National Democratic Revolution, Part 4a
People's Democratic Dictatorship
Ten years after the 1939 publication of Mao’s near-perfect
example of the way to lay out the Political Economy of a country given in the
previous instalment, the same Mao stood in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on 1
October 1949, to declare the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Also in 1949, Mao wrote of the People’s Democratic
Dictatorship in a document linked below (please download it). In it he
rehearsed some of the history, for example:
“Imperialist
aggression shattered the fond dreams of the Chinese about learning from the
West. It was very odd - why were the teachers always committing aggression
against their pupil? The Chinese learned a good deal from the West, but they
could not make it work and were never able to realize their ideals. Their
repeated struggles, including such a country-wide movement as the Revolution of
1911, all ended in failure. Day by day, conditions in the country got worse,
and life was made impossible.”
In 2012, Africans can still feel the truth of these words in
relation to their own experience.
In 2012, sixty-three years after the revolution,
China is still called a People’s Republic, and not a socialist republic. Why
is this? How is it constituted?
The Chinese nation is constructed in terms of its political
economy. Mao is very clear about this, for example in the following passage:
“Who are
the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the
peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These
classes, led by the working class and the Communist Party, unite to form their
own state and elect their own government; they enforce their dictatorship over
the running dogs of imperialism - the landlord class and
bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the
Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices - suppress them, allow them only
to behave themselves and not to be unruly in word or deed. If they speak or act
in an unruly way, they will be promptly stopped and punished. Democracy is
practised within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of
speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the
people, not to the reactionaries. The
combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship
over the reactionaries, is the people's democratic dictatorship.”
In 2009, according to information from a Chinese delegation
then touring South Africa, the number of people living in the rural areas
of China was still 800 million, but the number of people in Chinese
cities was by then 500 million, an enormous increase on the three million
“modern industrial workers” counted by Mao in 1939.
The South African
NDR
As we become more aware of what is happening, it becomes
apparent that the National Democratic Revolution should never be seen as a
regrettable compromise, or as a temporary or an interim measure, or even as a
stage, if a stage means a halt.
The National Democratic Revolution is a positive,
revolutionary move forward. It is the only direct move forward that is possible,
in our circumstances, that can be accomplished in a conscious, peaceful,
deliberate and rational way. This is because the NDR corresponds to the
political economy of the country, and because development is class struggle.
The National Democratic Revolutions cannot properly be
defined by a set of tick-boxes next to self-justifying stand-alone goods such
as “non-racial”, “non-sexist” and “unified”, as much as those things may be
desirable in the abstract.
The nature of the NDR and its consequent trajectory can only
be properly and fully seen in the light of Political Economy. The NDR should
always be defined, and from time to time redefined, in relation to a specific
class alliance for unity-in-action.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: People's Democratic
Dictatorship, 1949, Mao Zedong.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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