The Reign of Virtue: Thoughts on China's Cultural Revolution
Schwartz, Benjamin I.
"When societies first come to birth," says Montesquieu, "it is the leader who produces the institutions. Later it is the institutions which produce the leaders." Whoever would undertake to...
...There is also, however, Rousseau's clear realization that princes, magistrates, and all those who govern (the "executive power") are made of the same clay as the people...
...Ibid., p. 293...
...7° Cited in the Hong Kong Consulate publication Current Scene, Vol...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ "Of itself," we are told, "the people wishes the good...
...The Maoist group in China is still bent on capturing for itself this transnational Marxist-Leninist authority, and it is most difficult to see how it can do so if it abandons the very concept of the Marxist-Leninist party...
...Institutions, made up as they are of many individuals, are hardly indivisible and may easily become the embodiment of "partial interests...
...4, "The CCPOrphan of Mao's Storm...
...As already indicated, men such as Chou En-lai are probably deeply conscious of the role of the party in Marxist-Leninist Communism...
...He thus seems to provide an instance of the "institution producing the leader...
...Thus Mencius accepts the 17 In the ideal society of the past, the ethical initiative had been taken by single individuals, the sage-rulers Yao, Shun, and Yii...
...13 The individual can realize his moral potential only by submerging himself in that larger "moral entity," the people...
...Is it possible, in fact, to make meaningful comparisons between the eighteenth-century political philosopher and the ancient Chinese sage...
...Yet in Mencius (as opposed to Hsun-tze) it is not the in titutions which mold the sagerulers ,md the men of virtue...
...The Marxist conception of classstruggle, however, when added to the notion that parties represented classes, provided a much firmerfoundation for the concept of a party...
...3, Locke, Hume and Rousseau (Oxford University Press), p. 274...
...Many of his contemporaries, such as Turgot, D'Alembert, Voltaire, and Diderot, were overwhelmingly concerned with the progress of the "arts and sciences" and regarded moral progress as a by-product of the accumulation of human knowledge...
...The people as a collectivity is not only the source of all sovereignty but also of all virtue...
...The problem of how the general will of the proletariat is to be actualized becomes an immediate problem of political action...
...Essentially the party is the army.$ Debray, to be sure, is discussing the period of revolutionary struggle, and his doctrine is not incompatible with the view that after the victory a party of the Communist type may be established...
...Yet within the Marxist-Leninist context, however, this also involved an extreme reluctance to share with any individual or any group the enormous, indivisible and total moral and intellectual claims attributed to the party...
...When we turn to Mencius' account of the famous sage-rulers Yao, Shun, and Yu, we find that the distinction between legislator and prince does not exist...
...There ought to be no "parties" within thesovereign people...
...One could go on in this scrutiny of Western and Chinese perspectives...
...As in the case of Rousseau, Mao Tse-tung's masses are the masses not necessarily as they are but as they "ought to be" and there can be no doubt of the leader's aspiration to make them what they ought to be...
...It is Robespierre himself who plays this role and not the Jacobin society which itself turns out to be susceptible to selfish factionalism...
...The ties which bind here are not the institutional forms of the corrupt traditional establishment but the moral cement of shared sentiments...
...It may be conceived of in terms of its organizational structure—its "constitution," rules, and established mechanisms...
...In discussing these matters, we find ourselves in medias res and it would be futile to predict the future...
...For almost two years now we have been told that the dictatorship of the proletariat has been borne by the "Red Guards," by the PLA (the "main pillar of the dictatorship"), and a whole assortment of nonparty "proletarian revolutionaries...
...On the other, they respond to the Rousseauist emphasis on morality in reaction to the preponderantly technocratic version of the theory of progress...
...We have spoken of Maoism within a Western perspective...
...The aged Mao is bent on achieving the reign of virtue as he understands virtue and remains unprepared to accept any progress of the "arts and sciences" which is not based on virtue...
...3 Ibid...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ Historic Perspectives—Western and Chinese NSTEAD OF ATTEMPTING to discern an un predictable future, what I shall attempt in the balance of this article is an effort to see whether the notions which lie behind the Maoist attack on the CCP and behind the Cultural Revolution in general can be related to certain larger perspectives and contexts of ideas...
...The crux of the matter would still be not so much whether a "party" should be rebuilt but what form such a party should take...
...We have the recent effort of the early sixties to turn the army into a model of Maoist behavior, and behind that one has the central role of the army in the whole history of the party since the early thirties...
...Where the instrument no longer serves its purpose should the class struggle come to a halt or should new instruments be forged?3 [Debray suggests that] an end be put to the plethora of commissions, secretariats, congresses, conferences, plenary sessions, meetings and assemblies at all levels—provincial, regional and local...
...The moralizing agency of his society is clearly an ethical elite, and the superiority of this elite resides in the moral superiority of its individual members who are somehow able to actualize through individual self-effort their own potential virtue and wisdom.'7 Unlike the mass of mankind, these "chiin-tze" are able to realize their own potentialities by "following that part of themselves which is great...
...However, as we are all aware, it is by no means clear that the army as a whole is as solid a pillar as Mao would like it to be nor as thoroughly imbued with proletarian virtue...
...Grippa has, in turn, vehemently attacked Rittenberg and whoever may stand behind him, for attacking the Leninist prin ciples of party organization in the name of a "cult or idolatry with regard to a leader "s Grippa (a former Stalinist) is committed to the party not only as a moral entity but as a Leninist structure...
...Ibid., p. xxxix...
...He must accept Montesquieu's view that "leaders produce institutions...
...Lenin has shifted from "spontaneity" to "consciousness" but, as in the case of Marx, Rousseau and Saint-Simon are both present in his out -look...
...The significance of Rousseau here is that he gives a highly vivid expression to more general tendencies which can make their way without any intimate contact with the great thinker himself...
...The whole thrust of the Cultural Revolution has been to devalue and diminish its significance...
...ing their own canonized revolutionary experience as the exclusive model for the Third World, the Chinese must inevitably stress the role of the party in the revolutionary struggle...
...The institutional charisma will not easily be restored...
...But it is by no means as interested as others in restoring power to the bulk of the former membership, or in rebuilding the entire former machinery, or even in restoring its position of centrality in the polity...
...One would gather that Grippa's standing in Peking is now very much under a cloud...
...Even after 1949, it received much sound guidance from Moscow...
...The very Red Flag editorial of July 9, 1967, 12 which attempts to refute the charge that the Maoists do not "desire the leadership of the party," makes it crystal clear that whatever charisma the party may possess derives solely from the person and thought of Mao Tse-tung...
...19 Mencius himself might have recognized this dilemma...
...It is only when the individual will somehow become fused with the "general will" that the individual's own moral potential can be realized...
...Indeed the party as such when considered apart from Mao Tse-tung and his thought, may wholly degenerate and become another "partial interest" in the Rousseauist sense...
...His good society would be peopled by men who would abnegate their private interests for the public good, men constantly inspired by a sense of duty to their country, men who would sacrifice themselves without stint, and men who would live simple and austere lives...
...The party may be conceived of as the sum total of its actual members—of its human composition...
...There is also considerable evidence that party structures and mechanisms are in a shambles and that even where they survive, as in the rump Central Committee and army party branches, they have ceased to be an important vehicle of decision-making...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ discussed the subject of the Ninth Party Congress set for next year...
...When one now scrutinizes the writings of Lenin on party organization, one is struck by his vehement defense of the importance of organizational forms and wellformulated rules against all detractors of "formalism...
...The party may not have engaged in all the heinous bureaucratic crimes attributed to it in Red Guard newspapers, but its profane nature as simply another bureaucratic organization devoid of any inbuilt proletarian grace or powers of self-redemption now stands revealed...
...It is, of course, entirely possible that with the demise of Mao or a reversal in the fortunes of the Maoist group, there will be an effort to restore the party to its central position in Chinese life and to re-establish all its sanctified organizational forms...
...The institution of the Marxist-Leninist party (as a world movement) has been in existence well over half a century...
...15 Grippa is quite right...
...And yet, the uncertainty of the Maoist attitude toward party organization in China can be most graphically illustrated by the uncertainty of Peking's relations to its own Maoist followers in Belgium and France...
...His new man would be socially virtuous but would also live in material comfort and appreciate his Shakespeare and Homer...
...18 They are able to transcend their environment and are thus also able to transform the people below them through the power of example, education, and proper policy...
...It may well be suggested at this point that many of the dominant notions of the Cultural Revolution seem to suggest the greater cogency of a Chinese cultural perspective (in spite of the explicitly antitraditional stance of the Maoist group...
...It has definitely been announced that the Ninth Party Congress will be held in 1969...
...The Chinese party has, to be sure, always been defective, we are told, given its woefully weak proletarian base, but it was after all horn under the inspiration of the October Revolution and for many years was guided by the directives of the Comintern...
...The essence of those quotations is that the forms of party organization are part of the very essence of what the party is...
...WITH LENIN, however, who devoutly accepted Marx's conception of the historic mission of the proletariat, the problem of politics comes back to the very center of the stage...
...This does not mean, it must be stressed again, that Mao is against modernization...
...The others were social engineers concerned with how arts and sciences could be mobilized to render society felicitous...
...the middle, and perhaps even the basic levels of party organization, at least in urban areas...
...It is the law itself which plays a determining role in forming the general will 21 With the Jacobins, however, this sharp distinction between the legislative and executive breaks down, and Robespierre must represent the general will as both legislator and magistrate...
...What indeed is the party as such...
...The attainment of the ideal is immediately cast into doubt, however, by all sorts of tragic dilemmas...
...We also note, however, some discussion of the convening of the Ninth Party Congress, an act which would presumably once again place the seal of party "legality" on whatever state of affairs would prevail at the time of its meeting...
...Again, one is tempted to speculate that some of the major pressures for this "rebuilding" may come from those opposed to the inner Maoist group (particularly from former party people...
...5 . . . Eventually the future People's Army will beget the party of which it is to be theoretically the instrument...
...Yet as stated above, there is no reason to assume that the Maoist group is opposed to some sort of recrystallization of the "party...
...One feels this also in the tremendous emphasis on the power of example attributed to such paragons as Lei Feng and Men Ho, who may, to be sure, be men of the people but who are nevertheless capable of heroic acts of ethical self-transcendence...
...There is also the need to refute the current Soviet line on events in China...
...p. 105...
...Any notion that Mao Tse-tung must legitimize his cultural revolution through established party procedures is, in my view, not based on a correct reading of cultural revolutionary doctrine...
...In France there are at least three "Maoist" groups, only one of which has constituted itself as a Marxist-Leninist party of the conventional type, while at least one of the other groups has refused to acknowledge that the older party structure is any longer valid...
...If we are dealing with what many take to be a kind of madness, is this madness unique to Mao or does it relate in any way to a larger history of ideas—Western or Chinese...
...These mythic fig ures are in a sense "legislators" in that they create or make manifest the sacred institu tional framework of society, but they are also the active rulers of society who stand high above the institutions which they have formed...
...It is interesting to note that in another sector of what is still vaguely called the Communiet world, the possibility of eliminating the role of the party as such has emerged...
...One is immediately struck by certain similarities in the relationship of ethics to the political realm...
...The latter phrase presumably designates the "social bearer" of certain social virtues and capacities, but in current Maoist usage it often seems to refer to the assemblage of the virtues themselves—selflessness in the "service of the people," lack of self-interest, austerity, singularity of purpose, implacable hostility to the forces of evil however defined, etc...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ principle of hierarchy gladly and without hesitation...
...When Lycurgus gave laws to his country he began by abdicatinghis royal power...
...In some ways, however, M. Debray's assertions seem most applicable to China's Cultural Revolution...
...Turning back to Rousseau we find that, THE REIGN OF VIRTUE as Burke states, "Rousseau is nothing if not a moralist...
...In the case of Mao, one can indeed maintain that Marxism-Leninism itself has been a bearer of the strains of thinking with which we are concerned...
...The crux of the matter is not whether the party survives in some form, but whether it can ever recover its central sacred character...
...Assertions about the proletarian virtue of the army like many statements of this type reflect not so much the complex actuality as the normative reality—the way things ought to be and will in good time become...
...What is more, this moral energy is to be unified in a positive aggressive struggle against all the forces of evil...
...14 Many enigmas emerge, of course, when this notion is applied to the modem nation-state...
...Instead of discussions of party building there has been a resurgence of attacks on the "right"—of those nefariously attempting to "reverse verdicts...
...In Latin America, indeed, this brings them into direct collision with the Castro-Debray line which tends to express a studied contempt for the "pro-Chinese" groups in Latin America...
...21 Although here too we find ambiguities...
...The Confucian tradition even in its Mencian interpretation is hardly antiformalistic...
...It was Lenin who insisted that the party structure be imposed on all "vanguards" abroad...
...Unfortunately, the petty bourgeois Maoist group was able to establish its ascendancy and is now bent on destroying it...
...p. 104...
...The "soul" of this collective entity incarnates all those intellectual and moral capacities which Marx had attributed to the industrial proletariat...
...He had developed a genuine appreciation of the values of material progress which in his good society would be a precondition of cultural richness...
...In Belgium, the so-called "Rittenberg case" has thrown a glaring light on some of the issues involved...
...The question of how—in concrete political terms—the "general will" comes to be internalized in the individual is, of course, one of the central enigmas of Rousseau's political thought and has been the subject of a vast literature...
...Amid the sophisticated and hedonistic libertines of the enlightened aristocracy and the new intelligentsia, he felt he himself represented the essential innocence of a man of the people and the sturdy virtues of a citizen of Geneva...
...What is more, the qualities of the proletarian dictatorship which find their fountainhead in Mao Tse-tung may be shared by groups, institutions, and individuals which lie outside the party...
...What is more, unlike Castro and Debray, the Maoist group (including such people as Ch'en Po-ta and Kang Sheng) cannot but be profoundly conscious of the weight of the concept of the "Communist party" in the history of Marxism-Leninism since 1917...
...Is it indeed Western or Chinese, or may it be said to feed on both cultural traditions...
...Ibid...
...To admit that the party's transcendental capacities are totally dependent on the haphazard emergence of great leaders is to render its claims precarious indeed...
...WHEN we turn to Stalin, we find that he rises to power through a manipulation of the party administrative apparatus...
...The fact that the PLA has become the "main pillar" of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" can, of course, be explained in quite mundane terms...
...Unlike Rousseau, he was able to invoke a new dynamic principle, the impersonal forces of history...
...I saw," he stated in his Confessions, "that everything depended basically on political science, and that no matter how one views the problem, every people is just what its government makes it...
...The fact remains that the Cultural Revolution has unmasked many truths which will not be easily forgotten, particularly by the young who have participated in recent events...
...Mao himself is the source of legitimacy and so long as his group remains more or less at the helm, he can legitimize any structure...
...p. 102...
...Far from possessing those self-purgative and self-regenerative powers that had always been attributed to it in the past, we find that the party must be "reproletarianized" from without—by Mao Tse-tung standing above it and by the "revolutionary masses" standing below...
...The "building of socialism" with its enormous emphasis on technocratic capacities naturally led Stalin to emphasize the "social engineering" aspect of the party function rather than its moral virtues...
...It is to be a moral energy consolidated in the service of the nation...
...Yet it seems to me that comparison (which involves both difference and similarity) is, in fact, possible...
...What it asserts is that in some fashion the state is or should be the moralizing agency of human society...
...Even if it was essentially voluntary (and I lean to the view that it was), the fact that the "first line" leaders of the party were moving in a direction that the leader regarded as radically mistaken was, of course, not only an offense to his own vision of China's future, but also an offense to an enormous swollen sense of self-esteem which had become indissolubly tied up with this vision...
...In both cases the people's ethical potentialities can be realized only through political mediation...
...The Soviets have flatly asserted in their polemics that the "Maoist group" is bent on the destruction of the Chinese Communist party...
...Just as the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" has long since been sundered from any actual reference to industrial workers, the cultural revolution has now demonstrated that the particular "general will" which it represents is quite detachable from the particular organization known as the Communist party...
...It might simply be noted, in passing, that for some reason the ancient Chou thinkers and the eighteenth-century philosopher do, oddly enough, confront the human situation from a similar perspective, the perspective of vicarious statesmen who have prescriptions for "society" as a whole...
...Indeed, he was quite sincere in his effort to create an organization that would play this role...
...In Regis Debray's book Revolution in the Revolution?, which is now regarded as a textbook of Castro ideology, we find the following striking assertions: BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ Fidel says simply that there is no revolution without a vanguard but that this vanguard is not necessarily the Marxist-Leninist Party...
...The "revolutionary committees" formerly treated as a provisional device seem to be emerging more and more (whatever they may be in actuality) as Mao's chosen vehicle of "proletarian dictatorship...
...Is it not possible that the Maoists are also ready to eliminate the party's role in history as an instrument which "no longer serves its purpose...
...The question of who the actual bearers of this "general will" are has indeed become a crucial problem of the Cultural Revolution...
...The Jacobin clubs were never to develop the distinctive personality later to be attributed to the Communist party and Robespierre continually stressed that his Committee of Public Safety enjoyed its authority because of the purity and incorruptibility of its members rather than as an organizational entity...
...Unlike Rousseau's legislator who provides a static body of good laws for all eternity, Lenin's party is required to act within the stream of history, to provide ever fresh yet infallible guidance through all the shoals and eddies of a changing world...
...Faced with a state of emergency and a militarily organized enemy such a mechanism is paralyzed at best, catastrophic at worst.4 . . . There is no exclusive ownership of the revolution...
...Lenin probably never regarded himself as the living incarnation of the proletarian will...
...In retrospect, one is tempted to add that Stalin's de facto downgrading of the party organization was due not only to his own power, greed, and mistrust, but also to the fact that the party was unable to fulfill the tasks which Stalin felt the times required...
...On the contrary, during the Great Leap Forward he fervently hoped that the energy THE REIGN OF VIRTUE of organized virtue would itself spur economic development...
...What makes Rousseau's ethic modem and revolutionary is, however, his lack of belief in the power of the individual to realize his potentiality for virtue through his own individual efforts and his consequent tendency to link ethics indissolubly to politics...
...Yet, however prominent the RousseauistJacobin component in latter-day Maoism, key elements of the language remain MarxistLeninist...
...Even here he was forced to introduce a transcendent element in the form of that eighteenth-century device, the all-wise "legislator...
...In the case of Stalin, with his jealous greed for power, one is tempted to see here simply a particular instance of the universal struggle between the despot and his own bureaucracy...
...6 Ibid...
...When societies first come to birth," says Montesquieu, "it is the leader who produces the institutions...
...Current statements from the mainland would indicate that if the Maoists have their way, the cult of Mao and of his thought will reign supreme...
...Ernest Barker points out that in spite of his emphasis on law, Rousseau "felt in his bones that the nation made the law and not the law the nation...
...Rousseau was not yet attuned to the notion of the dynamics of history which endow institutions with a kind of dynamic historic life of their own...
...The enlarged Twelfth Party Plenum of the Eighth Party Congress was held in October 1968 and the task of "rebuilding the party" was again placed on the agenda...
...Here both the nationalist motif of Rousseau and transnational image of MarxismLeninism are united into one...
...Concretely, this would mean that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and proven nonparty "proletarian revolutionaries" would play a dominant role at the heart of any reconstituted party...
...The Maoist virtue remains "proletarian" and does not stem simply from the people or the masses...
...It is significant that even this literature hints that the party will somehow be restructured...
...Rousseau can solve his dilemmas only by introducing the deus ex machina of the transcendent legislator, that rare genius of unaccountable "greatness of soul" who is able to create a system of general laws which educates the people to virtue...
...The fact that the broadest masses of the people are taking part in the cultural revolution together with the party does not in the least impair the prestige of the CCP...
...In recent months the discussion of party building has again receded, and one tends to feel that there has been no resolution of the conflicts surrounding the whole issue...
...In responding to their version of Mao, they are thus responding to an element of their own cultural past...
...One may, of course, assume that the question of how the party should be built was by no means entirely theoretical...
...Later it is the institutions which produce the leaders...
...Our particular quest here indeed leads us back as far as Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Jacobin effort to apply the doctrine of that fruitful but ambiguous thinker...
...Even to Mencius, the virtues of rulers and of the chun-tze must be channeled through an institutional setting and find their objective expression in the rules of propriety...
...First in the science of revolution, and then after the revolution as the technico-administrative elite of the post-revolutionary society...
...Hegel was, of course, ultimately to find the realization of man's higher social virtue in the modern state while Marx was to find the social bearer of general virtue to be a particular segment of modem society, the industrial proletariat...
...Its meaning is relatively clear when applied to an idealized ancient Rome and Sparta, where citizens presumably expressed their "general will" in face-to-face primary assemblies and where the decisions of majorities were, in Rousseau's view, actually inspired by virtue...
...Chou En-lai is alleged to have aksed, on November 11, a delegation of proletarian revolutionaries from Canton: "Haven't you 9 See Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) 44, 204, January 31, 1968, passim...
...The future of Communism is not guaranteed by the existence of the party but by the "Thought of Mao Tse-tung...
...12 Hung Ch'i (Red Flag), No...
...18 See particularly One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward...
...XVII-Vol...
...It is not at all a question of whether Mao Tse-tung was ever a profound student of Rousseau or Jacobinism...
...Whatever its actual power role, however, the faith in the army as the bearer of proletarian virtue certainly antedates the cultural revolution...
...The area of uncertainty is the third miasmic area of the party as an ontological category —as a whole which may persist, whatever the fate of its parts...
...The question would thus not be one of whether the party should be rebuilt, but how it should be rebuilt...
...Furthermore, as legislators of the general will they soon found that Rousseau's sharp distinction between the legislator who creates the general laws of the good state but who does not attempt to implement them and the "executive power" which applies them was to prove completely inapplicable in practice...
...Parties are never anything but instruments of class struggle...
...Rousseau, on the other hand, sets out from a rejection of hierarchy...
...It is, after all, no accident that the transcendental factor in Rousseau's 14 'The Social Contract," Book H, Chap...
...They are to be made publicspirited and their virtue is no longer to be passive and negative, but active and dynamic...
...p. 125...
...His own "civic morality" was not a "new morality" but a morality based on a kind of Plutarchian exaltation of ancient Roman and Spartan virtues...
...18 The Book of Mencius, Pt...
...Social Contract" is not an institution but an individual—the "legislator" who by dint of his god-like "great soul" is able to embody the indivisible public spirit...
...The attempt to realize this ideal within the framework of the modern nation-state was, of course, to fall to Robespierre, St...
...His ideal of good society was no longer simply Rous THE REIGN OF VIRTUE Beau's ideal of civic virtue...
...It is, however, an essential ingredient, and on this ingredient we shall concentrate our attention...
...The word "proletariat" still refers to some ill-defined transnational, transcendental historic force, and it is as the embodiment of this force that Mao confronts both his own people and the world...
...WHEN WE TURN our attention to recent developments in China itself as they are refracted through the murky media of the Cultural Revolution, one notes that at the end of 1967 and at the beginning of 1968 there are many references in the literature to "party building...
...There is, to be sure, an area of vagueness and uncertainty concerning this whole matter...
...Grove Press), p. 78...
...The Maoists are constrained by their own history to reject Debray's elimination of the party in the revolutionary struggle...
...2...
...In this area, it does not appear likely that the Maoist group is prepared to jettison the sacred label...
...These general notions have indeed proved more enduring than the specific ideologies within which they have found a lodging...
...It is in this way that the later Marx avoids the problem of class organization, the problem of politics itself...
...1. THE REIGN OF VIRTUE Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is `directed against the Chinese Communist party...
...11 One may speculate that some of the "ultraleftists" actually may have conceived of the possibility of doing away with the party entirely...
...The question of how the virtue of the people is achieved in these vast societies is dealt with most cursorily by Rousseau and indeed he often expresses doubt whether social virtue is attainable in societies of this size...
...4 Ibid...
...What happens here in essence is that Robespierre, not by any intent, himself becomes the embodiment of the general will not only as a "legislator" but also as a "magistrate...
...In Lenin's view, the virtues and capacities of the proletariat both in Russia and abroad had proven potential rather than actual and the impersonal forces of history had proven extraordinarily sluggish in carrying the proletariat along its destined path...
...20 And even he should not rule...
...The institutions are simply the chan nels through which they spread their spiritualethical influence...
...As against this possibility, however, one must note the fact that the concept of the Communist party is now part of Chinese Communist sacred history, and that in press 1 Regis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution...
...To any genuine Marxist-Leninist, it is, of course, more than its cells and anatomy...
...In their discussion of the Cultural Revolution they have also dwelt at great length on the Maoist violation of party constitutionality...
...It was Lycurgus who created an all-wise constitution and system of law which shaped the Spartans to virtue...
...There are, however, areas in which the particular Chinese perspectives and the particular Western perspectives, far from being mutually exclusive, prove to be mutually reinforcing...
...It was Lenin who insisted that no revolution could be called socialist unless led by Communist parties and it was during Lenin's lifetime that the ultimate authority of the international Communist movement became lodged in one center on the basis of a logic inherent in Communist party organization...
...Furthermore, in dealing with Western sources, it will no longer suffice to confine our attention to the specificities of Marxist-Lenini t ideology...
...The party will derive whatever luster it may have from the leader...
...When we turn to Mao Tse-tung's thought itself (in its cultural revolutionary interpretation) we are struck, as stated above, by the overwhelming predominance of the socialethical...
...To Lenin, the secret of his party lay not only in the virtues of its members but also in the efficacy of its organization...
...19 The Social Contract, Book II, Chap...
...Unlike the Jacobin clubs, the Bolshevik party was to be a highly articulated organization with a distinct corporate life of its own...
...The Maoist dream of reconstituting a new world Communist movement centered in Peking remains indissolubly tied to this vocabulary...
...The vision may be only one ingredient in the total complex...
...What is more, he left the formal lines of party organization intact...
...WHEN ONE EXAMINES the idiom of the Cultural Revolution one somehow feels that the untroubled image of Mao as the fountainhead of all morality, standing high above all laws and institutions, may owe more to certain Chinese cultural perspectives than to any Western source of inspiration...
...It had turned out to be an agglomeration of all kinds of egoistic individual and group interests...
...II, p. 419 in Legge's Chinese Classics...
...Now there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Maoists have carried out a frontal assault on the human apparatus on the highest, This article is reprinted, with permission, from the China Quarterly, London...
...Before one could even begin to create good laws, it was necessary to eliminate the manifestation of individual, group, and factional egotism as well as the cynical sophistries of vain intellectuals which interfered with the establishment of good laws...
...Much of the prevailing historicist and social scientific dogma would reject this possibility...
...In both cases the unfavorable social environment negates the possibility of such realization...
...It is apparently unclear whether any of these groups has as yet obtained Peking's official sanction...
...On the one hand, they respond to the Maoist anti-institutionalism and antiformalism...
...There can be little doubt that in his youth he read about both but one need not argue any intimate contact...
...Like Lenin, he insisted that it was the institution rather than the leader that embodied the proletarian general will...
...Whoever would undertake to give institutions to a people must work with full consciousness that he has set himself to change, as it were, the very stuff of human nature, to transform each individual who, in isolation, is a complete but solitary whole, into a part of something greater than himself, from which, in a sense, he derives his life and his being, to substitute a communal and moral existence for a purely physical and independent life with which we are all of us endowed by nature...
...In his own individual life he had discerned how impossible it is for a good man to realize his moral potentialities within a bad society...
...Press Paperback), p. 154...
...In turning on the party, Mao and his supporters have been forced to fall back on the army...
...Rousseau, however, was overwhelmingly concerned, in the first instance, with the question of how to make society virtuous and just...
...Mao Tse-tung has found that the CCP, both in its human composition and as an organizational structure, has failed at least for a time to embody the qualities of the "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Thus Marx's concept of the mode of production fuses together, as it were, in an unstable complex the concepts of technico-economic and moral progress...
...Just, and Babeuf who found that the mere elimination of established vested interests and privileges as embodied in the old order did not automatically actualize the general will...
...The reign of virtue, as we know, was not established by the French Revolution, and the question of why it was not established was to agitate a whole new generation of young thinkers including both the young Hegel and the young Marx...
...IN SPITE of its imprecision, the concept of a society in which the organized people would be able to crush all selfish individual group and factional interests and infuse its individual members with public virtue was to prove most powerful...
...The proletariat was not only the heir of Rousseau's public virtue but as a stratum deeply immersed in technical life, it would also fulfill the role of Saint Simon's industrialscientific elite...
...However capable the masses may be of proletarianization, however necessary it is for "proletarian revolutionaries" to be in contact with the masses, the source of proletarian virtue lies somehow outside, above and beyond the masses, just as the word "bourgeoisie" refers to forces of egotism on a world scale...
...In focusing on ideas and their genealogy, there is no intention of implying that the Cultural Revolution, or the conflict between the party and the leader is solely a result of ideas in the head of Mao, or to deny the role of power struggles, psychological motives, or "objective factors...
...Yet while Lenin was most intent on creating a party institution with its own institutional charisma, the fact remains that during his lifetime it was Lenin rather than the party who embodied the proletarian general will...
...p. 101...
...As in the case of Rousseau, the majority of men in Mencius are potentially good (they possess the roots [tuan] of goodness) but seem incapable of realizing their goodness through their own efforts...
...He claimed to the end to derive his legitimacy from the party constitution, however much he may have flouted it in practice...
...To inquire why such comparison may be possible would carry us very far afield...
...The concept of the masses as active and total participants in the whole political process (whatever may be the actual situation) has, of course, become an essential part of the "Thought of Mao Tse-tung...
...It is a metaphysical organism which is more than the sum of its parts...
...In the face of these Soviet efforts to identify themselves with the "legitimate" CCP heritage, the Maoists must deny Moscow's claims...
...The isolated guerrilla fighter sacrificing his very life for the people has always been as much the epitome of higher virtue as the hard-working cadre...
...The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never been used more obsessively, and yet it is made crystal clear that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the Communist party are by no means interchangeable terms...
...From the vantage point of the present, one is tempted to observe that Mao may have always implicitly regarded the PLA as much of a bearer of proletarian virtue as the party itself...
...It is made painfully clear that the party derives its legitimacy from Mao Tse-tung and not vice versa...
...There is, however, no reason to believe that this ethic was regarded, either then or now, as nothing but a means to modernization any more than Weber's Calvinists regarded their own ethic as simply a means to economic ends...
...If Mao was to find the party insufficiently red, Stalin found it insufficiently expert...
...There is, of course, implicit in Marx's class conception something like the Rousseauist conception of a class "general will...
...of itself it does not always see it...
...One would assume that former cadres would be most insistent on "party legality" and the sacred character of party structure, and that the Maoists would be infinitely less committed to the "institutional charisma" of the party...
...What form of government is most suited to produce a nation which is virtuous, enlightened and wise—in short, in the highest sense of the word, as perfect as possible...
...In all of this the Chinese perspective may explain much which cannot be explained in terms of a purely Western perspective...
...The whole discussion of "party building," which was a prominent theme at the end of 1967 and the early part of 1968, indicates the degree of party wrecking which has been going on...
...It is the internalization of his thought which will realize general virtue and not the existence of the party...
...Again, they are capable of these acts only because they draw inspiration from the ruler-sage himself...
...Perhaps of more significance than the question of cultural origin is the fact that we are here dealing with issues that have now assumed a transcultural significance...
...Maoist virtue, one might say, was to play the role of a kind of collectivistic Protestant Ethic...
...The unfolding mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production would themselves lead the proletariat to fulfill its historic role, to actualize both its moral and technico-economic tasks...
...T T URNING FINALLY to the Mao Tse-tung of the Cultural Revolution period we find first that the problem of leader and institution assumes entirely new proportions, and second that the Rousseauist ethical emphasis again achieves a clear ascendancy...
...l . . . The effective leadership of an armed revolutionary struggle requires a new style of leadership, a new method or organization...
...Here, however, we perceive the enormous contradiction between Rousseau's intentions and the unintended uses to which his doctrines have lent themselves...
...10 This question would indicate, as one might suspect, that Chou at least is strongly committed to a return to as much organizational normalcy as possible under the prevailing conditions...
...He was overwhelmingly concerned with society's moral progress...
...Proletariat," "bourgeoisie," "class struggle," and "dictatorship of the proletariat" are terms which occur in maddening iteration...
...It is entirely possible that the Maoist group itself is interested in rebuilding the party in some form or other...
...Mao's retreat to the "second line" of power during the years since 1959 may have been voluntary, or involuntary, or partially voluntary...
...In a statement attributed to a "Stalin group"—a revolutionary organization in the Soviet Union8—we find a condemnation of "Soviet revisionist calumnies that China's 7 See for instance "Gel'bras o stanovlenii voennoburokrazticeskoi diktatury v Kitac" ("On the Establishment of a Military Bureaucratic Dictatorship in China"), Narody Asii i Afriki, No...
...He is able to cull many telling citations from Lenin stressing the importance which Lenin attached to organizational principles and party rules...
...8 NCNA Service in English, May 14, FBIS No...
...it is the sage-rulers and chun-tze who irradiate their ethical power through the institutions...
...Both Hegel and Marx concluded that the "people" as a collective entity did not, in fact, embody the indivisible general virtue which Rousseau had attributed to it...
...The Maoists insist that China is in a permanent state of revolutionary class struggle and that the party both in terms of its human composition and as a structure has gone radically astray...
...It was, in the first instance, the economic origins of the proletariat which were to turn Marx's attention to the whole historic economic process that lay behind the rise of this redemptive class...
...He was not, however, inclined to go into the question of how the proletarian general will would find its realization...
...However, Marx's growing interest in technico-economic progress during the forties was not wholly due to the necessity to explain the preconditions of the existence of the proletariat...
...In seeking out the provenance of these notions I shall concentrate attention in the first instance on the possible Western origins, precisely because of the tendency among Western "pragmatic" academics to see something peculiarly Chinese in Mao's highly moralistic rhetoric...
...Since the completion of this essay, there have been significant new developments...
...Here we find the heroic bands of blood-brothers fighting for the right under leaders recognized by all for their nat THE REIGN OF VIRTUE ural qualities of leadership...
...We have even been told that the battle between the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "dictatorship of the THE REIGN OF VIRTUE bourgeoisie" takes place within the arena of each individual soul...
...The fact that groups of the young in heart of the modem Wet profess to find in the Mao of the Cultural Revolution (by a painfully selective interpretation) answers to their own discontents points to this transcultural aspect...
...As the Marxist - Leninist ideology moves into a period of advanced disintegration one becomes more and more conscious of some of the more general notions which lie behind MarxismLeninism, notions which have become embodied in specific ways within the MarxistLeninist complex (as well as in other ideologies) but whose origins go back at least as far as the enlightenment...
...VI, p. 289...
...I, Chap...
...J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VII O O NE OF THE MOST arresting aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been the confron tation between Mao Tse-tung (or the Maoist group) and the Chinese Communist party...
...Nevertheless, while Stalin diminished the actual role of the party, while he formed it into a personal machine, on the conceptual level he never veered in the slightest from the Leninist conception of the centrality of the party...
...If we choose to personify ideas, may not Mencius be more relevant than Rousseau...
...Yet the fact re 15 To Robespierre the word "party" was a badword...
...When viewed in a Western perspective, one must say that the Rousseauist element has pushed the Saint-Simonian technocratic element well into the background...
...One is further tempted to speculate that even the aged Mao's antiformalism and antiinstitutionalism may have their indigenous roots in the heterodox strains of the Chinese heroic (yu-hsia) tradition so vividly expressed in the epic novels which were his favorite childhood reading...
...13 Cited in Cassirer's Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Beacon...
...If present trends continue, they may themselves become the constituent units of any rebuilt party...
...VI, No...
...It is also implied that in some fashion the "revolutionary committees" will continue to function either inside or alongside of the party...
...11, July 9, 1967...
...Sidney Rittenberg, an American Maoist of long standing residing in Peking, in the summer of 1967 wrote a pamphlet excoriating Jacques Grippa, the recognized leader of the Belgian Maoists, for his defense of Liu Shao-ch'i's "How to be a Good Communist...
...One may still hope, however, that the bulk of party leaders now in opposition will ultimately be able to restore the party to its legitimate role and also, hopefully, recognize Moscow's spiritual hegemony...
...It was Lenin who insisted after 1917 that only MarxistLeninist parties could act as the vanguard of the proletariat...
...The institution had hardly replaced the leader...
...20 Rousseau is, after all, an heir to Western legalism and ultimately seems to believe in the rule of law...
...he had actually found in his "Discourses in the Arts and Sciences" and "Discourses on the Origins of Human Inequality" that the arts and sciences (technico-economic progress) as they had developed until his time had actually run counter to moral progress and contributed to all the corruptions of society...
...Far from being a dispensable element, it lies at the very heart of Leninism...
...The proletariat also required its "legislator" or its legislative vanguard to lead it on its destined path...
...Again and again he turned on his own party and found it wanting...
...95, Vol...
...His ideal society is one in which all citizens fully participate as "free" and equal citizens on the idealized ancient Roman model...
...BENJAMIN I. SCHWARTZ mains that the relationship between the leader and the party remains as problematic as ever...
...While related to the modem sociological view that the individual derives his "values" from "society" it is, of course, much more activist and political...
...In Leninism it survives in the feeble guise of party constitutionality and legality...
...There are also areas where only the Western perspective can adequately account for a new reality...
...18 One is further struck by the " fact that while Lenin's "professional revolutionaries" certainly should embody all the proletarian virtues, Lenin dwells not so much on their virtues as on their professionalism, their organizational expertise...
...There is not only the dilemma raised in the question, "How can the multitude which often does not know what it wants because only rarely does it know what is for its own good undertake an enterprise so extensive and so difficult as the formulation of a system of laws...
...In all this, however, the issue is not necessarily whether the term "party" is to remain in use, but whether the old structure is to survive, or whether structure as such is to play a central role in a Maoist political universe...
...1, 1968...
...Yet Mencius manages to avoid many of the enigmas surrounding Rousseau's abstract conception of the general will of the people...
...Have the Maoists attacked the party as such...
...This was appreciated by Stalin just as much as by Lenin...
...In fact, the party bureaucracy proved incompetent to perform in this capacity...
...It is interesting to note that as the spiritual father of modern nationalism (although again, the "antique" example is here of overwhelming importance) Rousseau exalts the martial virtues and even praises hatred of the national enemy as a unifying cement of the sovereign people's will...
...Undoubtedly, it was intertwined with the most ferocious power struggle...
...These literary images must blend easily in the leader's mind with the actual experiences of the HunanKiangsi and Yenan days...
...2 Ibid...
...It is interesting to note that in early Meiji Japan as well as in early twentieth-century China affinities were often noted between Mencius and Rousseau...
...The party organization will be changed in significant waysand the mechanisms of election will play no greatrole...
...Yet in China it is now reiterated ad nauseam that the Chinese Communist party is wholly dependent for whatever proletarian charisma it may have on the leader and his thought...
Vol. 16 • May 1969 • No. 3
