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 to 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 formation, 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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