Mao discusses problems in party organization and how to fix them.
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
“On the Revolutionary “Three-in-One” Combination”
Episode artwork: May 1967 poster “Resolutely Protect the Policy of the Revolutionary Three-in-One Combination”
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 125 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Alright, let’s continue our textual analysis of the Gutian Resolution.
The second section of the resolution is headed as “On the Problem of Party Organization.” This section is so valuable for actually understanding the organizational state of affairs within the Communist Party and also for getting an idea of how Mao was going about trying to correct that state of affairs, that it’s going to continue to be valuable to read the whole section, like we did for the previous section on “The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party” in the last two episodes, even though we are now past the part of the Resolution that was edited and put into the Selected Works, so we are no longer, at this point, dealing with the first draft of what was to become a major canonical document for global Maoism, and we are merely dealing with a primary source document which allows us great insight into how the Fourth Red Army and the Communist Party were functioning at the time.
MRP3 207-208
Ok, a very negative assessment of how the Communist Party was functioning. Despite an ongoing wave of successes in conquering territory in western Fujian and south Jiangxi, a very negative portrayal of the state of affairs. Mao is going to give his reasons for this assessment in the various subsections of this part of the Resolution, so let’s keep going.
MRP3 208
So, the basic pool of people that the Party wanted to recruit from were soldiers whose main task was to engage in combat, but we are also reminded here that there were other types of soldiers, like those whose main duty was to carry out various laboring functions, and orderlies. For people unfamiliar with what an orderly is, it would be a soldier who carried out tasks for a command headquarters or for a group of officers, doing things like carrying messages, or performing clerical or administrative tasks.
MRP3 208
So, how big were these squads, platoons, and companies? The truth is that these varied a lot, as the army was constantly being reorganized, because of the shifting nature of the army’s objectives, as well as the toll that nearly constant combat took on the army. But as a general rule, squads had around 9-13 soldiers, then platoons were made up of 3 to 4 squads (about 30 to 50 soldiers), and then companies were made up of 3 to 4 platoons (about 100 to 150 soldiers).
It seems clear from the context here that there were less Communist Party members to distribute within these military formations than Mao would have liked, which is why they were not always able to set up small groups of party members at the squad level and had to do it sometimes at the platoon level.
MRP3 208
Here we can see already a form of organization that Mao encouraged basically throughout his life. Mao liked to mix up people from different backgrounds and put them together in committees or small groups with each other, so that they could bring their different experiences and insights to bear. Here, Mao is talking about trying to put together intellectuals and laborers, ordinary party members and cadres (which would have been party members whose main tasks involved much more work for the party, rather than work in whatever their particular role in the army was, as would have been the case for the people who Mao is calling ordinary party members here, although I think the distinction could become blurry here).
Probably the most famous instance of this sort of thing was during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao called for the formation of what were called revolutionary three-in-one combinations as the basis for the revolutionary committees which provisionally took power in places where the capitalist roaders, or at least alleged capitalist roaders, had been overthrown. These three-in-one combinations were formed by leaders of revolutionary mass organizations, representatives of the People’s Liberation Army units stationed in the area, and revolutionary leading cadres.
MRP3 208-209
The first three of the items that Mao lists regarding the “issue of laxity in party organization” are, I think, fairly self-explanatory: too many people being made party members just because they are officers in the military; party headquarters solving problems without training and educating rank-and-file party members how to solve problems on their own; and people who have important responsibilities not being called on their lapses in discipline because of fear of jeopardizing the work that those people are responsible for (and this, in turn, lowering expectations for discipline more broadly).
However, what Mao means in this fourth point is not entirely clear to me. Let’s think about it for a second.
Mao is saying that there is a problem where party members are conflating the work of the party and the work of their social professions. What is most unclear to me here is what Mao means when he talks about ‘social professions.’ My first reaction when reading the term ‘social profession’ is very much, I think, conditioned by my education and training in a ‘profession.’ I think of historians who do history, doctors who do medicine, lawyers who do law, marketers who do emails and ads, stuff like that. Clearly, though, the Fourth Red Army was not made up of historians and lawyers and digital marketers and also had very few doctors. So, what did Mao mean?
I can’t be certain, but what I think Mao is referring to here is just the work that people were assigned to do, but conceived of separately from the person’s particular role in the Communist Party. So, for example, a Communist Party member in the Red Army might be assigned to work on land reform or to engage in propaganda work. What it seems to me that Mao is saying here is that a lot of party members are just assuming that the particular problems related to the work that they are engaged in, like land reform or propaganda, are things just to be decided by the Party. Instead, what it seems to me that Mao is saying here, is that these party members should take the initiative to call meetings of the people working in these areas (including, presumably, non-party members engaged in the land reform or propaganda work) to discuss the politics of the work that they are doing. Don’t just assume that the Party can or should decide everything, call meetings and discuss things broadly among the people who are actually involved in the work, that is much better than having everything decided either from above, where not everyone knows about the concrete conditions, or only by a narrow groups of party members who are involved in something and, in so doing, fail to draw on the knowledge and unleash the initiative of non-party members involved in the work or whose lives are affected by things like land reform, or setting up a new government in a liberated area.
I’m not entirely sure that this is what Mao means here, but if we look at the larger context of the other things that Mao is saying in this Gutian Resolution, I am pretty confident in this guess at what he meant. And, if I’m right, this is another example of Mao as someone extremely concerned with finding ways to bridge the gap between the party and the masses, and in unleashing the masses to win their own liberation.
MRP3 209
One of the biggest assumptions in so much of the scholarly literature on Communist parties is that they function as these kind of super well-lubricated machines of organization and discipline. You know, Mao sometimes referred to the party, the army, and the united front as the three magic weapons for defeating the enemy in the Chinese revolution. And it’s like many of these scholars almost act as if the party is a magic weapon. In that light, it’s kind of funny to read what Mao wrote here, about some of these higher party bodies that, rather than functioning as the clever, behind-the-scenes managers or, more sinisterly, manipulators of the party bodies below them, actually just kind of ignored the party organizations that they were supposed to be providing leadership to.
I’ve encountered lots of examples of this sort of thing in my own work. For example, there was one guy who I talked with who had been given some fairly important tasks, and then, when he was done, he was supposed to wait to be contacted to get back in touch with his leadership. But the problem was that his leadership just kind of forgot about him, so he waited and waited and cooled his feet and eventually had to find a way to get back in touch with the Party which didn’t compromise security. And the thing is, this sort of thing is far from unique in the history of international communism.
Likewise, what Mao mentions at the start of the section we just heard about “reports of lower-level organs” being “seldom approved, replied to, or dealt with” by higher-level party organs is also very common. I have done oral histories with innumerable people from all over the world who describe the reports that they wrote up for higher level party bodies as disappearing into a ‘black hole.’ Who knows if they were ever read, but they were certainly never replied to. Almost universally, people found this to be one of the most dispiriting aspects of party life.
OK, how does Mao say these problems should be corrected?
MRP3 209
Alright, here’s the first indication that Mao was really not joking when he said that standards were too lax for letting people into the Party. Gamblers and opium addicts were not the sort of people I had pictured him as referring to, but upon reflection, it makes sense. As Mao had discussed earlier, one of the main issues for the army and the Party was that it drew large numbers of recruits from mercenaries and vagrants, especially soldiers who had been captured from enemy forces. Then, the party and army were faced with innumerable tasks that needed to be done, and limited capable people to fill those roles. Given the people who the party had available to recruit from, it makes sense that people with serious deficiencies, like opium addiction and gambling problems, were among those who circumstances called on to fill historical roles in the revolutionary process that they were ill-prepared for. Some of those people rose to the occasion, transforming themselves as they transformed the world. But also, some couldn’t manage it, and here Mao is trying to fix how that had caused problems.
And there are ready parallels that I think can be drawn to other times and places where revolutionary movements have drawn on a social base which would not have been their initial preference. One of the comments that I have heard a lot from people talking about revolutionary politics in first world countries around the world over the past decades is that they are struck by just how many people involved in those efforts wear their emotional damage on their sleeves, and how many appear to be mentally ill. This may well be the ‘opium addicts and gamblers’ problem of the revolutionary organizations of the late twentieth century and early 21st century in the rich countries of the world. Ok, that’s a huge tangent, I’d better stop there.
Back to Mao’s line for correcting the errors of organizational laxity:
MRP3 209-210
We already discussed a lot of what Mao addresses here, because he’s mainly going back over what he just listed as errors and indicating things to do to correct those errors. But I do have an additional comment:
When Mao says that new party members “should have no errors in their political views,” I think what is meant here is no major errors. The idea that people should be entirely without error is at odds with the way in which Mao emphasized ongoing ideological remolding as a form of personal growth that people go through as part of the revolutionary process. Although, to be fair to the Gutian Resolution and the Mao of 1929, Mao came to lay greater emphasis on this process of transformation later on.
This next part of the document talks about the importance of party meetings:
MRP3 210-211
I think that this was all pretty self-explanatory and doesn’t require a lot of input from me. But I do wonder if Mao would have considered Robert’s Rules of Order as a feudal procedure for conducting meetings?
OK, there is just a little bit left in this “On the Problem of Party Organization” section of the Resolution, but honestly it’s all pretty short and schematic and not as useful for our purposes, so I’m going to skip it.
At this point, we have given a pretty close reading to the first two sections of the Gutian Resolution. There are seven more sections left that we haven’t read and discussed, but much of it is either much more schematic than what we have covered so far, or much less relevant for learning about what the lived experience of Communist Party life was like in 1929, or is stuff that we have covered pretty well already, so I think that this probably concludes our reading of the Gutian Resolution (although I want to think about that just a little more before I decide for certain). That said, if you are able to get access to the text, I would encourage you to go ahead and read the whole thing, it’s worth it.
OK, that’s it for now. Until next episode, be well.