On 'On democratic centralism'

Well, this is maifestly an intervention into a specific climate, into the CCP in - well, I'm not sure what year. Still, it's clearly a didactic method aimed at guiding the practice of the Party, which is in this period clearly wavering from what it should be. I think it's important to remember here that Mao is just a participant in a struggle, albeit one with a very privileged position, who is trying to make an intervention with the aims of guiding the revolution in the right direction.

The point which most alarmed me was Mao insistence on the necessity of "unity of understanding," which seemed to me at first blush to be an insistence that all people have the same ideas, which is impossible, hence a dangerous goal to try to pusue politically. However, given the context and audience, it is clear that what Mao is trying to say is that the masses themselves must understand what is being done by the Party, and that the Party must understand the perspective of the masses, rather than the Party believing themselves to have the understanding and treating the masses like animals to be herded, which at the same time in fact must mean that the Party themselves do not understand what is going on.

The following passage appears prescient from our present perspective:

Unless we fully promote people's democracy and inner-Party democracy ad unless we fully impelement [sic] proletarian democracy, it will be impossible for China to have true proletarian centralism [i.e., as I outlined above, the unity of Party and masses — I would love to be able to analyse the Chinese on this point]. Without a high degree of democracy it is impossible to have a high degree of centralism, and without a high degree of centralism it is impossible to establish a socialist economy. And what will happen to our country if we fail to establish a socialist economy? It will turn into a revisionist state, indeed a bourgeois state, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and a reactionary, fascist dictatorship at that. This is a question which very much deserves our vigilance and I hope our comrades will give it a good deal of though.

OK, so what Mao is doing here is laying out the conditions under which socialism can flourish in China. It is impossible to know whether he was right about this: I think it is clear that there wasn't that much democracy, but I think it is impossible to know how much would have been enough, or indeed if any amount would have been enough without other factors also being there. It is clear in any case that this struggle was lost and that Mao's intervention, both that showcased here and the apparently extreme intervention of launching the cultural revolution simply did not prevent the restoration of capitalism in China.

It's clear then that the 'democratic' line which Prachanda is now pushing in Nepal is based on extending the Maoist logic, attempting from the beginning to insist on democratic mechanisms that were not applied in China. Of course, this makes sense in Nepal because, unlike in China, there is already a bourgeois electoral system in place which can be harnessed towards this purpose, which seems to be the way Prachanada is pushing, which also enables him to hook up with the established parties. I ought also here to acknowledge the extent to which this thinking seems to me to come from Bob Avakian, although it also seems to me that this is pretty much the only noteworthy contribution from Avakian that I am aware of, and that both he and Prachanda seem to me to err on the side of dodgy personality cultism, as indeed does Mao.

Mao is interesting in this piece, however, in admonishing the Partymen for not having publicised Mao's own self-criticism. This in fact segues nicely with some stuff I was reading recently from Stalin apologists arguing with some plausibility that the cult of personality of Stalin served not Stalin, but rather bureaucratic functionaries, and that it was they who propagated it against Stalin's wishes. One can well believe this with Mao, particularly considering that Mao has continued to be deployed by the CCP as a symbol for them to use as a cloak for their restoration of everything Mao opposed.