May 1--It would be an act of incredible folly for the governing group in Beijing, and in particular for Deng Xiaoping personally, to embark upon a so-called investigation of the student unrest ending up in harsh penalties and the meting out of punishment to so-called instigators and agitators.Even worse would be a finding that the protests were the product of a "conspiracy" by some small group, whether domestic or foreign. Anything like this would be sure to boomerang, for even if there are small conspiratorial groups, and even if foreign agents are at work, this does not explain the massive, spontaneous character of the student demonstrations and the defiance of the authorities which they manifest.
Such an explanation goes against the grain of all communists, who have always looked upon such spurious explanations for mass activity as coming from the overheated imaginations of reactionaries.
Were the governing group to embark upon an effort to disintegrate the student movement by repressive measures, that would of course merely temporarily halt its advance and prove to be as superficial as any of the old police agent methods were in the good old pre-liberation days. None of these measures touch the fundamental causes of the unrest.
Inflation and corruption
As for the officials, years and years of training in communist doctrine, and the vast experience of the communist government, seem to have been completely thrown overboard at the sight of this new phenomenon. Yet it is the result of old causes: inflation and corruption, the twin elements of a bourgeois program. Inflation is inseparable from capitalist economics; corruption is an invariable concomitant of all bourgeois politics. The students know this. They are within earshot of what is going on in Beijing.
The current developments must be a humiliation for Deng himself, who long awaited the maturation of this very generation of students. This is not the generation that followed the victory of the Long March or the Revolution. It's not the generation of the fifties, or the sixties. This is the Deng generation. And he banked particularly on the students to prove the correctness of his program, i.e., his bourgeois deformation of Marxism, his outright revisionism, his clamoring for the capitalist road.
The Deng generation
Well might these students say, "Here we are." For in truth they are the children of the present officialdom. They are indeed carrying out the Deng program and, like student radicals everywhere, they carry things to an extreme.
It was Deng who in the late seventies said, in connection with opening a student exchange program between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China, "If we send 20,000 [to the U.S.], and we lose 10,000, we will still have 10,000 more trained people than we had before." Wonderful. The true test of pragmatism--to reduce a sociological problem to an arithmetical formula!
This presumably fits China, with its huge population of over one billion. It suited Deng to deal with arithmetical formulas rather than the inherent social tendencies in the world struggle between socialism and capitalism. If numbers alone were decisive, would the ruling class anywhere in the world have survived, since they are such a negligible minority? As if Deng doesn't know that.
So now, on the 40th May Day since the triumph of the Chinese Revolution, we find the student movement, so frequently in the vanguard of revolutionary struggle, embracing a program which can only delight the enemies of the revolution.
Symptomatic of social crisis
Nor can the students really be blamed. They are merely reflective of the social crisis. Their movement is symptomatic of what lies underneath--the utter incompatibility between the socialist structure and the new attempt to foist upon the workers, peasants and society in general basic elements of the old bourgeois system--which may have its innovative trappings, but whose strings can be traced back to the old compradore bourgeoisie and the imperialist monopolies.
Even the bureaucracy finds it difficult to blame the students. Hence its ambivalence. The students are the social offspring of the current officialdom, as well as the privileged in science, industry and the arts.
The leadership of a regime transitional between capitalism and socialism has problems in how to conduct itself in relation to the new generation. Mao tried in his own way to have a reasonable approach--the "three in one" combination for society in general. The young, the middle aged and the elderly were all to get a fair shake in the distribution of jobs and income.
This was good for the social system in general, but proved more difficult to apply when it came to the schools of higher learning. Could it be otherwise in a country which for centuries lived in bitter poverty and illiteracy? Only the aristocratic elements and the progeny of the old imperial bureaucracy had access to higher learning.
Even today, the workers, although their numbers have vastly increased by many millions, constitute a small minority in a vast peasant country, while the officialdom have the experience and the connections to push their own kin for admission to the universities.
Enthusiasm for reforms wanes
The old optimism of the Deng leadership, which waxed so eloquent in the seventies and early eighties, has begun to wane. The ouster of Hu Yaobang was symptomatic of this. Not unlike other bureaucracies, both modern and ancient, they believed in their own omnipotence. In the face of objective laws, they thought they could manipulate economic trends (which they themselves had stimulated), such as the fundamental laws governing commodity production and exchange. In the early eighties, flush with some success as a result of a modest rise in the productivity of labor and increasing circulation of commodities, they thought they had the bull by the horns.
They forgot that an increase in the production of scarce commodities by means of capitalist techniques is not at all an extraordinary feat. Capitalist production proved its superiority over all other previous systems by its ability to constantly increase the quantity of commodities produced. That it can do, even to great excess, which then leads to capitalist overproduction and crisis. This finds its counterpart in a vast increase of poverty, a super-abundance, if one can put it that way, of poverty. Isn't this what's emerging in China today?
The demonstrations began after the death of Hu Yaobang, who was dismissed from his post as party head a year ago. Yaobang was identified with the bourgeois reforms. His dismissal reflected not so much an effort to abandon the bourgeois market as an attempt to restrict further encroachments by the spontaneous growth of capitalist development in China at the expense of the socialist sector.
Now that the demonstrations have reached proletarian Shanghai, the possibility that the infection will spread to the workers certainly poses the problem more sharply than ever before: which road, the capitalist road or the socialist road? Isn't this the way things began in Poland, before Solidarity became a movement? Can the leaders close their eyes to all this and let matters take their own course, as happened in Poland?
However complex the new developments in China appear to be, they all reduce themselves to this elementary proposition: Can the attempt to build socialism on the basis of a nationalized economy coexist side by side with the growth of a capitalist market?
Events are now showing that the two are irreconcilable. The imperialists are profoundly aware of this. That is why they are loudly urging Deng and his grouping to hurry up, take the decisive step, and cross the class line.
The objective orientation of the capitalist market is to swallow up the socialist sector. And that is what can happen if the leadership is wedded to further experimentation with capitalist market techniques and profit-making ventures with private enterprise and shows no ability to put politics, as Mao used to say correctly, in command.
It is necessary to have a revolutionary communist perspective, a communist goal, which means of course the elimination not just of the old landlords and capitalists that still exist, but also of the new ones that have arisen in the Deng period.
Whatever usefulness they might have had in the days immediately after the revolution, given China's underdevelopment, they have long overstayed their welcome. What might have been helpful at one stage of development has become an unacceptable brake upon socialist construction and a threat to the whole system.
In the early fifties, the Chinese leaders tried to move rapidly to industrialization by setting up "backyard furnaces." It was a daring idea and exceptionally hopeful. Even Khrushchev, who was already in opposition to the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, called it highly imaginative. Later on when it was seen that it wouldn't work, this was publicly acknowledged and the "Great Leap Forward" was abandoned. Shouldn't the black market, the galloping inflation and all the other ills plaguing China have made it clear by now that the "new thinking" of the Deng grouping is only bringing back old troubles and should be discarded?