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The Reign of Virtue: Some Broad Perspectives on Leader and Party in the Cultural Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Benjamin I. Schwartz
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Extract

One of the most arresting aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been the confrontation between Mao Tse-tung (or the Maoist group) and the Chinese Communist Party. There is, to be sure, an area of vagueness and uncertainty concerning this whole matter. Have the Maoists attacked the party as such? What indeed is the party as such? The party may be conceived of as the sum total of its actual members—of its human composition. It may be conceived of in terms of its organisational structure—its “constitution,” rules and established mechanisms. To any genuine Marxist-Leninist, it is, of course, more than its cells and anatomy. It is a metaphysical organism which is more than the sum of its parts. The “soul” of this collective entity incarnates all those intellectual and moral capacities which Marx had attributed to the industrial proletariat.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 35 , September 1968 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1968

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References

1 Debray, Regis, Revolution in the Revolution? (Grove Press), p. 78Google Scholar;

2 Ibid. p. 101.

3 Ibid. p. 104.

4 Ibid. p. 102.

5 Ibid. p. 125.

6 Ibid. p. 105.

7 See for instance “Gel'bras o stanovlenii voenno-burokrazticeskoi diktatury v Kitae ” (“On the establishment of a Military Bureaucratic Dictatorship in China ”), Narody Asii i Afriki No. 1, 1968Google Scholar;

8 NCNA Service in English, 14 May, FBIS No. 95, Vol. 1.

9 See Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) 44, 204, 31 January 1968, passim.

10 Cited in the Hong Kong Consulate publication Current Scene, Vol. VI, No. 4, “The CCP—Orphan of Mao's Storm.”

11 One may speculate that some of the “ultra-leftists” actually may have conceived of the possibility of doing away with the party entirely.

12 Hung Ch'i (Red Flag), No. 11, 9 07, 1967Google Scholar;

13 Cited in Cassirer's, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Beacon Press Paperback, p. 154Google Scholar

14 “The Social Contract,” Book II, Chap. 3, Locke, Hume and Rousseau, Oxford University Press, p. 274Google Scholar;

15 To Robespierre the word “party” was a bad word. There ought to be no “parties” within the sovereign people. The Marxist conception of class struggle, however, when added to the notion that parties represented classes, provided a much firmer foundation for the concept of a party.

16 See particularly One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward.

17 In the ideal society of the past, the ethical initiative had been taken by single individuals, the sage-rulers Yao, Shun and Yü.

18 The Book of Mencius, Pt. I, Chap. XVII–Vol. II, p. 419 in Legge's chinese Classics.

19 The Social Contract, Book II, Chap. VI, p. 289.

20 And even be should not rule. “When Lycurgus gave laws to his country he began by abdicating his royal power.” Ibid. p. 293.

21 Although here too we find ambiguities. 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.” Ibid. p. XXXIX.