National Democratic
Revolution, Part 4
In all the countries of the
world, there is division into classes.
The form of study or
discipline that enumerates, names, describes, and narrates the changing
absolute and relative condition of all the classes is correctly called
Political Economy, meaning literally, the arrangement of the classes within the
overall polity.
In Marxist terms this study
has to be an “ascent from the abstract to the concrete”, or in other words it
must make possible a view of the whole social phenomenon as a “unity and
struggle of opposites”, at a particular moment in time.
The social classes are formed
as a consequence of various modes of production. The study of the bourgeois
mode of production in isolation, and the imagined generalisation of its laws to
the entirety of current human experience, and to history, is what is known as
(bourgeois) “Economics”. The confinement of political thought within the bounds
of bourgeois economics would cripple it and render us incapable of projecting
forward in any way, and especially not towards socialism.
Hence revolutionaries from
time to time, and with varying degrees of precision and detail, are apt to
prepare a balance sheet of the Political Economy at a particular moment in
time. This is what Karl Marx did in the “Class
Struggles in France 1848-1850”, and in “The
18th Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte” (1852). These were exemplary calculations, which
apart from their practical revolutionary value, served forever after to educate
and to re-educate revolutionaries about the facts of class-struggle life.
Mao Zedong’s extraordinary
study of the political economy of China in 1939, called “The Chinese
Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party”, is another great example of this
kind of exercise (attached; otherwise please click on the first link below and
download it).
This piece of writing is
about as concentrated and as directly relevant to South Africa as it could be.
Here you will find the relationship between Imperialism and the most backward,
feudal elements; the role of the national bourgeoisie; the role of the gentry
(rich peasant farmers); the concept of “motive force” and many other matters
that are crucial in South Africa today.
Note that Mao was not
embarrassed to talk of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This is only one of
the differences between the Chinese revolutionaries and their Soviet
counterparts of a generation earlier.
The general scheme of
rational class alliance aimed towards the construction of a national and
democratic republic - what Mao calls the new-democratic
revolution, is as follows:
“…in
present-day China the bourgeois-democratic revolution is no longer of the old
general type, which is now obsolete, but one of a new special type. We call this type the new-democratic
revolution and it is developing in all other colonial and semi-colonial
countries as well as in China. The new-democratic revolution is part of the
world proletarian-socialist revolution, for it resolutely opposes imperialism,
i.e., international capitalism. Politically,
it strives for the joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes over the
imperialists, traitors and reactionaries, and opposes the transformation of
Chinese society into a society under bourgeois dictatorship. Economically,
it aims at the nationalization of all the big enterprises and capital of the
imperialists, traitors and reactionaries, and the distribution among the
peasants of the land held by the landlords, while preserving private capitalist
enterprise in general and not eliminating the rich-peasant economy.”
Taken together with the piece
coming next, which Mao wrote ten years later in the year of the victory of the
Chinese Revolution, 1949, this text allows us to get a sense of the dynamics of
plural class formations, and of their ascent and decline in China, and the
consequent practical inevitability of the National Democratic Revolution.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The Chinese
Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, 1939, Mao Zedong.
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