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 2013, Africans can still feel the truth of these words in
relation to their own experience.
In 2013, sixty-four 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 fully 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 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.
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