Posting essays here on Kasama does not represent endorsement of the views presented. We share it here because it is of interest to our readers, and will encourage discussion on the lessons of the socialist revolution in the twentieth century.
To engage one of the key assumptions of this essay here in our introduction: Tariq Ali essay repeats an assertion common to many Trotskyist and “post-Trotskyist” analysis — that the way to understand the Chinese revolution, its politics and contradictions is to view it as a variant of Stalinism (and to act as if a 1930s Trotskyist critique of Stalinism is the prism through which one can understand Mao and Maoism over the next forty years).
For example Tariqi Ali writes:
“One of the tragedies of world communism was that most of the parties it spawned came of age and became mass organizations during the 1930s and 40s. By this time the early traditions of dissent and debate within the Bolshevik Party had been suppressed and most of their participants—including 90 per cent of those who served Lenin’s Central Committee—brutally exterminated. The model that new Communists imbibed was the one they encountered in Moscow: a social dictatorship of the Party/bureaucracy that was master of all public life and sustained by institutionalized networks of repression. This was the system put in place when they came to power or even within parties active in the capitalist and colonial worlds. The stifling of debate weakened both Party and state.”
Is this true? Is this sufficient? Is the party and state of the Chinese experience merely a reproduction of the Soviet “model” — or is this experience a struggle between several poles: Chinese feudalism, pro-western capitalist modernization, the Stalin model, and then a distinctive Maoist alternative to all three?
Then, at the same time Tariq Ali makes another point which confronts us all (whether we are sympathetic to Maoism or not):
“As Chinese capitalism proceeds further, creating even more social and economic disparities, perhaps some of Mao’s ideas might be deployed by the insurgent masses as they seek to storm the heavens once again.”
Thanks to JP and the folks at Socialist Unity for this essay which originally appeared on the Chairman Mao Zedong site. It is one of Mao’s earliest known writings — from April 1917, as Mao was seeking a road to liberation, but before he became a Communist.
China at that time was humiliated — carved up and dominated by foreign powers. The internal feudal culture was discredited among forward-looking sections of the youth. In opposition to the old, conservative views, that despised physical labor and glorified aristocratic dissolution, young radicals started to create a militant, new, pro-scientific culture — that was determined to learn from the rest of the world and transform China in order to liberate its people. Physical fitness was part of that — and was shockingly rebellious against the old ways. It was a cultural trend filled with political symbolism and preparation.
This discussion of fitness suggests how the appearance (i.e. first arrival) of a real-life revolutionary movement is marked by its moment in the culture.
“Because man is an animal, movement is most important for him. And because he is a rational animal, his movements must have a reason.”
“Civilize the mind and make savage the body.”
“Perseverance without concentration of mind can hardly produce results. If we look at flowers from a galloping horse, even though we may look daily, it is like not having seen them at all. If one person’s heart follows a swan in the sky, he cannot compete with the person who has meanwhile been studying carefully.”
“I have had many long conversations with campesinos and workers from Oaxaca to Chihuahua to the factories and fields of California. Most of these workers have a 6th grade to high school education or none at all. Almost always they will show a rapt,attentive and curious attitude towards me when I speak of Marx-Lenin-Mao.”
“I love to tell stories and draw parallels between what they said and what happened to them during their time in history and make comparisons to the present.”
“I find it almost impossible to avoid reference to communist ideas and history. It seems to me that anyone who attempts doing so is either fooling themselves or intentionally betraying Communism. That’s my opinion.
“Don’t underestimate the power of the people to be open to Marx-Lenin-Mao. there are thousands of ways to talk about Marx-Lenin-Mao without being boring,trite and appear “old hat” as one of our posters stated in one of her posts. It is a matter of being creative and imaginative.daring to express your communist views.
“Poor people who know you,who speak the same language,who can relate culturally and most of all respect and trust you will listen and think about what you are saying about communism.if they respect you they will listen.”
“Going out to the people with a Kasama Project would require a solid consensus and commitment centered around a well thought out, thoroughly dense ideological package.”
We have been discussing a wave of anti-communist charges that have been aimed at the revolutionary Maoist period in China.
In that discussion, we noted that a new book is appearing: Frank Dikötter’s 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe. It is advertised to be an exposure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (and the food shortages of 1958-62).
This book itself has not yet been extensively dissected and vetted. However there is already an exposure of a falsification concerning the book’s cover.
That cover appears on the right. The website “Genocide Studies Media File” has documented that this cover photo is a misrepresentation. (Thanks to BJ for suggesting that we expose this.)
One of the frustrating things about communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is his blanket acceptance of many anti-communist summations, made even as he provocatively puts forward, in his own idiosyncratic way, the communist cause and its giant figures like Lenin and Mao.
“[Žižek] makes no distinction between the USSR under Stalin, the USSR under Khruschev, China under Mao, and China since the 1980s, and classifies it all as ’20th century Communism.’ A lot of us, I’m sure, would want to say that there are qualitative distinctions within that melange and that it doesn’t all fit under that label. So the challenge is to analyze and think, and not dogmatically from the past.”
In one notorious example, Žižek helped publish and promote a new edition of Mao Zedong’s philosophical essays “On Practice and Contradiction” — which is a much-needed development bringing important communist essays (once again!) into countless college classrooms. But then he prefaced it all with his own ominously named essay “Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule.” That preface is complex and not easily characterized — but among its themes is, once again, that very strange willingness to simply accept (to swallow whole) extreme anticommunist charges as if they were true.
In 2005, the British publisher Jonathan Cape launched Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, to great fanfare. The book pictures Mao as a liar, ignoramus, fool, philistine, vandal, lecher, glutton, hedonist, drug-peddler, ghoul, bully, thug, coward, posturer, manipulator, psychopath, sadist, torturer, despot, megalomaniac and the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century – in short, a monster, equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin. He cared nothing about the fate of the Chinese people and his fellow human beings, or even his close friends and relatives. He was driven by bloodlust and the craving for power and sex. He ruled by terror, led by native cunning, and defeated Chiang Kai-shek by leaning towards Stalin and treacherously insinuating moles and sleepers into the Guomindang.
The book rocketed to the top of the best-seller list in the UK and elsewhere and was hailed as a bombshell, triumph and irrefutable authority. Its success was due in part to the popularity of Wild Swans (1991), a family biography of Chang herself, her mother, and her grandmother, which sold 12 million copies and made her an international celebrity; but also due to the rapturous welcome press reviewers gave the expertly marketed Mao. The media ferment was in turn part of the larger political context of selective China-bashing in the long aftermath of the Cold War, with Mao still haunting the intellectual debates beyond China’s borders about the legitimacy of its post-Mao order.
During the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: In this one picture you can see the complexity of mass mobilization in the mix of consciousness, passivity, obligation and passionate participation
From Bob Avakian’s K. Venu Polemic:
“Lenin does frankly discuss the fact that
“‘in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class.’…
One can only ask here: what is wrong with this?”
“…it does not get to the essence of things if the masses have the formal right to replace leaders, when the social conditions (contradictions) are such that some people are less “replaceable” than others… Voting Mao out of office would only mean that somebody less qualified—or, even worse, someone representing the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat—would be playing that leadership role. You can’t get around this, and adhering to the strictures of formal democracy would be no help at all.”
“Given the contradictions that characterize the transition from capitalism to communism, worldwide, if the party did not play the leading role that it has within the proletarian state, that role would be played by other organized groups—bourgeois cliques—and soon enough the state would no longer be proletarian, but bourgeois. … the problem with the ruling parties in the revisionist countries is not that they have had a ‘monopoly’ of political power but that they have exercised that political power to restore and maintain capitalism. The problem is that they are not revolutionary, not really communist—and therefore they do not rely on and mobilize the masses to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to continue the revolution under this dictatorship.”
Intro by Mike Ely
I am reading Badiou’s new work “Communist Hypothesis” together with others. It argues that the previous communist Party-State has reached the limits of its historical value. This is connected to a view that the Leninist party itself has shown historical limits, and that new forms of communist organization need to be developed.
We would like to urge our readers to start by tackling (together!) the now available Badiou work on the “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?” which we have recently posted here on Kasama.
As a counterpoint to that: we are continuing to publish excerpts from a detailed defense of the Party-State by Bob Avakian.
“Lets put it this way: Marxist dialectics without negation of negation is less fixated on “lawful” motion– less convinced of the determining role of necessity.. It gives more rein to unpredictable events and less to prophetic prediction. It is less triumphalist and sees more role for both accident and the impact of creative human decisions.”
By Mike Ely
Some of the following was originally tacked onto an earlier post on dialectics (discussing Badili Jones’ essay “Dialectics for Community Organizers.“) That essay puts forward the concept of “negation of the negation” as one of Badili’s three core principles of dialectical logic.
“Engels talked about the three categories, but as for me I don’t believe in two of those categories. (The unity of opposites is the most basic law, the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity, and the negation of the negation does not exist at all.)
The juxtaposition, on the same level, of the transformation of quality and quantity into one another, the negation of the negation, and the law of the unity of opposites is ‘triplism’, not monism. The most basic thing is the unity of opposites. The transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity. There is no such thing as the negation of the negation. Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation . . . in the development of things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation.
“Slave-holding society negated primitive society, but with reference to feudal society it constituted, in turn, the affirmation. Feudal society constituted the negation in relation to slave-holding society but it was in turn the affirmation with reference to capitalist society. Capitalist society was the negation in relation to feudal society, but it is, in turn, the affirmation in relation to socialist society.”
“Even when the people have nothing, they do have themselves, i.e. the potential gravediggers of this society and the potential makers of history.”
By Mike Ely
In our discussion of confronting the rabid anti-mosque hysteria, SKS raised a number of important questions (that might get obscured by hype and hysteria of our own):
“Are we ready for shit? I don’t think so. We can declare all we want, but in this civil war, the other side has all the guns, all the training, all the discipline, and all the will. We have, some websites, dozens of sects, and a few individuals here and there with an odd shotgun or pistol.
“We will get our asses handed to us. This article is not ultra-left, actually in the abstract it is the correct line, but its suicidal in our current conditions. Without a people’s army, the people have nothing. And we have nothing.
I think your approach is a bit one-sided. And rather deeply pessimistic.
A materialist observation about our current weakness
First, let me start where we all agree with you: anyone with a brain who can count will agree with you that some mechanical, frontal assault on this system (or even on its core of fascist supporters) would not be tactically wise.
All we have to do is mention the Greensboro Massacre — here was a lesson that the communist movement in the U.S. paid for in real blood that should be studied. The communists in North Carolina threw out militant and understandable words about “Death to the Klan” and called for a rally, but were simply not tactically prepared when the Klan (with layers of secret government support) came to kill them.
So yes, you are right. Though it is a bit absolute the way you say: “the other side has all the guns, all the training, all the discipline, and all the will.”
They don’t have all the discipline or all the will — but certainly the lineup is incredibly uneven and lopsided.
Taking Initiative Under Adverse Balance of Forces
But it is quite possible, within a strategically adverse situation to creatively inflict major political setbacks on our enemies. And that is in fact (a) how we grow, and (b) in part, how we will move from the strategic defensive to a more favorable allignment of forces.
In 1966, millions of youth stormed the heavens during China’s Cultural Revolution
When Bill Clinton went to China he lectured the Chinese people about “human rights and democracy.” But the U.S. has propped up and sponsored death squads and brutal dictators all over the world and the CIA has been involved in fixed elections. Clinton criticized Chinese leaders for “rounding up dissidents.” But in the U.S., political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal are locked up for their beliefs and Black, Latino and other poor youth are being systematically criminalized, brutalized by the police and imprisoned.
Clinton wants the Chinese people to believe that the capitalist free market will bring them “freedom and democracy.” But this is a lie. For the masses of Chinese people, imperialist penetration and the free market has meant more inequality, a growing gap between the rich and poor, and deepening economic instability.
It is socialism–not capitalism–that brings the masses real liberation.
When the great revolutionary leader Mao Tsetung died in 1976, counter- revolutionaries seized power and brought capitalism back to China. But for over 25 years China was a socialist country.
Under the leadership of Mao, the masses of people participated in the revolutionary struggle to transform society–to do away with classes, all inequalities and oppression. And during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, millions of students, workers, and peasants were mobilized to expose and kick out high-level authorities and party leaders who were trying to take China down the capitalist road.
Mao pointed out that even with new socialist relations there were leftovers from bourgeois society and the basis for inequalities. He pointed out that the basic divisions continue to exist in socialist society: between mental and manual labor, between town and country, and between workers and peasants. He said that a new bourgeoisie continually arises under socialism– concentrated at the highest levels of the party–and that class struggle continues under socialism, all the way to the elimination of all classes and the establishment of communism on a world scale.
Thousands of working class and farmer struggles have been erupting in China -- including this confrontation at Honda
The following document reportedly comes from an underground organization within China. Little is known about them (including their size or influence) other than what has been shared here. Kasama is posting it because of its obvious interest, without being able to independently evaluate its authenticity. Thanks to Iseul for making it available.
The Ten Declarations of the Maoist Communist Party of China (MCPC)
22 March 2009
一、强烈抗议中国共产党修正主义叛徒统治集团对我党实行秘密追剿的声明！
1. We strongly condemn the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party and its policy of secretive suppression of our party!
On 26 December 2008, our party gave out the pamphlet “To all the people of China” that declares that “the peoples of China have the right to rise up against the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party” in the central districts of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. By doing this we have “dared to touch the tiger’s ass”!
Afterwards we engaged in more propaganda online and in other cities. This revolutionary action of our party has resulted in a strong political wave against the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party, and managed to beat down the arrogant air of the revisionist ruling bloc.
This is the clarion call for a great revolutionary movement among the Chinese proletariat against capitalist restoration; this is the signal flare to mobilise the people to strike against the crimes conducted by the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc; to peel away the false skin of the revisionists, and to engage in a people’s revolutionary war through both words and actions.
U.S. reconquest of the Pacific: Was this mainly an antifascist act or a colonialist one?
“Our world strategy should place revolution and the defeat of imperialism central in our thinking and action — not this or that state interest of socialist states, not temporary alliances with various reactionary powers.”
by Mike Ely
May 9 objected angrily to my analysis that World War 2 was principally an interimperialist war.
Let me open up my argument by stepping back, and seeing the current importance of this argument against “international united front against a single main enemy.”
This question is not just historic but acutely strategic:
Is there a single worldwide united front against a main enemy today?
Can one be built?
Do the people of the world (at each point) somehow have one single “main enemy”worldwide (among the various imperialists and reactionary powers they face)? And if so, how is it determined?
Part of the reasonv this matters is that the argument of “united front against main enemy” has been used in the present time to portray any force opposed to the United States as (somehow) “objectively anti-imperialist.”Even in the absence of an organized international communist movement or a major socialist country, this view is asserted — so that a number of different, highly reactionary forces are portrayed as “objectively” allies of oppressed people (including, in some cases, oppressors like Islamist theocrats or Milosevic style chauvinists in the Balkans or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or revanchist Russian imperialism in the Caucasus etc.)
We needto look at the arguments (claiming such forces are “allies”) in an objective class analysis, and also examine the theoretical framework that assumes there is a single “main enemy” (and that its existence defines the objective role of various reactionary forces).
What Difference Does a Revolution Make? A Contrast of India and China
by Bob Weil | 16 July 2010
I. Commonalities
At the time of their casting off of colonialism—India gaining independence from Britain in 1947, China putting an end to a century of imperialist domination in 1949—the two largest countries in Asia shared many common characteristics. Each possessed an enormous continental landmass with a population in the hundreds of millions, the most populous in the world. In both the anti-colonial struggle extended over many decades, with the forces that led to eventual victory having consolidated by the 1920s. Each inherited a fractured territory, with imperialist backed enemies forcing the diversion of limited resources into military preparations and conflicts—India with Pakistan, in three wars, and ongoing clashes over Kashmir, China still colonized in Hong Kong and Macao, divided from Taiwan, with open warfare in Korea, and threatened spillover from Vietnam. Both experienced extreme birthpains, in the Chinese case the aftermath of occupation and civil war, in the Indian-Pakistani, death and dislocation in the population exchange across their new border, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Despite their many obvious differences—China lacked the communal and caste divisions of India, had never been fully colonized, and could rely initially on assistance from the Soviet Union—the two countries began their new national stage in roughly similar shape.
I think this is one of the most important discussions we have… and one we need to press ahead with a lot more energy. It opened up with the publishing of a study guide of a familiar (orthodox) ML kind.
That study guide starts by proclaiming its focus is “the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism, the science of revolution.”
And then it explains:
“Marxism-Leninism is the synthesis and summation of the historic experiences of the revolutionary struggles of working and oppressed people against capitalism and imperialism for more than 160 years, and as such it is a weapon to be used by working and oppressed people in their struggles for emancipation, liberation, and the building of a new world. As Stalin has said, Marxism-Leninism is not a dogma but a guide to action”
This is all very pat and very flat — and very un-contradictory. The synthesis, summation, weapon and science we need is right there, it exists, and it is ready to be our guide to action. (And it has been there presumably, all along, for a century or more.)
“I think the idea of “classics” here is highly problematic. There is certainly much in this list that might be useful for particular studies and I can certainly see consulting it. But as actual courses of study these is really more about inculcating people into an already established ideology than they are about training people to think critically about these questions.”
Time’s up….
Here is my view:
If you teach scientific ideas in a religious way, you have not taught science, you have taught religion. If you gather up buckets of “true facts” and teach them in a rote and dogmatic way, you have not taught truth you have taught rote and dogma.
There is a great wealth of insight and experience embodied in the past revolutionary attempts — both in their theoretical work and their actual practice. It is extremely important to dig deeply into it, to become familiar with the history and theory of 19th and 20th century communist movements. (And almost all of the works listed in this guide are well worth reading.)
But the approach that turns a core set of such writings into “classics” is the teaching of religion not creative materialist thinking. And in the end it makes it impossible to learn many of the things we need to learn.
There is great power and precious material within the body of international Marxist theory and method — but if we treat it like an encapsulated and semi-finished doctrine we will be depriving ourselves of that power, and circulating dead verdicts out of space and time, drained of precisely the creative analytical approaches that Marx pioneered, and that Lenin and Mao advanced to lead revolutions.
For that reason it was valuable to raise that remark from Lenin:
“People for the most part (99 percent of the bourgeoisie, 98 percent of the liquidators, about 60‑70 percent of the Bolsheviks) don’t know how to think, they only learn words by heart.”
When oppressed people break out into ferocious struggle, when they risk everything to strike out at their tormentors, when they exceed what some people consider “proper limits,” what should be our stand?
And what is our responsibility as revolutionaries?
Not to criticize in cranky ways from the sidelines.
Not to tail whatever newly awakened people choose do.
Certainly not to stand against the people and try to smother their outrage and energy.
What does it mean to help raise the level of the popular resistance, to give it a more and more conscious and organized expression?
When the people act, in militant ways, how should they choose their targets?
Who are their friends and who are their enemies?
Who are their potential audiences and potential allies?
Who are they trying to involve and who are they trying to awaken and influence?
What do such strategic considerations mean for the forms of struggle and resistance? How can the more conscious and organized forces help promote those more advanced forms of struggle and resistance?
There is much to learn about orientation and strategy from Mao Zedong’s communist stand during ferocious popular rebellion when there was a sudden eruption of fearful conservatism among the supposedly progressive.
* * * * * * * * *
The Excerpts from Mao Zedong are about: Knowing Your Enemy, Standing with the People & Exceeding the Usual Limits
In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.
“Revolutionary politics and militant tactics are inherently shocking to powerful sections of society. It is certainly unacceptable to that liberal establishment (that some want to ally with). It is offensive and infuriating to the more backward. And any serious revolutionary movement needs to travel (with enthusiasm) straight into those hostile winds — with a deep strategic sense that there are other forces who in class society who are not nearly so conservative.”
* * * * * * *
This discussion is about general politics and overall evaluations — it does not advocate any specific acts, in any specific timeframe.
“i find it a little odd the way Marxists in the US always associate militant action with anarchists almost exclusively.”
That is a misunderstanding. I think you are talking to the wrong Marxists. The experience of the Maoist movement in the U.S. (to take just one example) is closely tied with many forms of militancy — starting with the Black Panther policies of armed self defense, and then also with the militant combativity of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). And denoucing militancy is (in my view) associated with very particular currents within the Left — whose strategic errors are closely tied up with those tactical views..
Learning and Practicing Street-Fighting in 1968
While in high school, those of us attracted to SDS took classes at a local “Free University” in radical theory and the street fighting snake dances of the Japanese Zengakuren.
Sixty years ago, the U.S. army continued to occupy southern Korea, five long years after Japan had been defeated. It was clear to the whole world that the U.S. did not intend to leave Korea, but had instituted its own colonial occupation in the place of the Japanese. And it was also clear that this forward basing of U.S. troops was intended as a foothold on the mainland of Asia — a military threat to the new revolution in China.
On June 25, 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula as newly formed armies of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea engaged and drove back the U.S. occupiers. A bitter three-year war had started.
This is the story about a historic and unprecedented U.S. defeat — the first direct confrontation between a triumphant U.S. imperialism and the new revolutionary forces they were fighting to contain.
Under U.S. General MacArthur, the Americans were first driven back, to their southern enclave at Pusan, and then (after the Inchon landing) started to push the DPRK forces north, toward the Yalu River and China itself.
Clearly they had visions of taking back China. And we now know how extensive their secret debates were — about using nuclear weapons against revolutionary China.
The following is a little known story about the intervention of revolutionary Chinese troops into the Korea war, and how they drove the U.S. Army back from their borders by applying revolutionary methods of warfare.
This piece originally appeared in the Revolutionary Worker newspaper on the 50th anniversary of the Korea war (June 18 and 25,2000).Both parts appear below.
Tearing Up the U.S. Paper Tiger in Korea
Part 1: How 300,000 Chinese Troops Snuck into Korea & Kicked the Ass of the U.S. Armed Forces
INTRODUCTION
On June 25, 1950 the Korean People’s Army (KPA) army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea let loose a full-scale attack, pushing aside the troops of the reactionary Republic of Korea along the 38th parallel (the line demarcating North and South Korea). A civil war had begun. The United States which had been training and arming the Republic of Korea (ROK) army as part of its own plans to gain a foothold in Korea used the KPA offensive as an excuse to launch its own war of aggresression against the Korean people.
Joan Hinton has died. She was one of the “Friends of China” who participated in the Chinese revolutionary struggle from early agricultural revolution through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Earlier in her life she had been an American physicist participating in the Manhattan Project during World War 2 — and targeted as a potential atomic spy for the socialist camp in the McCarthy years that followed.
On August 29th (or in June, according to another source), 1966, Joan Hinton, Erwin Engst and two other Americans living in China—Bertha Sneck (Shǐ Kè 史克, who had previously been married to Joan’s brother William) and Ann Tomkins (Tāngpǔjīnsēn 汤普金森)—signed a poster put up at the Foreign Experts Bureau in Beijing with the following text:
Which monsters and freaks are pulling the strings so foreigners get this kind of treatment? Foreigners working in China, no matter what class background they have, no matter what their attitude is toward the revolution, they all get the “five nots and two haves”: the five nots—first: no physical labour, second: no thought reform, third: no chances of contacts with workers and peasants, fourth: no participation in class struggle, fifth: no participation in production struggle; the two haves—first: they have an exceptionally high living standard, second: they have all kinds of specialisation. What kind of concept is that? This is Khrushchevism, this is revisionist thinking, this is class exploitation! [...] We demand: [...] Seventh: the same living standard and he same level of Chinese staff; eighth: no specialisation any more. Long live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!
A copy of the poster was shown to Mao Zedong, who issued a directive that “revolutionary foreign experts and their children should be treated the same as the Chinese.”
Tariq Ali is a well known political activist and novelist — whose background is within the Trotskyist movement of Britain.
