Preface to the 1991 Morningside Edition of Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary

Wang Fanxi

I was overjoyed to learn that Columbia University Press is preparing to make available for American readers a new edition of the English translation of my memoirs, first published by Oxford University Press in 1980. The news could hardly have come at a better time, now that we are witness- ing the general collapse of Stalinism. Starting in the late spring and early sum- mer of 1989, earthshaking changes have taken place and are continuing to take place in countries of the ‘socialist’ camp: changes so sudden and dramatic that everyone – Stalinist and anti-Stalinist alike – has tried hard to find an explana- tion for them. To understand Stalinism’s present collapse, in my opinion we must first grasp how the Stalinist system came into being. The main content and central story of this book tells how a Chinese revolutionary and his comrades set out after 1927 to oppose both the theory and the practice of Stalinism, at first in the Soviet Union and then in China. Needless to say, it does not give a rounded and comprehensive picture of its subject, but even so it shows graphically how Stalinism and its Maoist variant were born, began to flourish, and eventually triumphed both in the Soviet Union and in China. What’s more, it might in some degree help predict the future of the system of Stalinism. I would like to use this preface to review a number of new issues, as well as some old issues that were once thought to have been settled but have now been raised afresh by the new developments in the ‘socialist’ camp. Is Stalinism really the equivalent of socialism? Does its collapse prove the bankruptcy of socialism and communism? Can and will it be capitalism that replaces Stalinism? Is capitalism from now on inviolable and irreplaceable? Will socialism and communism go down in history as reactionary illusions? Let me start by saying that my answer to these questions is in all cases no. I have spent the greater part of my life and effort in the struggle for socialism and against Stalinism, but that is not the main reason why I answer as I do. Under the new circumstances, even old questions must be freshly pondered and answered in the light of new facts. I have spent much energy considering these questions, and considering the answers that others have given to them. And my conclu- sion has not changed: I still believe that the bankruptcy of Stalinism is in no way equivalent to the bankruptcy of socialism. Nor do I believe that capitalism

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004282278_082 preface to the morningside edition of memoirs (1990) 1121 is ‘immortal and unending’. On the contrary, I see no reason to change my view that the future of humankind depends on the realization of true, that is, non- Stalinist socialism. Unfortunately I am too old and tired to deal with these ideas in any detail, and in any case a short preface is not the right place to deal with such weighty issues. So to compensate a little, I would like to quote a passage written fifty- two years ago by George Orwell while reviewing The Communist International, by Franz Borkenau:

Dr Borkenau thinks that the root cause of the vagaries of the Comintern policy is the fact that revolution as Marx and Lenin predicted it and as it happened, more or less, in Russia, is not thinkable in the advanced western countries, at any rate at present. Here I believe he is right. Where I part company from him is when he says that for the western democracies the choice lies between Fascism and an orderly reconstruction through the co-operation of all classes. I do not believe in the second possibility, because I do not believe that a man with £50,000 a year and a man with fifteen shillings a week either can, or will, co-operate. The nature of their relationship is quite simply, that the one is robbing the other, and there is no reason to think that the robber will suddenly turn over a new leaf It would seem, therefore, that if the problems of western capitalism are to be solved, it will have to be through a third alternative, a movement which is genuinely revolutionary, that is, willing to make drastic changes and to use violence if necessary, but which does not lose touch, as Communism and Fascism have done, with the essential values of democracy. Such a thing is by no means unthinkable. The germs of such a movement exist in numerous countries, and they are capable of growing. At any rate, if they don’t, there is no real exit from the pigsty we are in.1

I am not an Orwellite, but apart from where he agrees with Borkenau that the revolution predicted by Marx and Lenin cannot break out in the western democratic countries, I agree with most of what he says here and moreover applaud it, though naturally where he says ‘communism’ I would say Stalinism. It’s a fact that society consists of different classes, and it is illusory to expect the robbers and the robbed to cooperate freely and even more so to expect the robbers to ‘turn over a new leaf’ of their own free will. Orwell’s third road between fascism and Stalinism – a radical and if necessary violent class revolution to overthrow the robbers and at the same time to preserve by all means possible

1 Orwell and Angus (eds) 1970, pp. 387–8.