Mao and Stalin’s Class Struggle under Socialism

• In Event: From Honeymoon to Conflict: Reassessing the Changing Relationship between the Soviet Union and China after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956

Abstract

In his secret speech of February 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s “mass repressions” between 1935 and 1938 and linked Stalin’s actions to his ideas concerning “the intensification of class struggle as socialism advances.” Mao supported Khrushchev’s position until September 1957, but after the Lushan Conference in 1959, Mao reinstated Stalin’s ideas and applied them until the end of his life. In this paper, I examine the process by which Mao first rejected and then embraced Stalin’s ideas about the intensification of class struggle as socialism advances. I also describe the way in which Mao rejected other later ideas of Stalin’s about the disappearance of classes and class struggle after the Soviet Union had achieved socialism in 1936 in order to fortify Stalin’s earlier ideas.
I base my study on interviews I conducted with Chinese scholars and party researchers and my readings of documentary materials. I argue that Mao’s changing positon after 1959 was rooted in his effort to achieve two objectives: first, to justify his use of class struggle as an ideological weapon to fight against those who disagreed with him or, he believed, posed a threat to his authority; and second, to establish himself as a theorist who had developed and enriched Marxism, especially in the area of class struggle under socialism. In 1960, with Lin Biao’s help, Mao Zedong-thought was defined as the “current form of Marxism” and as an ideology of class struggle.

Author

• Hua-yu Li, Oregon State University