Once Again, ‘Making the Past Serve the Present’: A Critique of the Chinese Communist Party's New Official History

Abstract

The 1981 revised history of the Chinese revolution changes previous interpretations in fundamental respects. The ‘people's democratic dictatorship’ appropriate to the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution is taken to be synonymous with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which is appropriate to the process of socialist transition. As early as 1956 the Chinese had defined antagonisms as originating outside the socialist system, and in the anti-Right movement reverted to Stalin's notions which put such a view in an extreme form. Mao had denied the existence of ‘economic laws of socialism’ based on theoretical reasoning, but the post- 1976 ideology of China has ignored Mao's warnings in this field. They have also passed over his contention that a change in formal ownership of the means of production might not mean a change in the commodity character of the means of production. One result is the rapid growth in China of a-historical positivist economics and a falling away of the important tradition of Marxian political economy, and non-socialist ideas like the ‘law of planned and proportionate development’ have consequently been able to experience a revival. The official history makes nonsensical comments on Mao and the Cultural Revolution and condemns the ‘communist wind’ of 1958, because its underdeveloped Marxism blinds it to the fact that socialism is a process whereby variations of the capitalist mode are negated and communist forms introduced.