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A Factory Collective Expands Production in the Cultural Revolution
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- 10 April 2014 489 hits
Almost 45 years after the reversal of the Chinese Revolution, China has emerged as a major capitalist power and appears to be on a collision course with U.S. imperialism. The Chinese Revolution was one of the great achievements of the 20th Century — an advance over the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In 1967, more than 40 million workers, soldiers, and students launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). It was an effort to stop the return to capitalism in China. Ultimately it was defeated, in part because the Red Guards and other revolutionary forces were unable to organize a new revolutionary communist party.
The following account shows the need for further advances in the international revolutionary movement. Wages must be eliminated, along with the special oppression of women. Above all, we must create a worker-run society based on one unwavering principle:
From each according to commitment, to each according to need.
Progressive Labor Party, in our infancy at the time of the GPCR, was a fraternal party of the Chinese Communist Party. And we supported the GPCR. The defeat of the GPCR and the reversal of the Chinese revolution signaled the end of the old communist movement. These setbacks plunged the international working class into the Dark Night we have struggled through for more than two generations.
But Dark Night will have its end. World War I gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution. World War II give birth to the Chinese Revolution. PLP, organizing across all borders, aims to make the next imperialist war the last one, with worldwide communist revolution.
This is a story of a collectively owned village factory. In the winter of 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the eighth production team of my Village decided to set up a metal shop. The team employed two old farmers who had worked with sheet metal before, and three other people with no experience in metal work. In need of a site, they rented a vacant three-room house from my family.
The workshop was to produce metal pieces for both ornamental and practical purposes — handles for drawers, doorknobs, and so on. The production team bought a truckload of leftover metal pieces from a factory in Qingdao City for very little money, and began to make their products with simple metal cutters and hammers.
The products sold very well on the local market. Shortly before the Chinese New Year that winter, every family in the production team — including those taking care of the farm work — received a collective bonus from the extra earnings from the metal shop.
Noting the success of this enterprise, village leaders proposed expanding the metal shop into a bigger operation. The production team leaders agreed, so the metal shop moved into the village-owned motel, which for years had catered to travelers with horse-drawn carts. There were more than a dozen rooms and three to four acres of yard space. The village invested in more tools and hired a few more workers.
Apart from maintaining the original product line, the new workshop also sought to expand production into other areas. The village sent several young people to a farming machine factory, a state-owned enterprise about three kilometers from the village, to be trained for different industrial skills. Some learned to assemble or operate lathes, others to weld with electricity or weld and cut with gas torches.
As a state-owned enterprise, the factory’s mission was in part to help rural areas in whatever way they could. The factory leadership trained village youth for free for six months. At the end of the training period, they donated to the village all the tools the young people had been trained to use: an old lathe, a planer, a drill, and a thirty-ton press, along with many smaller tools. The factory also donated the parts needed to assemble two newer lathes and a sixty-ton press. With these tools and more than a dozen trained workers, the factory’s technical capacity was greatly expanded.
The village factory also received contributions from other factories, including some electric motors. The political climate at the time eased the transfer of old equipment from state-owned enterprises to the villages for collective use, most of it free of charge.
At the time, most tractors in China’s rural areas had no shelter for the driver’s head. The village factory set out to make a metal cab for the driver with a roof and two doors. It shielded the driver from the sun and the cold in winter, and became a highly popular product. The line of tractor drivers desiring the metal cab was very long; people had to wait for months for their turn.
The cab was designed by Huang Jianguo together with Liu Jiawen and Liu Jiazhou. Huang, a middle-school graduate, drew the blueprints; Liu Jiawen and Liu Jiazhou developed the manufacturing process. The factory made good money from this product line for a number of years. More important, the process trained many young people in working with sheet metal. Soon the factory gained a reputation for innovative practices. It took on the name of Mohan (Welding and Fixing) Factory.
Soon Mohan began making ventilation fans for textile factories in Qingdao. The textile industry was expanding at the time and needed a great quantity of these fans for the health and safety of the textile workers. A group of our factory workers specialized in making this product. They cut the sheet metal into the right-sized pieces and used our sixty-ton press to shape them. Then they welded these blades onto the axis. The production line was streamlined and standardized, and the products were continuously shipped out to Qingdao.
Our county was on the coast, where fishing was a traditional industry. At the time, fishermen still used sails, which were dangerous when the boats were caught in storms. When I was still a young child, a serious storm took the lives of 70 fishermen. The county government was determined to modernize the industry by replacing sails with diesel engines.
Our factory got the contract to produce transmission boxes for the fishing boats. Two high school graduates, Liu Kefeng and Li Yuxun, were assigned the task. With blueprints from a state-owned enterprise in Rongcheng County, they began to figure out how to make the different parts and assemble them into a transmission box.
In 1973, a major contractor wanted to manufacture two ventilation blowers to improve workers’ conditions. These blowers were huge, as large as small houses, and the contractor was not sure we’d be able to do it. After their technicians inspected our equipment, they said they did not believe we could do the work. (In fact, at first our own business manager wasn’t sure we could do it. One of the visiting technicians was an eighth-rank metal worker, the highest in China at the time. He said that many factories with greater technical capacity than ours had turned the contract down.
Relying on the Workers
But our factory had a secret weapon, one of its original five workers: Wang Xuejin. In his early forties at the time, he could not draw or read a blueprint. But Wang had a rare knack when it came to innovation. Whenever the factory had a technical difficulty, the leaders would discuss it with him. He would work on it by drawing some lines on the ground with a stick. Then he would chat with other people in the factory and work on it some more. Sometimes he would have to think about it for a long time. Once Wang had developed an idea, he would call in a few technically savvy people to work with him and draw the blueprints.
The factory leaders badly wanted the contract for the two big blowers, but first they had to be sure the factory could handle it. The factory manager explained the difficulties to Wang. The main obstacle was that the factory lacked a press powerful enough to form the sheet metal into a horn-shaped part that drew air through the blowers. This one part was more than two meters in diameter at its smaller end and close to three meters at its larger end!
The manager asked Wang to find a way to circumvent the problem. Wang considered it for a whole morning by himself, then brainstormed with a few other workers in the factory. Toward the end of the afternoon, they managed to draw a simple blueprint showing how the part could be made without heavy equipment.
The factory manager went back to the top technician and told him he was now certain they’d be able to meet the contractor’s three-month deadline for the blowers. We got the contract, since no one else could be found to do the work. But the technician was less than absolutely convinced we could do it, either. He left with the words that he would return in one month to check on our progress.
Next issue: The author graduates from high school, becomes a factory worker; a medical emergency; wages and collectivity.
U.S. rulers and their European allies are locked in a fierce struggle with their imperialist adversaries in Russia for control over Eastern Europe. Among recent developments:
• Russia’s seizure of strategic Crimea — after the coup backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Ukraine (see CHALLENGE, 3/12) — foreshadowing a wider world conflict;
• The crisis in Crimea intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries already in place;
• U.S. rulers scrambling to oppose Russian bosses even as they must continue to “pivot” toward a military confrontation with China and try to police the Middle East;
• The hostilities between the capitalist regimes of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin escalating to shifts of military assets and longer-term coalition building. U.S. Air Force fighter jets have left Italy and England for Poland and Lithuania, while Russian tanks threaten Ukraine’s eastern borders;
• NATO vowing absolute defense of the now-threatened Baltic states, a promise the Western powers may be unable to keep;
• A standoff that “has made Russia, Iran, and China more united in attempting to create a new power pole, counterbalancing and resisting the West — particularly the United States,” according to Majid Rafizadeh of Harvard’s International Review (FrontPageMag, 3/20/14).
Workers’ Only Answer: Communism
The international working class has no interest in either side of this imperialist dogfight. Our only answer is to organize for communist revolution to destroy the profit system and its mass racist unemployment, poverty and war. (For conditions of workers in Ukraine, see page 4). Building the communist Progressive Labor Party is crucial to the goal of creating a society free of profits and bosses, one run by workers for workers’ needs.
When Putin says he seized Crimea to help the ethnic Russians who reside there, it is a bald-faced lie. Putin is in power to serve his fellow-Russian capitalists, the corporate oligarchs who share a strategic interest in Crimea’s energy pipelines and Russian naval base. The Russian president is offering similar “service” in a play to win over the Russian-speaking 25 percent of Estonia and Latvia. Under the headline “Disquiet in Baltics over Sympathies of Russian Speakers,” Reuters reported (3/23), “There was disquiet when as pro-Russian forces took up positions in Crimea, the Russian ambassador to Latvia offered Russian passports and pensions for Ethnic Russians.”
But unlike Ukraine, the Baltic nations — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — belong to the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which views invasion of a member state as an act of war. NATO boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently reaffirmed this war pledge at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the leading think tank for the finance capital wing of U.S. imperialism.
A CFR interviewer asked, “How confident should the government of, say, Estonia feel that, if Putin decided to send Russian forces into Estonia on the pretext of protecting the large ethnic Russian population there, NATO would respond with force?” Rasmussen replied, “I am 100 percent sure ... that the alliance as a whole would take action to ensure effective protection and defense of an ally that is attacked” (CFR website, 3/21/14). A NATO-Russia conflict would put the two sides with their millions of troops and thousands of nuclear bombs in direct confrontation.
U.S. Bosses Not Ready?
But others in the U.S. ruling class insist that NATO is not yet prepared for a broader conflict. On the day of the CFR-NATO interview, the Brookings Institution (another finance capital think tank) published “The Geopolitical Realities of the Ukraine Crises, the Limits of U.S. Energy Assistance, and the Need to Tone Down the Rhetoric.” It noted that the U.S. goal of using its natural gas exports to break Russia’s stranglehold on Western Europe’s energy supply remains years from reality.
Brookings warned Obama to “de-escalate the tensions currently surrounding the crisis unfolding in Ukraine before we either reach an impasse with only suboptimal outcomes or expand the crisis into a truly global one.” In other words, the U.S. rulers and their allies must fully militarize before taking on a power like Russia. Otherwise, their present course will lead to regional defeats — or a third world war for which they stand unprepared.
Naturally, Brookings failed to note the bosses’ most dangerous weakness. The U.S. will be hard-pressed to march to war as long as the U.S. working class has yet to be won to the capitalists’ cause, as reflected by popular opposition to a military draft and intervention in the Syrian War.
No wonder that U.S. bosses are protesting that Germany and France contribute far less to NATO than they could in both cash and cannon fodder. Even weaker is their alliance with NATO member Turkey. At present, Turkey allows Russian warships passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea through the chokepoint of the Bosporus Strait. At the same time, citing safety reasons, Turkey bans all liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers from the strait. This prohibition blocks the U.S. bosses’ plan to use LNG from Qatar (and eventually from Texas) to undercut Russia’s energy export leverage against the European Union. In any case, the infrastructure to handle these exports is at least a year away in Qatar and five years off in the U.S.
A Scenario for World War
ExxonMobil currently provides crude oil from Kurdistan (an autonomous region in Iraq) for the long-term purpose of winning Turkey fully to the U.S. side. But this deal antagonizes the Iraqi government, which is vying for control over Kurdistan oil. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is threatening to cut off the vast operations of Exxon and allied oil companies in southern Iraq, established during the last U.S. invasion.
But the U.S. may run out of time to consolidate its bloc before the next great-power clash. On March 18, three days before Russia’s parliament ratified the annexation of Crimea, U.S. ruling-class mouthpiece Roger Cohen fed war fever in his column in the New York Times. He imagined a scenario that begins with the assassination of the Russian defense minister by a young Ukrainian nationalist, an obvious parallel to the events that helped trigger the imperialist murder of tens of millions in World War I. And then:
Russia annexes Crimea. It declares war on Ukraine, takes Donetsk in short order, and annexes the eastern half of the country. The United States warns Russia not to advance on Kiev. It reminds the Kremlin of America’s binding alliance with Baltic states that are NATO members. European nations mobilize. Desperate diplomacy unravels. A Ukrainian counterattack flounders but inflicts heavy casualties, prompting a Russian advance on the capital. Two NATO F-16s are shot down during a reconnaissance flight close to the Lithuanian-Russian border. Russia declares war on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Invoking Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty — an attack against one member shall be considered an attack against all — the United States and its European allies come to their defense. China, in what it calls a pre-emptive strike, invades Taiwan, “a potential Crimea.” Japan and India declare war on China. World War III has begun.
Cohen’s scenario may not materialize in Crimea in 2014. But given enough sparks, one of them must burst into flame somewhere. U.S. imperialism is locked onto a violent collision course with its equally ruthless competitors. Unchecked, the result would murder hundreds of millions of workers. It can only be answered by the might of a communist-led international working class, which has the power to wipe out the capitalist system. That’s the goal of Progressive Labor Party. Join us!
Schools should be wondrous centers of discovery and learning. They should be places where students develop life-long interests and abilities, where they gain confidence and knowledge, where they find cherished friends and mentors, and where they feel protected and cared for.
But public schools under capitalism fail on every count. First, they sort students into racist tiers to determine who will obtain the better-paying jobs at the top, and who will be left with the least desirable, lowest-paying jobs at the bottom. Put simply, schools define who will occupy the corporate executive suites and who will clean them! They also decide who will be the unemployed pittied against other workers; who will be the soldiers to kill workers around the world.
Of course, there are still plenty of people in the middle, including teachers. But the number of good-paying jobs in the U.S. is dwindling, while low-paying jobs (many with few or no benefits) are on the rise. According to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 30 occupations with the most projected job growth between 2012 and 2022, only five require a four-year college degree.
Jobs requiring master’s degrees are not exempt from these cuts. More than 75 percent of college teachers are on non-tenure (non-permanent) tracks. Many adjunct professors earn poverty-level wages with no healthcare benefits.
Starving the Schools
For the capitalists, it makes no sense to fund a school system generating lots of college-ready graduates when fewer and fewer jobs call for a college education. In fact, the bosses are understandably nervous at the prospect of millions of college graduates who are frustrated and angry about their limited future.
Since it costs more than $600 billion a year to operate K-12 public schools, and money is needed for war preparations with its imperialist rivals, the U.S. ruling class can kill two birds with one stone. By cutting spending on public schools, it will turn out more workers for the low-paying jobs that U.S. capitalism is creating. To deflect the anger of young workers, they need to sell the racist myth that people have disappointing careers because they weren’t capable of “higher-level” thinking — or because they didn’t work hard enough in school.
Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer people than before the recession, according to figures from the Labor Department. Enrollment in public schools, meanwhile, has increased by more than 800,000 students. To maintain pre-recession staffing ratios, public school employment should have actually grown by about 132,000 jobs in the past four years, in addition to replacing those that were lost, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
The New York Times (12/22/13) goes on to describe what the loss of school positions has meant for students: larger class sizes, reduced services, fewer guidance counselors and reading and math specialists.
The decay in public school conditions — on top of the higher fail rate in the Common Core exams — means that most students will be labeled unprepared for college. In New York City, for example, only 22.2 percent of 2013 graduates were considered “college-ready” by Department of Education standards. But it gets worse: In the bottom half of New York’s high schools — that’s 170 schools — only 4.5 percent of the graduates were college-ready.
Most students in these low-performing schools are black and Latino. The public school sorting machine is racist at its core. This continues the growing stream of black, Latino, and immigrant workers who suffer the racist super-exploitation that nets U.S. capitalists hundreds of billions of dollars in super-profits. Meanwhile, this deterioration of the entire school system drags down the conditions for white working-class students as well.
The Game is Rigged
U.S. bosses like to pretend that schools offer “equal opportunity” for all. In reality, affluent families gain a huge advantage by sending their children to expensive private schools or public schools in wealthy suburbs. Because most of public school funding comes from local property taxes, the result is stunning inequality. In New York State, the wealthiest 10 percent of school districts spent an average of $35,690 per student in 2012-2013, nearly double the average spending ($19,823) for the poorest 10 percent of districts.
Tests such as the SAT and ACT and standardized exams play a central role in sorting students for the top colleges and the best jobs. When students do poorly, they are told it’s because they are dumb or lazy and therefore deserve a future of low-wage and precarious labor.
The politicians, at the bidding of their corporate masters, recently added a new wrinkle. They have convinced large sections of the public that teachers — and not the big capitalists — are responsible for their children’s lack of success on the exams. Therefore, the bosses’ argument goes, teachers are undeserving of tenure, seniority rights, decent pensions or wage increases.
Teaching Obedience and Patriotism
The second crucial aspect of schools under capitalism is ideological indoctrination. Schools say they teach critical thinking; if students were really taught “critical thinking,” they would rebel against a social order in which 400 U.S. households have as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. They’d refuse to accept a “global war on terror” based on lies, a war that masks inter-imperialist rivalry to control valuable resources, markets and investment opportunities. They’d organize against a political system where Big Money calls the shots, and where the richest companies get what they want and the rest of us endure wage freezes, lower benefits and high permanent unemployment.
Instead of critical thinking, students are taught passivity from an early age. They are taught to follow orders and be patriotic and support the U.S. military, no matter how many countries it invades or how many workers it displaces or kills. Students are told they are responsible for their own success or failure, which is the rulers’ strategy to build individualism and hide the system’s failure to provide meaningful, rewarding jobs for all. Finally, students are taught the anti-communist myth that only capitalism works and any attempt to build an egalitarian society must fail.
This last bit of instruction is particularly important as more and more people are beginning to question capitalism. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 49 percent of young adults (ages 18 – 29) have a positive view of “socialism,” while only 43 percent had a negative opinion. In this age group, more people support anti-capitalist ideas. This is an indication that youth are open to communism. Let’s take this oppurtunity to build a movement for communism and explain to our friends the differences between
socialism (state capitalism) and communism (see Our Fight on page 2).
Teachers in Progressive Labor Party tell students the truth: that they are bright and capable of tremendous learning. In fact, they can learn how to run society, not for the profit of a few but for the benefit of the entire working class. A critical part of that understanding lies in anti-racism and multi-racial unity. When students and workers grasp the fundamental truth that our class can transform society into one that runs by the communist principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” we will have aced the most important test of all.
While at an Advisory Board hearing for parents and teachers in Newark, NJ, we had several hours to distribute 400 CHALLENGEs. There was time to take in the bitter cold. I glanced at the nearby cemetery. It was there I made my decision to join Progressive Labor Party. I used to study there, as it’s a beautiful spot, full of trees, shade and quiet.
My boyfriend back then had urged me to get a subscription to CHALLENGE, though he was not himself a PLP member. After a year of reading the paper, I wrote PL asking if I could do Spanish translation. Not long afterward, a newly married couple came to my door, themselves students and members of the Party. They had checked with my (now former) boyfriend to see if he vouched for my honesty and asked if I’d like to meet for a few months with them. (Back in the day, a six-month period of candidacy was required.)
That very week I went to “my” cemetery to contemplate about what I’d been reading in CHALLENGE: the organizational powers of the wealthy had waged the Vietnam war; the logical conclusion being that a revolutionary party was the only way to end the atrocities of capitalism. I recalled how words like revolution and communism had at first grated on my mind. Gradually, they took shape with each article as part of the logical beauty of science. Though joining seemed like the right thing, I knew to do so would put me in difficult situations, and sometimes danger. I might lose my life.
I pictured closing the lid on my own coffin, there in that cemetery. I then knew I couldn’t die with integrity unless I lived a life making progress for the working class. While my anti-sexist pride takes joy in the fact that I joined without my boyfriend’s urging and before he did so, it’s only right to thank him today for insisting I pick up the subscription.
These are the reasons why, for forty-eight years, CHALLENGE has been so essential to my life. It is much more than a newspaper — it’s more like a comrade.
Longtime Roja
PITTSBURGH, March 5 — Militant protests rocked this city on March 3 and 4, bringing traffic to a standstill. Over 1,000 workers, some beating drums and others carrying banners, gathered at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) headquarters here to protest the anti-worker policies of the UPMC bosses. Members of the Service Employees International union, they are paid starvation wages while the bosses rake in millions, similar to tens of millions of other workers nation-wide. These protests in Pittsburgh demonstrate that workers are prepared to fight back against the bosses.J
Rap artist Jasiri X fired up the crowd with his song, “People Over Profits” which seemed to sum up the sentiments of all the workers. However, workers must fight for a society without profits. It will take a communist revolution to gain true equality and justice for all workers.
