On the importance of the Resolution, and a beginning discussion of the actual text.
Further reading:
Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power, vol. 3: From the Jinggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930
Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong: A Biography, vol. 1: 1893-1949
Mao Zedong, “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party”
Episode artwork: Photo of the Gutian Congress
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 123 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode, we began our discussion of the Resolution of the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the Fourth Red Army (also known interchangeably as the Gutian Congress or the Gutian Conference) by talking about the global significance of the portion of the Resolution which was edited and published in Mao’s Selected Works as “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party.”
This episode, I want to start taking a look at the Resolution itself, as it was written in December 1929. The whole nine-part Resolution is much longer than the article “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party,” which after all was taken from just the first part of the Resolution. To give you some idea of the difference between “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” and the full Resolution, “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” takes up just 12 pages of the first volume of Mao’s Selected Works (11 pages if you don’t count the endnotes), while the Resolution of the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the Fourth Red Army takes up 36 pages of the third volume of the Mao’s Road to Power series.
Also, there are some significant differences between the text of the first part of the Resolution as it was adopted in 1929 and the text that was edited and became “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party.” The Selected Works text is, I think, clearer in its meaning. Much of the language has been changed from the idiosyncratic expressions that Mao was using in 1929 into standardized forms consistent with usage in other documents circulating in the International Communist Movement. For example, as we will see in our discussion later on, in the 1929 Resolution Mao criticizes what he calls ‘idealist views’ and in “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” the term that he uses is changed from ‘idealism’ to ‘subjectivism.’ For people who have been trained in the language and idea-world of international communism (or who are in the process of being trained, since such training was (and perhaps remains) one of the major functions of Mao’s Selected Works), this better describes Mao’s meaning. And there are a lot of other examples of this sort of clarifying editing in “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party.” And if you aren’t familiar with these terms, don’t worry, we will talk about the content of the Resolution in a little bit here.
But “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” also does away with some of the concrete details that Mao gives in the text of the original Resolution, which I think is unfortunate. I think that those details make the original document a richer source for concretely understanding what Mao was criticizing at the time, and how he proposed to fix the problems that he identified.
While the document is pretty long, I do think that there is a strong case to be made for going and reading the entire text if you can. There are two main reasons for that. First, the document helps us to understand how the party was actually functioning. Mao’s descriptions of party life give the sort of details about how things were actually being done that don’t make it into other kinds of documents or into most histories written about this time period. Especially given the huge historical and cultural distance that we are at from where the Chinese Communist Party was in 1929, these descriptions of Mao’s are really valuable for supplanting whatever pictures we have unconsciously created in our brains about how the Party was functioning with a more realistic picture. It’s not uncommon for the literature on the history of the Chinese Communist Party to paint the Party as much more competent and monolithic than it actually was, and Mao’s descriptions of its functioning can be a powerful corrective to that.
Second, specifically for people engaged in trying to change the world in any time and place, no matter how far removed from rural China in 1929, it can be a powerful document to read in that many of the behaviors that Mao criticizes are ones that recur in vastly different times and places all around the world (not unlike other classic documents, like Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and Mao’s “Combat Liberalism.”) It’s the sort of thing where someone trying to change the world today could read some parts of the Resolution and feel like Mao was speaking directly to their own experience.
Of course, for the purposes of this podcast, I am mainly interested in the Resolution because of its historical significance in the development of the Chinese Revolution. It marks a definitive turning point in the political development of the Red Army. As we discussed in the last episode, Mao’s own efforts at carrying out his line on how the army should be a politically engaged weapon of the Communist Party and, as part of that, how army soldiers should be involved in political work in addition to fighting, began with the Sanwan Reorganization in 1927 (which we talked about in episode 62). But with the September 1929 instruction from the Central Committee, the top party leadership gave sanction to Mao’s way of doing things, and this became the overall official party line going forward.
In the Gutian Resolution, Mao takes advantage of this victory to fully discuss the problems with the party’s work in the army and how to fix them, based on a little over two years of experience of guerrilla warfare and of line struggle within the Party over how to organize and use the army. The Resolution is far reaching in discussing the problems involved, both on the level of political line and on the level of concretely applying the policies in the real world.
So, let’s start getting into the document.
The resolution has nine parts. They are titled: “The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party;” “On the Problem of Party Organization;” “The Problem of Inner-Party Education;” “The Problem of Propaganda Work by the Red Army;” “The Problem of the Political Training of Soldiers;” “Special Education for Young Soldiers;” “The Problem of Abolishing Corporal Punishment;” “On the Question of Granting Considerate Treatment to Wounded Soldiers;” and finally “On the Problem of the Relationship between the Military System and the Political System of the Red Army.”
Let’s start at the beginning, with the part titled “The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party.”
This is how Mao begins the Resolution:
MRP3 195
This paragraph serves to introduce the entire Resolution, not just the “Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party” section. The paragraph performs a few functions. On the one hand, it serves as a reaffirmation of the Marxist concept that ideas have their roots in the experience of social classes. Building on that first reaffirmation, Mao also reaffirms something that the Communists took for granted, which was that correct ideas (including ideas about how to go about having a revolution) corresponded in some way with the working class (although whether this meant that they flowed out of the lived experience of individual workers or just, in a sense much more removed from the experiences of individual workers, corresponded to the class interests of the working class in having a successful socialist revolution, is left vague, and was at the time in fact very vague in the minds of the Communist leadership). And, on the flip side of that, incorrect ideas flowed from the influence of different classes on the Party.
In this sense, the Resolution’s introductory paragraph can be read as a kind of boilerplate reaffirmation of basic principles. At the very least, it was an adroit way for Mao to signal to the Party Center and other leaders that everything that followed was written in the spirit of being in line with political orthodoxy.
Now, one of the things that Mao is eventually going to be known for is the understanding that he came to that political line is more important than class origin in keeping a revolution actually revolutionary. And I think we can see even here how Mao was already moving in that direction, because the way he frames the source of the errors in the Party as originating in the non-proletarian origins of the majority of Party members differs in significant ways from the more mechanical way in which the connection between political line and class origin were often understood at the time by Communist leaders, in China and in the International Communist Movement more broadly.
The first way that he does this is a very easy one to miss. He states that the ‘overall’ source of the various incorrect tendencies in the Party lies in the fact that its units are composed largely of peasants and other elements of petty bourgeois origin. The word ‘overall’ at the beginning of this paragraph serves to put at least a little distance between class origin and ideas. (It’s worth noting that the word ‘overall’ is removed in the Selected Works version, because in the editing process this was also noted, and Mao’s ideas downplaying the importance of class origin in relation to political line were highly unorthodox even as he sat at the apex of Party leadership when the Selected Works were put together in 1951.)
Mao then goes on to stress the importance of education as a way in which large numbers of people from non-proletarian class backgrounds can correct their errors. The fact is, if you read broadly in the literature of international Communism at this time (especially if you read lots of Soviet or Comintern documents), there is just a lot of skepticism and, at best, ambivalence about the idea that non-proletarians can really remove the taint of their class origin. Anyone who has read documents from the various party purges of the Soviet party will note the essentialism in regard to class origin that was prevalent. For an in-depth comparison, you can go back and look at the discussion of class origins and political line at the 6th Party Congress, which we discussed back in episodes 101 to 106.
Finally, Mao ends by mentioning the “various erroneous tendencies toward nonproletarian consciousness in the Party.” Here again, Mao uses hedging language which is turned into the phrase “non-proletarian ideas” in the Selected Works version. This is not just an edit to make Mao’s language more straightforward, it also makes Mao’s identification of class origin with political ideas much tighter than it actually was. Anyways, I can go on about this sort of thing forever. As we read through some of the document, you can see for yourself how Mao expressed his understanding of the connection between class origin and political errors, and the recommendations that he made for fixing the errors.
Alright, the first section of the Resolution, the one titled “The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party,” has eight subsections: “The Purely Military Viewpoint;” “Ultrademocracy;” “Lack of Organizational Consciousness;” “Absolute Egalitarianism;” “Idealist Views;” “Individualism;” “The Ideology of Roving Rebel Bands;” and “The Remnants of Adventurism.” Let’s start at the beginning, with “The Purely Military Viewpoint:”
MRP3 196-198
Ok, we’ve actually spent a lot of time in past episodes talking about Mao’s and Zhu De’s disagreements on the issues dealt with in the section on “The Purely Military Viewpoint;” so I don’t think that I have a lot to add to what we’ve already discussed in past episodes. Let’s move on to the next section, “Ultrademocracy:”
MRP3 198-199
As we saw in episode 120, the Eighth Party Congress of the 4th Red Army got bogged down with endless discussions as a result of ultrademocratic practices. What I find really interesting is that the problems with ultrademocracy at that Congress came out right at the time when the ‘purely military viewpoint’ was ascendant, during that period between when Mao was removed from the leadership of the Front Committee and before the September Instruction arrived from the Party Center. One typically associates the ‘purely military viewpoint’ with the problem of ‘commandism,’ that is, giving orders and expecting people to carry them out regardless of whether they understand them or politically agree with them or not.
Certainly, in my own experience and research, when I have had the opportunity to speak with members of non-Maoist armed groups, like the various groups which referred to themselves as political-military organizations that back in the 1980s and 1990s were not so uncommon in Latin America, the people who I have spoken with who were with these groups would emphasize the fact that armies could not be democratic at all, and used this to justify a high level of commandism and even an isolation of their military cadres from the sort of political dialogue that these groups sought to promote as part of their political activities.
I think the fact that Zhu De and the other parts of the Fourth Red Army military leadership fell into this ultrademocratic way of functioning, however problematic it may have been for actually getting things done, speaks to the fact that these people had a real commitment to egalitarianism. Mao’s criticism has more to do with finding some form of compromise between having a functioning army and having, to the degree possible, democratic ways of functioning within the army and party. It’s no surprise that form that he falls back on to fix the problem is to implement democratic centralism, which after all was the standard way that Leninist parties were supposed to function. But it speaks to his experience that he is able to give concrete guidance on steps to actually implement a democratic centralist way of functioning in the party, rather than leave his criticism at the level of “ultrademocracy is bad, democratic centralism is good, so let’s do democratic centralism.” Principles are simple to uphold in words, but concrete guidance on how to actually implement them in the real world can be very hard to come by.
Alright, that’s it for now, next episode we will make some quicker progress through the parts of this Resolution that we are going to read.
Until then, be well.