Welcome to episode 124 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.

Last episode, we began our textual analysis of the Resolution of the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the Fourth Red Army, known as the Gutian Resolution for short.

There’s one additional thing on top of what I said last episode that I would like to mention about the Gutian Conference and its significance in Chinese history. While I usually prefer to emphasize the ruptures between Maoist China and China today, it’s important to remember that the legitimacy of today’s government in the People’s Republic of China is derived from the victory of the Chinese Revolution, and that major nodal points in the revolutionary process continue to have resonance there. In November 2014, Xi Jinping held a conference in Gutian to mark what was then the soon upcoming 85th anniversary of the Gutian Conference. And the theme of Xi Jinping’s 2014 conference was the importance of party control over the army, and the importance of political work within the People’s Liberation Army. Then this past June, of 2024, Xi held a similar conference in Yan’an, again, in order to mark the then-upcoming 95th anniversary of the Gutian Conference. So, while Xi Jinping’s interpretation of the relevance of the Gutian Conference is probably pretty different than how Mao would interpret its relevance if he were alive today, it’s interesting to note the way in which Gutian is invoked in China by Xi Jinping today.

OK, let’s jump back into our analysis of the Resolution’s text.

We left off after discussing the section on ultrademocracy, so let’s pick up by reading the section about “Lack of Organizational Consciousness:”

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What Mao articulates here, about the minority submitting to the majority and carrying out decisions that they might have voted against and not bringing up the matter again until another meeting is convened, is a pretty traditional interpretation of democratic centralist organizational principles. Ok, continuing with the text:

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What stands out to me from these parts of the Resolution dealing with “criticism made without regard to the organization” and “special treatment of some party members” is that, despite the high level at which the Chinese Communist Party was operating in the sense of conquering territory and setting up liberated zones run by people’s governments and carrying out land reform, that actually the Communist Party had many of the same problems that much smaller and less significant revolutionary organizations have anywhere else in the world, problems of organizational discipline, gossip and criticism outside of proper channels, poor and uneven participation in meetings, failure of responsible people to present their work for discussion to group meetings and having party members who set themselves above the basic rules and expectations that the party had for its members. On some level, Mao was dealing here with the sorts of problems that any local committee of progressives or revolutionaries might be experiencing around the corner from wherever you are today.

Moving on with the text:

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This section on ‘absolute egalitarianism’ is great because of these details that Mao gives about how this problem manifested itself, but I don’t have a lot to add to it. This next section is titled ‘Idealist views,’ and Mao’s terminology here may require a little clearing up. In the Selected Works the section heading is changed to ‘On Subjectivism.’ Here ‘subjectivism,’ or alternately ‘being subjective,’ means getting all caught up in one’s personal standpoint or even personal feelings, and not grasping the whole situation and proceeding, or at least trying to proceed, from an all-sided and objective analysis of things. So, with that bit of a clarifying introduction, I think you can tell what Mao means in this next section:

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Among other things here, I find it very interesting that Mao says that the problem of people evading the discussion of important political topics by discussing technical details has its roots in a fear of facing political criticism. So, if you’ve ever been in a meeting that was focused on process questions at the expense of dealing with the important matters at hand, you are not alone, the Fourth Red Army did it too.

Alright, next section:

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So, Mao describes here a range of ways in which individualism manifests itself in the Communist Party.

The most interesting, and for me kind of surprising, of the ways in which individualism manifests itself that he mentions is what he calls the ‘employee mentality.’ The employee mentality is kind of the flip side of commandism, and it’s a pretty common problem in organizations where most of the initiative is taken at higher organizational levels, and people down at lower levels are used to the idea of just being given tasks to carry out and come to realize that no one above them has much interest in their input. Mao takes the position here that this sort of lack of initiative represents a kind of individualism in the sense that people with the employee mentality feel disconnected from the collective struggle of the masses, and because of that they don’t demonstrate the enthusiasm and initiative that they should.

Mao notes a couple paragraphs later how “improper handling of affairs, assignment of work or enforcement of discipline by the Party and the army” can lead to party members becoming passive, but it’s very interesting to me how he puts the onus of overcoming the employee mentality on the person with that mentality themselves. On some fundamental level, I think Mao is saying, despite whatever errors may be made at higher levels in the Party above the person displaying the ‘employee mentality,’ it is up to that person to have largeness of mind and understand how they are part of a larger collective struggle and to take up their full role as part of that collectivity and to find the personal resources to muster enthusiasm and initiative in the struggle, despite whatever commandist nonsense or other difficulties might be coming down on their shoulders from up above.

Personally, I would have liked Mao to have expanded on this point, because it’s both a widespread and a well-disguised form of individualism. Also, in a context where people have to do a lot of following of orders, such as in warfare like the Fourth Red Army was engaged in, it seems like it would be especially difficult to distinguish between an appropriate level of following orders and falling into having an ‘employee mentality.’ Well, maybe we’ll see Mao clarify some of that somewhere else at a later date.

In any case, Mao’s discussion of the ‘employee mentality’ as an ideological problem is an early example of one of the important ways in which Mao’s conception of socialism and the proper conduct of revolutionaries is at odds with many other Communist leaders. There is a powerful current, dominant in some times and places, within international communism associated with viewing individual cadres as cogs in a machine rather than as people who should combine individual initiative with participation in the larger collective project of revolutionary change. Later on, Mao will be more explicit in actually calling out and attacking other leaders who don’t share his view. For example, during the Cultural Revolution (which involved Mao calling on people to break with the ‘employee mentality’ on a society-wide scale), one of the major focuses of Maoist criticism of Liu Shaoqi was that he promoted the idea that communists should be docile tools of the Party.

OK, moving on with the Resolution:

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We actually read part of this section of the Resolution and discussed the roving rebel mentality back in episode 114, so let’s not spend too much time on it here. But just as a refresher on that topic, one important thing to keep in mind here is that this section of the document is aimed as much above Mao in the party hierarchy as below him. You might recall that on May 25, 1928, the Central Committee had issued a directive titled “Outline of Military Work.” This directive ordered the Red Army to reorganize itself according to the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom pattern of organization.” Later, in his February 7, 1929, letter, Zhou Enlai rescinded that order and said that “you must never follow the ways of the army of the Taiping Rebellion.” In the meantime, Mao had not done that anyways, but what was going on was that Li Lisan and Zhou Enlai had different ideas about what the Red Army should be doing, and as we discussed back in episode 114, Li Lisan liked this formulation about modeling the Red Army after the army of the Taipings because he saw it as a way of fighting that was matched to China’s particular conditions. Clearly Mao disagreed (and, in fact, Li Lisan’s understanding of how the Taipings were organized more reflected his ideologized fantasy about how they were organized than how they were actually organized in any case.) By the way, we discussed the Taiping Revolution all the way back in episodes 3 and 4.

Alright, the final section of the first part of the Resolution, on “Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party” is a short one on “The Remnants of Adventurism.”

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OK, here too, Mao is aiming both above and below him with his criticism of ‘adventurism.’

As you may recall, blind actionism is the term that was used for Qu Qiubai’s policies of trying to foment armed revolt wherever and whenever possible, regardless of the objective conditions or the possibility for success. In episodes 56 and 73 we talked about this policy.

On the burning of houses in cities and the negative effect that had on the Communists’ efforts at winning support from people whose houses got burned down, the South Hunan Uprising is the big example of that, which we discussed in episodes 81 and 82, although Mao also waged a continual struggle to keep his own troops from doing too much unnecessary destroying of private property while he was leading them in the Jinggangshan base area days, as we discussed in episode 92 for example.

Some historians have also seen this section of the Resolution as directed against Li Lisan, who will soon (but had not yet) come to dominate the Party Center and who will push the Red Army to attack cities that it had no prospect of holding on to. That may well be the case, although at this point Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan were still contesting the leadership of the Party in Shanghai and none of the orders to attack cities that Li Lisan would later issue had come down the pipeline from the Party Center yet. It is possible, though, that Mao had some indication that this is the direction that Li Lisan would go if he won out over Zhou Enlai. Certainly, Chen Yi may have learned that Li Lisan leaned in that direction during the time he had spent in Shanghai before returning to Fujian with the September Instruction (as we discussed in episode 120).

Alright, that concludes the first part of the Resolution, the part titled “The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Nonproletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party.” Next episode, we’ll continue our analysis of the Resolution.

Until then, be well.