Production¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter titled "Production" establishes the material foundation upon which the entire historical trajectory of the Chinese Revolution rests. Its core argument is that the mode of production — the specific combination of productive forces and social relations of production — determines the character of any given society, and that a scientific analysis of China’s economic base is indispensable for understanding the political superstructure and the fate of the revolution itself. The author insists that without grasping the concrete level of development of China’s productive forces, the nature of its class relations, and the contradictions inherent in its economic system, any discussion of Chinese politics remains abstract and idealist.
The chapter draws heavily on the Marxist method as elaborated by Marx in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, emphasising that the totality of production relations constitutes the real foundation on which legal and political superstructures arise. It argues that China, before the revolution, was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, where the relations of production — landlordism, usury, foreign imperialist domination — acted as fetters on the development of the productive forces. The revolution, in its bourgeois-democratic phase, was therefore historically necessary to clear away these obstacles. However, the chapter stresses that the revolution did not, and could not, leap over the objective stages of economic development. The productive forces in China were overwhelmingly backward: a vast peasantry working with primitive tools, a tiny industrial proletariat, and a weak domestic bourgeoisie subordinated to foreign capital.
The key claim is that the Chinese Revolution, having triumphed in 1949, faced the same objective economic tasks as any bourgeois revolution — primitive accumulation, industrialisation, and the creation of a modern state. The evidence marshalled includes statistical data on the extreme poverty of the countryside, the low level of industrial output, and the dominance of subsistence agriculture. The chapter argues that the failure to recognise these material constraints led to catastrophic voluntarist experiments, particularly the Great Leap Forward, which attempted to impose socialist relations of production on a backward economic base. The result was not the building of socialism but the destruction of productive forces and the deepening of bureaucratic deformations.
The polemical target is clear: the Maoist theory of "permanent revolution" as applied to China, which the author argues was a distortion of Trotsky’s original conception. Trotsky’s theory held that in backward countries the bourgeois-democratic tasks could only be solved by a workers’ government, but it never denied the necessity of first completing those tasks. The Maoist version, by contrast, attempted to skip the stage of developing the productive forces and imposed collectivisation and communisation prematurely. The chapter argues against the notion that the relations of production can be arbitrarily transformed regardless of the level of the productive forces, a position it identifies as a form of left voluntarism that paved the way for the restoration of capitalism. The theoretical context is the Marxist debate on the relationship between base and superstructure, and the historical experience of the Soviet Union under Stalin, where a similar attempt to force the pace of socialist construction on a backward economy produced a monstrous bureaucratic caste.