CHINESE SHIFT POSITION ON STALIN by Pat Jordan
The full text of the "Red Flag's ninth comment on the CPSU open letter" consists, in the main with all-too-familar material. However, there are two features, both of which may indicate quite a radical shift in the Chinese ideological position. A section of the second chapter willLilustrate this:
"..As the Sovict Union was the first, and at the time the only, country to build socialism and had no foreign experience to go by, and as Stalin departed from Marxist-Leninist dialectics in his understanding of the laws of class struggle in socialist society, he prematurely declared after agriculture was basically collectivised that there were 'no longer antagon= istic classes! (in "On the Draft Constitution of the USSR") in the Soviet Union and that it was "free of class conflicts" (report to the I8th Congress of the CPSU), one-sidaily stressed the internal homogenity of socialist society and overlooked its contradiction, failed to rely on the working class and the masses in the struggle against the forces of capitalism and regarded the possibility of the restoration of capitalism as associated only with armed attack by international imperialism. This was wrong both in theory and - practice, Nevertheless, Stalin remained a great Marxist-Leninist..."
This chapter goes on to denounce Khrushchov for pushing through a whole series of policies which have "greatly hastened the forces of capitalism....ein the Soviet Union, Being more explicit it speaks of "the generation of new bourgeois elements on a large scale and the acceleration of class polerisation." It gives examples of "leading functionaires of some stateowned factories..." using "their positionses.e.eto set up ‘underground workshops' for private production.." and of functionartes who "turn collective economic enterprises into economic enterprises of new kulaks", these poople being protected from above, All this leads them to the conclusions "Obviously, they all belong to a class that is antagonistic to the proletariat and the labouring farmers, belong to.the kulsk or rural bourgeois class" and that a “privileged bourgeois stratum has emerged in soviet society." Shades of 'state-capitalisnm.
The next chapter defines what the Chinese mean by this privileged stratum and refers to Lenin's struggle against tho re-omergence of capitalist forces in the Sovict Union. They say "he laid great stress on adherence to ‘the principle of the Paris Commune in wage policy...".. Whilst they claim Stalin continued this struggle they admit: "It cannot be denied that before Stalin's death high salaries were already being paid to certain groups and that some cadres had already become bourgeois elements..." What Khrushchov has done, according to them, is to speed up this process. They call upon the masses of the Soviet Union to "smash the plot for the restoration of capitalism."
Thus we have two conflicting tendencies, as usual, in the Chinese positions. On the one hand they are now beginning to admit that the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union begs under Stalin, and at tht, in part at least, Stalin's incorrect theories were responsible. This is a development which all socialists, no matter what their assessment of the Sino-Soviet dispute is, should welcome, This shift, especially if it is developed will materially help the democratisation of the Communist states. The other tendency is disturbing: if the Chinese come round to saying that Russia is 'state-capitalist' the unity of Russians and Chinese against U.S. imperialism will receive a death-blow,