Section VII: VIIThe US Challengers’ Century, 1917 to 1991

The ledger of the challengers’ century is the first in the series with a negative entry for European centrality, which began a large-scale contraction for the first time since 1492: Russia in 1917 and China in 1949 left the capitalist world market and became world powers themselves, representing a third of humanity. Anti-colonial rebellions ripped through exhausted European empires, and the “Third World” of national liberation movements flourished.

The capital relation responded by expanding through concessions rather than conquest: the welfare settlements of the imperial powers to placate socialist impulses, and the formation hand-in-hand with the settlements of the imperial “middle class” the post-war golden ages paid for. The New Deal and the postwar order again absorbed in form but not in essence: the capital relation conceding to its own working class what the encircled socialist formations had made thinkable.

US hegemony expanded toward its peak on the same fear: containment of Communism, the Marshall Plan rebuilding of the ruined Europe, the anti-Soviet NATO alliance, the nuclear bomb as enforcement medium, the dollar as clearing unit. The American rate of profit crested in the mid-1960s, the decade before the turn of 1978, the new hegemon’s summit and the Soviet-Chinese spring two sides of the same decade.

The century that follows the Great War is told here next, first through the Soviet case, and the reader here for analysis of China should know why: the party that governs China was founded in 1921 in the Comintern’s orbit, took the Soviet model whole in the 1950s, broke with it in 1958 and again in 1978, and has spent the years since answering questions the Soviet experiment posed:

How does a communist revolution in a “weak link” with a semi-feudal economy create the proletarian class it ostensibly rules for, accumulate under siege, keep its apparatus from ossifying during siege, and survive hostile encirclement long enough to be able to invert the encirclement? The Russian history here is not a detour but a control case.

The Bolshevik tradition in the Soviet Union seized state power in one of the last “Absolute Monarchies”: a “backward” economy that had come late to the party of industrialization and urbanization. State power was seized by a communist party, but the productive base and proletarian class, massively destroyed by the First World War and still substantially agricultural from Tsarist underdevelopment, was self-admittedly (by the communists in power) insufficient to support immediate socialist construction the seizure of power was intended to enable.

The stagist Marxists, Mensheviks and Provisional Government ministers sitting in Bolshevik prisons would have smirked. “Of course, we could have told you this, and in fact we did!” They would claim in “orthodox Marxist theory” you must proceed through prior development phases: there is no “jump” to capitalism without mercantilism, no mercantilism without feudalism. In order to get to socialism, you need a fully matured bourgeois-capitalist phase to develop productive forces. You cannot skip stages. Bolsheviks instead had theories about “jumping” from semi-feudalism to socialism. Trotsky notably popularized the conception of it being possible for a country to pass directly from the dominance of the semi-feudal aristocrats, who held political power in Russia in the early part of the 20th century, to the dominance of the working class, without an interceding period of dominance by the bourgeoisie. This was considered the sort of “voluntarist nonsense” stagist Marxists predicted would surely fail. Later events through 1991 would seemingly validate this thinking, though this work aims to show it is certainly more complicated than this simple reading.

The necessities of the civil war between the whites and reds essentially forced the Soviet government to ration, plan, and collectivize, the so-called “War Communism.” This collapsed in 1921 to 15% of pre-war 1913-era industrial output, and famine was common during the Civil War, which is to be expected as it was common during the First World War itself under Tsarism as the monarchical system collapsed. Civil war did little to improve such a situation.

With such mass impoverishment, and the difficult rationing and war time conditions the civil war entailed, the sailors and anarchists of the fortress of Kronstadt rose against the Soviet government that had won the revolution alongside them, and the beleaguered Soviet government crushed the rebels, but it was clear that the current course was not sustainable.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ response was the New Economic Policy. NEP reversed War Communism, restored small-scale private enterprise, permitted private trade, replaced grain requisitioning with a tax in kind, allowed peasants to sell surplus on markets, and brought in foreign concessions for industry, while keeping the commanding heights of large industry, banks, and foreign trade under state ownership.

The stagists again would smile: “here we revert! You are simply going to end up back at capitalist development, the Soviet government becoming the bourgeois one, as a law of history!” Marx’s statements in his March 1850 Address explicitly contradict such a view, explicitly rejecting a necessary “period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat” (the small proprietors and tradesmen), in this case writing about democratic, anti-monarchical revolutions they had just witnessed in 1848.

Marx and Engels wrote, “Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction. During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government.” Trotsky himself argued exactly based on this strategy for this to be the Bolshevik position in the period between the Provisional Government’s take-over in February and the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917.

Marx’s late thinking, in an obscure series of four re-written drafts of his 1881 reply to a letter by Russian Marxist Vera Zasulich, further complicates a strict “stagist” reading some of his German followers had drawn out of his works in Das Kapital. Marx specified that the historical analysis of stages of capitalist development in Das Kapital specifically described Western European development and explicitly declined to claim it as universal law. The letter’s drafts opened the possibility that Russia’s existing peasant communes under Tsarism could themselves possibly serve as a basis for a direct transition from semi-feudalism under the Tsar to socialism, if the political and material conditions favored it. Such a reading is contested, but the Bolshevik tradition essentially built its strategy on these thoughts, whether from the letters themselves or from similar interpretations of historical and economic development theories. Lenin in the April Theses and State and Revolution operationalized such rejection of strict stagism.

Trotsky’s permanent revolution thesis distilled this: in Russia, the domestic owners of capital would not carry out a thorough bourgeois-democratic revolution and could indeed become permanent backward resource colonies of Western capital instead. The bourgeois-democratic tasks (political democracy and the land reform question) would have to be carried out by the proletariat instead, who would not stop at those tasks but would carry them through and continue directly into socialist construction. How far the proletariat could continue would depend on the further course of events, not by mechanically passing through a bourgeois-democratic stage first.

These theses were necessarily again due to a fact Marx’s expectations had not predicted: the proletarian revolutions of the early 20th century came where the proletariat was largely not present in numbers. Russia in 1917 had perhaps 3.5 million factory workers in a population of 170 million, most of them in Petrograd, Moscow, the Donbas, and the Urals, a class of 2% in a sea of peasants, and China in 1949 had about 3 million industrial workers among 540 million people. The seizure of “proletarian” power in the “weak links,” the empires where capital was least developed, most exhausted and least reinforced, was carried out by the smallest working classes in the industrial world through parties that spoke for it, in alliances with a peasantry whose demand was land and whose numbers essentially became the Red Armies and whose urbanization created the working classes.

Lenin’s formula of 1905 named exactly this: a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the whole proletariat and the peasantry, a joint class dictatorship whose first content was the land reform the bourgeoisie would not carry out and whose second, once the land was given to the peasants, was the creation through industrialization and urbanization of the proletarian class in whose name the state ruled. Mao’s New Democracy of 1940 is the same formula for a more peasant-driven war: a joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes, led by the urban proletariat through the party, with the allied peasantry in the countryside surrounding the cities.

In both cases, the state that took power had to make its own proletariat, by the plan, by urbanization, by the countryside paying for the city. That is what so-called “primitive socialist accumulation” meant in practice (versus the colonial conquests and enclosures of “capitalist primitive accumulation“), and it is where a concept of a trapped transition begins to form: a working class needing to be produced as the object of the state’s plan before it itself could be the subject driving things itself, and all the while the state is encircled and isolated by hostile capitalist powers trying to destroy it as in the Allied Intervention during the Russian Civil War.³⁷

That is where charge of the Soviets as mere “state-capitalists” that was thrown at them throughout the 20th century by so-called “Left Communists” gets its evidence. A state that operates wage labor and commodity production in order to produce a working class is merely doing, in Lenin’s own name for it, “state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat,” yet Lenin called this “a step forward” because the alternative in a mostly-peasant country was dominance of the petty producer and a reversion to agriculturalism rather than the construction of socialism.

Such a charge and assertion that a proletarian political-economic authority either destroys capitalist property relations immediately or is destroyed by them is a description of the “weak link’s” political-economic situation and necessity as if it were a simple choice. It automatically rules out every actually-occurring socialist revolution as every one of them had to build the class the theory assumed it would already have. Interestingly, Mayer’s analysis of the Persistence of the Old Regime evidenced simply by the existence of feudal monarchy in the “most developed” regions of the globe until the 1920s, also points to socialist revolutions in those same 1920s as being a similar sort of “necessary pre-maturity” that the Jacobin revolution in France represented; that similarly had an “ultra-revolutionary” wing of Jacobins insisting on the immediate abolishment of hierarchies of all kinds, religion, and feudal-artisan methods of economic activity, the desires of the actual sans culottes be damned.

Plekhanov, the theorist of the stages this section has argued against, saw the cost of prematurity exactly and drew the wrong conclusion from it. In October 1917 he recalled Engels’s warning that no misfortune is greater for a working class than taking power before it is ready, and in 1883 he had foreseen what production organized by a caste would become. The diagnosis held: the formation that broke through first had to build the class and the base it had been told to wait for, under the caste he predicted. The conclusion did not: like 1793, the premature formation was the only way its content could enter the world, and the concessions it forced on the core lasted exactly as long as it did.³⁸

The Bolshevik answer, from the April Theses through The Tax in Kind to On Cooperation, was that a more gradualist transitional form is not in-of-itself restoration, and that the ongoing test is a directional one: whether the state and party that is making the proletariat is moving the wage relation toward abolition or managing it in place indefinitely, Marx’s dictum that “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” made manifest in reality. A “degenerating form” (to use Trotsky’s later description of the Soviet Union under Stalin) of the “proletarian state” would be one that is itself not moving to abolish the current state of things, and indeed falling into capitalist restoration, enabling market reform, not moving to abolish commodity production for a wage, reinstating some private ownership of the means of production etc.; the other charge levied against the Soviet Union from the 1950s to 1991, which we will explore in more depth later.

Starting in On Cooperation, in January 1923, Lenin signaled that the road to socialism in Russia ran through a multi-decade phase of using cooperative and market mechanisms to develop the productive forces under party political control. Nikolai Bukharin, the party’s theorist of the “peasant road to socialism” took this to a logical extreme and built his theoretical work around it. The transition to socialism, according to Bukharin, could be carried out through the gradual integration of the peasantry into cooperative forms during an even more gradualist industrialization over a generational timeline, while the party retained political supremacy, with the productive forces developed through tightly controlled and regulated capitalist methods and indeed actual capitalists over decades. This is essentially again the smirking Menshevik stagism reasserting itself: actual transition to socialism happened when the material base could sustain it after a period of capitalist development, a smudge of a party on top or not, and likely with party capture by such industrial capitalist and petty bourgeois forces.

Stalin destroyed all this in 1928, preventing the theory from ever being tested for more than around seven years. The First Five-Year Plan, forced collectivization, the “destruction of the kulak (small landowner) as a class” all flow from the adoption of the 1928 Plan. Bukharin himself was shot in 1938, partially for his “capitalist-roaderism” to borrow a later Maoist purge-era term. The historical accounting is still contested: Stalin’s crash industrialization indeed built a productive military-industrial base that defeated the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, and subsequently put a human being in space. The Bukharin alternative itself of gradualist agrarian-industrial development without such crash military industrialization would very likely have easily been destroyed by Nazi Germany before its productive base could mature. Stalin’s own course was still nearly crushed by the Nazis in the initial invasion. All paths can fail under pre-nuclear security conditions: Bukharin’s path can be destroyed by competitive power concentrators.

Such a victory under Stalin still deformed the party and society. Extreme repression of dissenting thought locked the USSR into a development pattern whose consequences played out across the next 60 years. Stalin’s path concentrates power, wins against competitor power concentrations, and consumed itself by such concentration over the subsequent decades.

A victorious framework becomes institutionalized, and the institution loses the capacity to question how it has won and how it can continue to win as the victorious framework becomes catechism. Material conditions change. The institution cannot perceive the change. The Soviet Party-bureaucracy that won the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany became, across the next 46 years, the apparatus that could not be successfully reformed because its legitimacy depended on a catechized and venerated framework that had won its defensive war against societal extermination, and structural critique of the framework was seen as essentially de-legitimizing both the victory and the apparatus, traitorous behavior to the Soviet Motherland. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization in 1956 did succeed partially in bucking this trend, but notably Khrushchev’s clique was sidelined, and these moves were eventually reversed by Brezhnev’s consolidation in 1964. When Gorbachev attempted serious reform in 1985, the apparatus had been ossifying for 32 years past Stalin’s death, the late reform itself producing the destruction of the system.

The Soviet arc from 1945 to 1991 is success-becomes-catechism. The same arc, run forward from 1949 in China, would terminate approximately around 1995. It did not, and the question is why? Something may have interrupted it, and identifying such an interruption is the analytical key to why China is structurally different from the USSR.

The Soviet Union had developed its nuclear bomb by 1949, which changed the question of national security. This development allowed for less heavy industrial-military development and more gradualist development, but such a course was already locked into the post-1945 ossification: the Stalin compression run past its expiration date, because the framework that had won the war could not perceive that the prior war’s had more fundamentally changed general conditions, and additional adaptations were required to confront continued US threat other than more military-industrialization and power-concentration in the Party.

Mao’s “New Democracy”

How did China behave under the similar circumstances? The early post-war economy after the victory in the civil war was substantially mixed, with tolerated private businesses, markets and private farming allowed in post-war ruins. There was a similar shift to central planning: Mao’s First Five-Year Plan, from 1953 to 1957, was Soviet-modeled and substantially successful. Industrial output rose, infant mortality dropped, literacy expanded. The Soviet developmental model worked when applied to Chinese conditions in the early phase.

The oscillation of the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956 that acted as a sort of proto-Perestroika of letting “a hundred flowers bloom in social science and arts and let(ting) one hundred points of view be expressed in the field of science,” and then the 180 degree turn back to orthodoxy in the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957 are the initial signs of something different: attempts to promote socialism against gradualist or restorationist “capitalist roaders” of the early post-war economy first through open debate and then later through active purges. Again, an attempt was made to jump from post-war semi-feudalism in the wreckage of a major war and subsequent civil war directly into socialism.

The Great Leap Forward made this literal in 1958. The mechanism they reached for was again mass mobilization plus ideologically-based volunteerism for industrial development akin to the Stalinist Stakhanovite movement but taken to an extreme. This was wildly miscalibrated to the post-war conditions and produced famine while achieving few of the industrialization goals, one of many heavy prices the Maoist apparatus paid for testing whether ideologically-based mass mobilization could substitute for productive base development.

The 1962 to 1965 recovery under Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping was a return to Soviet-style “pragmatic development” with the Great Leap excesses corrected.

It is also when the security environment changed categorically. The nuclear test at Lop Nur on October 16, 1964, made China a nuclear power. Conventional invasion became a calculation about willingness to absorb nuclear escalation rather than a calculation about military feasibility. The Vietnam War’s escalation from 1965 onward also tied down American military capacity at scales that constrained American options elsewhere.

By 1965 the agricultural base had recovered, industrial production had resumed, and the Party-bureaucracy that Mao had feared was reasserting itself. This is when the Cultural Revolution begins to emerge as Mao’s second, more deliberate attempt to subordinate the Party, attack “pragmatist” and “capitalist roader” development advocates, and try again at an immediate, voluntarist leap from semi-feudal conditions straight into socialism without bourgeois development.

The reassertion was concrete: The State Planning Commission was rebuilding a technocratic apparatus the Great Leap had partially dismantled. The Ministry of Public Security was reconstituting the discipline and surveillance infrastructure on patterns imported from the Soviet model of the 1950s. The university and academic establishment was reabsorbing the intellectuals whose political reliability Mao had questioned in the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns. Promotion logic across the Party-state was reverting to seniority, technical competence, and administrative loyalty rather than political mobilization. The pattern was the same one the Soviet apparatus was simultaneously locking into under the emerging Brezhnev consolidation, after Khrushchev’s partial de-Stalinization had been politically defeated by 1964 with his removal.

The Sino-Soviet split intensified through the 1960s. The space for internal political disruptions within the communist movement that had been foreclosed since 1949 by the requirement of maintaining maximum external readiness to defend against capitalist invasion or encroachment suddenly opened up.

China’s strange luck is now specifiable. The hyper-destructive war happened before and at the moment of the founding of the People’s Republic, rather than after the party’s victory. The Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945 killed 14 to 20 million Chinese. The Civil War to 1949 added millions more.

Such battles would have been Stalingrad-equivalents for an existing, society-wide People’s Republic created in, say, the 1920s. They occurred instead before the revolution took hold of the country, while the Party was an insurgency holding base areas rather than a government holding a country.

The Party absorbed the destruction as a formative experience rather than as a societal test of an already-formed apparatus, and in fact that weight fell on the KMT/Nationalists and destroyed them in the mainland as society fell apart and warlordism, famine and collapse continued as it largely had since the time of the collapse of the last major Chinese dynasty.

The famine of 1959 to 1961 was a catastrophe, but it came after the founding. The Leap won nothing, and the party had set its method aside within three years. The 15-year gap between founding and the first atomic test was short enough that institutional ossification had not completed when it arrived. The Cultural Revolution then performed self-inflicted institutional damage that would normally come from external war, but at a moment when the security evolution absorbed the political vulnerability the damage produced. The damage was self-produced, controllable, and subsequently reformable. The damage that comes from externally imposed war is often less able to be these things.

Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in this environment. The 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC” formally characterized the Cultural Revolution as catastrophic and named the human cost directly. The contemporary CCP carries this forward as an institutional capacity to absorb its own contradictions in writing, not merely as an embarrassment, which was a capacity the Soviet system never fully managed about its own analogous traumas including De-Stalinization.

The sociologist Andrew Walder reads the Cultural Revolution as the opposite of what its authors intended: by wrecking the party and state bureaucracy it cleared the ground for market reform and, in the rebuilding, renewed the party-state that carried the reform out. The CCP’s own verdict grants none of this. The Resolution of 1981 holds that the Cultural Revolution “did not in fact constitute a revolution or social progress in any sense,” the gravest setback since 1949 and chiefly Mao’s error. It could say so and survive because it separated the two: Mao Zedong Thought was declared the Party’s collective wisdom, and the Cultural Revolution the late error of a leader whose merits it still ranked first. The framework that produced the catastrophe remained the framework capable of assessing it, and the assessment did not destroy the framework. Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech on Stalin’s crimes was the analogous Soviet attempt and it produced factional disruption that subsequent leaderships absorbed by quietly suppressing further critical engagement rather than by institutionalizing self-criticism. The Chinese resolution institutionalized the self-criticism and the framework continued operating even with it.³⁹

The institutional consolidation that had produced the Soviet Party-bureaucracy was attacked from below in China before it could complete, which broke the momentum toward a Chinese Brezhnev stagnation by the 1980s, so that the Party Deng inherited in 1978 was a chastened, internally fractured, partially destroyed institution that retained the memory of its own vulnerability and of Mao’s excesses, as they still call it. The intellectuals returning from the countryside were grateful rather than entrenched, and the cadres who had been purged and rehabilitated had personal experience of institutional collapse and did not defend their positions against reform with the rigidity their Soviet counterparts would later show. The Cultural Revolution functioned as a Mao-directed demolition of the society that would otherwise have ossified beyond Deng’s capacity to reform.

The Cultural Revolution is the variable liberals and “western Marxists” have been least equipped to read. Treated only as catastrophe caused by an individual, it is incomprehensible as anything but a senile leader’s vanity. Treated only as a correct structural intervention against Party ossification, it becomes apologetics for what was lived through as chaos and terror akin to the Jacobin Reign of Terror. The adequate reading holds both in all cases, and separates intent from effect: the intent was permanent mobilization against a restorationist force real or imagined, and the later institutional effects this work finds was most likely not intended by anyone. The human cost was real. The structural effect of disrupting institutional consolidation before ossification could complete was also real, and is what made Deng’s Reform and Opening institutionally available in a way Gorbachev’s reform was not. A reader unwilling to hold both at once will be unable to read the contemporary CCP.

The Lin Biao incident of September 1971, the People’s Liberation Army defense minister’s mysterious death in a plane crash, killed the avatar of the most ideologically Maoist and hardline anti-American faction in the senior leadership. Lin Biao was Mao’s designated successor, the senior figure most committed to permanent revolutionary mobilization against internal “capitalist roaderism” and US imperialism. His political program required the Cold War posture that had organized Chinese or Soviet strategic thinking for the prior two decades.

The Nixon opening required institutional acceptance of strategic accommodation with the principal enemy of those two decades. The split with Moscow had culminated in the Zhenbao Island border clashes of March 1969 and the Soviet consideration of nuclear strikes on Chinese facilities that was leaked through American channels later that year, and the war scare is what turned Mao toward Washington. The opening did not even wait for Lin’s fall. Kissinger was in Beijing in July 1971 and the visit was announced that month, two months before the fateful flight. Lin Biao in place meant a standing veto over a realignment that was public and not yet secure, since his control of the PLA gave him the means to block it or to force a confrontation while Mao was attempting it. The Nixon visit in February 1972 was the strategic punctuation, conducted on the institutional ground the Cultural Revolution had cleared.