of their views on the nature and functioning of the socialist alternative to capitalism. It makes a path-breaking contribution to socialist economic theory. In the current world climate, the book assumes heightened importance–because the claim is made that there is in fact no alternative to capitalism, relegating Socialism, to be doomed.

It was Zhang who had formulated the initial plans for the Political Economy of Socialism. He had issued directives about its contents, had led several important discussion meetings concerned with the text, and had, reviewed final drafts.

The book was a testament that society be organised eradicating exploitation, competition, and private gain. Alienation, social fragmentation, and bureaucratic domination have their roots in economic and technological development. What heights were scaled in revolutionary China between 1949 and 1976 were truly path-breaking.

The book showcased Maoist Economics and the Future of Socialism in building a breeding ground towards creating a new socialist society as a transition to full communist society, in which men and women would consciously and voluntarily, and through great struggles, transform and govern the world by themselves. At the same time, while imbibing the positive experiences of the first efforts to build a socialist economy in the Soviet Union, Mao dialectically reformulated the prevailing model of a planned socialist economy that became institutionalised under Stalin.

The book reflects how Mao was conceptualising and implementing a set of solutions to the real problems of developing a planned socialist economy that is not based on bureaucratised regulation or reproduce oppressive capitalist relations.

The book reveals how the Chinese revolutionaries were preparing for battle, how they were training people to identify the structures and mechanisms within socialist society that had to be transformed and to understand what was ultimately at stake–to continue the revolution or witness it overturned.

The book explored how Maoist model also represents a complete anti-thesis of the orthodox Western approach to “underdevelopment,” which perceives under-development as nothing more than delayed development that can only be escalated and promoted through absorption of foreign capital and participation in the international division of labour. Revolutionary China, by contrast, cut off from the world imperialist system. It formulated and implemented a developmental strategy based on giving priority to agriculture, utilising simple and intermediate technologies that could be spread and adopted throughout the economy while seeking to develop and apply advanced technology in a way that would promote self-reliance, and, above all, unleashing people.

Without doubt there were problems and mistakes. The economy had certain weak points; the new social institutions certainly had some flaws; and in the booming of mass struggle, errors were rampant–sometimes due to people getting carried away in their drive to change things, other times due to dogma.

What is at issue here is the feasibility of revolutionary communism-whether or not it is possible to end oppression and class distinctions on the basis of the voluntary and collective efforts of millions.

The Shanghai Textbook is a concoction of synthesis and originality, conceptualises socialism as three interrelated things. First, it is a form of class rule through which the proletariat (in alliance with other popular strata, most especially the poor peasantry in the oppressed Third World nations) rules over old and newly-engendered bourgeois and exploiting forces. Second, it is a mode of production in which social ownership replaces private ownership of the means of production and social need replaces private profit as the purpose and measure of social production. Third, it is a period of transition characterised by intense class struggle and penetrative transformation, the aim of which is to eradicate classes and class distinctions on a world scale and as part of a worldwide process of revolution.

The authors of the Shanghai Textbook endorse the view of the Narodniks that without the development of agriculture the development of the national economy is not possible, and therefore they conclude that the development of the national economy is determined by the development of agriculture. The growth of capitalism during its early stages of development took place despite a shrinkage of the peasant market because of the expansion of the market of the means of production. Under socialism, the large masses of individual producers do not disappear under the pressure of the development of capitalism in the countryside, nor does the peasant’s market shrink in favour of the development of industry, as happens under capitalism. Much to the contrary, in the transitional economy the expansion of the forces of production in agriculture is mainly driven by heavy industry. To endorse that the development of agriculture in a relatively backward country like China can take place on the basis of simple cooperation without the assistance of the state in the form of a solid heavy industry is a reflection of a weak comprehension of the basics of Marxist political economy. The economic history of the construction of socialism has shown that failure to understand and implement this in economic practice ultimately leads to the development of capitalism in the countryside. The authors of the Shanghai Textbook contradict this thesis. They arrive at the same conclusions as the Narodniks when they even questioned the feasibility of the development of capitalism in Russia.

[Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist. Thanks information from Raymond Lotta ‘and Rafael Martinez in Revolutionary Democracy.]

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Frontier Autumn Number
Vol 58, No. 14 - 17, Sep 28 - Oct 25, 2025