Issue No. 60, December, 1978

NUMBE.R 60 DECEMBER 1978 TWENTY CENTS Teng leads campaign to "re-evaluate" Mao New power struggle in Peking For workers political revolution to smash , the Stalinist bureaucracy. Peking's announcement in late November that leaders were the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist reportedly executed Party (CCP) had just held an "important meeting" for their activities culminated weeks of speculation that, yet again, during the Cultural there was "great disorder" in the Heavenly Pal Revolution.. ace. On 20 November, the 1976 Tien An Men dem onstration -- which had been labelled "counter "Reversing the revolutionary" and brutally suppressed by the verdict" on Tien An People's Liberation Army and local militia -- was Men is a clear sign declared a "completely revolutionary action". that the erstwhile And for weeks before vice-premier Teng Hsiao-ping "demon and freak" cautiously declared a stop on 1 December, the Teng, twice purged famous dazibao ("big character" poster) wall in by Mao, has pre Peking was thronged by thousands of curious citi sently got the zens, joined by foreign· embassy first secretaries upper hand over his and their translators, where they read unpre rivals, real and cedented attacks on the formerly "infallible" potential, in the Great Helmsman, Mao Tse-tung. bureaucratic hier archy.After all, Anyone making such criticisms of Hao ten years it was at the same ago would have been denounced instantaneously as Political Bureau a "count errevo 1ut ionary"- and d i sa ppeared . Mao meeting following was attacked for being "metaphysical" and "amen the suppression of able to flattery" in his later years and for Tien An Men that lacking any understanding of "Marxism and the Teng was last purged class struggle". Mao's famous "criticism" of and the current Hua (centre), Teng (left) and Yeh Chien-ying (right) watch show by air force. Stalin as 70 percent good and 30 percent bad was chairman, Hua Kuo-feng, elevated to the post of what enthusiastic popular response. To a work turned around on him, some posters insisting prime minister. And Hua joined with the Gang in ing class denied a wage rise for two decades in that even that was too generous. Other posters applauding the militia for crushing the demon the name of Maoist hostility to "economism"; to painted a picture of a senile Chairman manipu stration. None of this has been forgotten: one the millions of Red Guard youth who were cyni lated by the evil "Gang of Four" into allowing recent poster denounced Hua for cynically jumping cally used and monstro'lsly betrayed by Mao and them to establish a "family-style fascist dic on the bandwagon by inscribing the title page of sent for "re-education" to labour on rural com tatorship" to return China to "feudalism". a soon-to-be published volume of poetry praising munes; and to a population whose intellectual The official campaign to "re-evaluate" Mao has the Tien An Men demonstration. Moreover, Hua's and cultural aspirations were prevented from been building for some time. \'Iu Teh, the mayor authority rests singularly on Mao's much pub rising above the incredibly shallow and of Peking who was identified with the Mao wing of licised purported final words -- when he was philistine "revolutionary operas" of cultural the bureaucracy, has been ousted; and party vice- supposedly a "senile" dupe of the Gang -- to his tsar Chiang Ching, the de-mythologising of Mao successor: "With you in is hardly an unpopular step. charge I can rest easy". But despite the spate of inflated reports in So while Hua and other the bourgeois press about a "spontaneous" out leaders have lain low, the pouring of demands for "democracy" and "human ebullient Teng has been rights" .. what is going on is clearly a carefully putting on a virtuoso per orchestrated campaign to consolidate Teng's formance entertaining a primacy in the Heavenly Palace -- a fact con stream of Japanese business firmed by his peremptory order to his supporters men and politicians and to desist. And if it is impossible right now Western journalists - to determine the specifics of the immediate bu praising the "Democracy reaucratic power play, in the long run the answer Wall" while assuring .one and all that it was a symptom Continued on page eleven only of China's "basic stab ility" and denying that he had any differences with Hua (Age, 29 November). Coyly, Teng "criticised" the How the "masses" for going too far f' in their attacks on Mao - L who "was better than that" Stalinists -- and generously granted ~., that he himself was only "60 percent good". There are limits to the planned "re-evaluation" of Mao's Teng bows before Japanese flag: "peace and fdendship" with Japanese imperialism. role which no wing of the Chinese bureaucracy will chairman and head of Mao's bodyguard, Wang Tung willingly cross. I~hile his wife of three dec Trotsky'S hsing, is reportedly next in line. The once ades can be retroactively slandered as a Kuo ubiquitous Mao badges have been consigned to the mintang agent, Mao most certainly cannot be. In scrap heap and the LittZe Red Book, which when Maoist hagiography he is China's Lenin and Stalin Mao was alive was attributed miracle powers, has both: the founder of the People's Republic and murder gone with it. In early November the stigma of the historic political and "theoretical" foun "bourgeois rightist" was lifted from the last of tainhead of the CCP since the 1930s. several million victims of the "rectification" campaign which followed the short-lived Hundred Nonetheless it is not surprising that the of . .. page 6 Flowers Movement in 1956-57. Five Red Guard ficial "re-evaluation" of Mao has found a some- How tile. SWP distorts Trotsle,ist IIistor, Tripp's meanderings revisited The 26 October Direct Action announced that shabby cyn1c1sm is no compliment to Tripp; rather application of this program to Australia - Ted Tripp, for three years during the 1930s a it is demeaning and patronising. Tripp played an one section [the Trippites] claiming that it member and leader of the Trotskyist Workers Party important role at one time and it must be under should be rejected in toto; the other (WP) and for several years prior to that a promi stood. So we would like to set the record [Wishart's] wanting to amend it so as to com- nent figure in the then-Stalinist Communist Party straight on a few points. pletely alter its meaning. Both wanted a (CPA), had capped "60 years of struggle for loose group expressing several viewpoints, socialism" by joining the Socialist Workers Party Deutschmann explains how "a few years" after Tripp joined the WP following his 1934 expulsion rather than a disciplined organisation advo (SWP). In itself this event has little signifi cating one programme and policy.... " cance. For the last 38 years, Ted Tripp has been from the CPA for Trotskyisn, "he left the Workers virtually politically inactive; for the last The splitters formed a group called the Revol twenty he has been secretary of the Victorian utionary Workers League (RWL), which published Labor College (VLC) in Melbourne's Trades Hall. three issues of a roneoed paper, Socialist But for the SWP, prettying up Tripp's political Appeal, with which Tripp was associated, and history, as the Direct Action piece by Dave .'-JIPP'S shortly thereafter disappeared. The political Deutschmann did, serves the purpose of artifici issues in the split were murky. The RWL's ac ally boosting the SWP's pretensions to represent ~L eandreriugS count in the first issue of Socialist Appeal the continuity of Australian Trotskyism. I \ (March 1939) scarcely clarified the matter, although it betrayed elements of cliquism and In the process the SWP shamelessly distorts -- 10 January 1938 Australian parochialism. In 1940 its members re \_. ~ vi('''' ot tM '~.~l'I).'\f"tI"'. 01 the history of the Trotskyist moyement. Such 1.:,1 w"td 'fripP .n thO 1"'\1\.0&1 Militant.on joined the Communist League, some to split yet l M.. i~ ill 1'>1311l" i\ IJeCOtIl"· noe "Tripp's again in solidarity with·'Max Shachtman's oppo \l.~""'~ 1\1,,1 .... n""" i\ 0\"" \h&\ he Footnote to a betrayal ,."".". "" connection ,.ilb \be ""0,,,··1 meanderings" . sition to military defence of the USSR. l';\.t'lo)·fur • .be 1",\ .ov.~\ tIlootbS 't.ipp" During most of World War II and from there • I"". "",,0 001l1."h.' o,ra\'o. onwards, Tripp was not involved in the Trotsky Almost two months after the fact, Direct Action (30 , ~\l>~t\1 November) felt compelled for same reason to comment on ist or any other leftist movement at all. Direct what it calls "one of the more bizarre sidelights to the Party and subsequently began to publish another Action attempts to obscure this fact by pointing October 7 NSW elections". What Allen Myers, resident Trotskyist magazine, Proletarian Review, which to Tripp's association with the VLC. But the VLC "humourist" of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), finds was based among Trotskyists at Sydney Univer is a creature of the Trades Hall bureaucracy, on so "bizarre" is our call for a simple act of class soli sity". Deutschmann's glib account notwithstand which it depends directly for its survival. Its darity in defence of striking Government Printing Office ing, one does not simply "leave" a revolutionary primary, albeit marginal, "educational" effect workers in Sydney whose picket line was broken .by the organisation and publish one's own "Trotskyist has been the training of "left" union bureaucrats Wra'n government to remove scab election ballot papers.

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