A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Endorsement of the landing had been one of the first actions of new US President John F Kennedy. He became a cult figure for many liberals after his assassination in 1962. But he showed no sign of liberalism in his dealings with Cuba. He and his brother Robert developed a deep personal enmity towards Castro, and gave the go-ahead for the CIA to plot with Mafia figures against the Cuban leader’s life – including such ludicrous schemes as the use of exploding cigars! They also prepared contingency plans for a US-backed invasion of the island. In 1962 their manoeuvres led to a direct confrontation with Russia.

  For many people who lived through it, the week of 20–27 October 1962 was the most frightening of their lives – the closest the Cold War came to turning into a nuclear war. US warships had surrounded Cuba, intent on using force to stop any Soviet vessels reaching it. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles and 1,400 bombers were on alert. Scores of bombers remained continuously in the air, each armed with several nuclear weapons and ready to move to targets in the USSR the moment the order came. And in Florida, just 60 miles from Cuba, the US assembled the largest invasion force since the Second World War – 100,000 troops, 90 ships, 68 squadrons of aircraft and eight aircraft carriers.

  Kennedy’s government had learned that the USSR under Khrushchev was secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. The US could already hit Russian cities from its bases in western Europe and Turkey. The Cuban missiles would provide Russia with the same capacity to hit US cities. Castro and Che Guevara welcomed the missiles, assuming they would be a deterrent against a US attack on Cuba. Undoubtedly this was mistaken, since there was little likelihood of Russia risking the destruction of its own cities in a nuclear exchange merely to please the Cubans.

  The US government, however, was prepared to risk nuclear war in order to get the missiles removed. How close the world came to nuclear war was later revealed by the president’s brother, Robert Kennedy. ‘We all agreed, if the Russians were prepared to go to war over Cuba, they were prepared to go to nuclear war and we might as well have the showdown then as six months later.’ Transcripts of the US presidential discussions show the government of the world’s greatest power was indeed prepared to risk nuclear war with Russia. 289 They also show the Kennedy obsession with Cuba was connected to a wider issue – the fear of an erosion of US global hegemony.

  War was only avoided because Khrushchev backed down at the last minute and agreed to withdraw the missiles – a decision which he only narrowly carried in the Politburo and which antagonised the Cuban leaders. In effect, the Russian leadership decided it could not challenge the existing partition of the world between itself and US imperialism – just as the US had not challenged that partition at the time of the Hungarian Revolution. This had important implications in the years which followed. Both sides continued to accumulate enormous quantities of nuclear weapons. But they did so on the basis of what they called ‘détente’ – an agreement not to trample too much on each other’s toes. This continued right through to 1980, despite huge upheavals in both camps in the interim.

  The Cuban leaders were distraught at Russia’s decision to withdraw the missiles. They had been used as a bargaining chip, and there was little they could do about it, since they were dependent on Russian economic support. What that dependency meant at home was shown by a scaling down of plans for industrialisation and a return to the pre-revolutionary reliance on sugar exports. ‘Diversification of agriculture’, the message of the early years of the revolution, was replaced by a call for a record sugar harvest. Internationally there was a brief attempt to break out of the constraints imposed by Russian policy. The Cuban leaders arranged ‘Organisations of Latin American Solidarity’ and ‘Tricontinental’ conferences at which they made half-concealed criticisms of the policies Russia was imposing on Third World Communist parties and liberation movements. Che Guevara eventually left Cuba to attempt to put these criticisms into practice through guerrilla struggle in Congo-Zaire and Bolivia. But neither the criticisms nor Che Guevara’s practice were based on a concrete assessment of the class forces in a particular situation. Instead Guevara attempted to impose the model of revolutionary struggle which had been successful in the very special circumstances of Cuba. The Congo intervention was a miserable failure and the Bolivian action stumbled from disaster to disaster until Che was killed – shot after capture by a CIA agent. By 1968 Castro and the Cuban government were back supporting the Russian approach.

  The Vietnam War

  In the early 1960s the US government saw Vietnam as just one place among many where it was using ‘advisers’ to organise military actions against opposition forces. ‘We have 30 Vietnams’, Robert Kennedy told a journalist. 290 On the face of it he had reason to be confident. A US government programme designed to stabilise Latin America, ‘The Alliance for Progress’, seemed to have been successful in stopping any repetition of the Cuban Revolution, and guerrilla movements in Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia and elsewhere were defeated. In the mid-1960s the timely deployment of US troops had stopped the advance of Congolese rebels against the capital of the US’s client dictator Mobutu and thwarted an attempt at a popular rising in the Dominican Republic. In Indonesia there was not even the need for US troops. The CIA worked with General Suharto, who used the excuse of an abortive putsch by left-wing generals to murder half a million people, destroy the most powerful Communist Party in the Third World, and replace the populist independence leader Sukarno.

  But Robert Kennedy’s boast about Vietnam proved misplaced. The country had been partitioned at the time of the settlement of the Korean War in 1954. France’s attempt to hold the country as a colony had been dealt a devastating blow when the Vietminh liberation movement inflicted a major defeat on it at Dien Bien Phu. But the Vietminh had been persuaded by Russia and China to take control of only the Northern half of the country, leaving the Vietnamese groups which had backed France to run the South pending elections for the country as a whole. The US, which had been funding most of the French war effort, now sponsored the government that ran the South and helped to ensure the elections never took place.

  There was increasing repression directed against any opposition in the South. Buddhist monks protested by setting fire to themselves, and former Vietminh fighters fled to the countryside and took up arms in self-defence. Soon there was widespread guerrilla warfare, continual unrest in the towns, and a government whose survival depended on increasing amounts of US support. The 400 ‘advisers’ when Kennedy took over the presidency had risen to 18,000 by the time of his assassination. In 1965 marines landed at Danang naval base, and there were 33,500 US troops in the country within a month, with 210,000 by the end of the year. Meanwhile the US air force waged the biggest bombing campaign in history, pounding away at both the North and South, day after day, week after week, year after year, in the belief that it could force the liberation forces to abandon the struggle.

  The Vietnam War was not like the war in Korea, a struggle waged by regular armies which the rulers of the North could call off at any time. It had grown out of spontaneous struggles against a repressive regime, and the leaders of North Vietnam could not turn their back on these without doing enormous damage to their prestige as the pioneers of the struggle for national independence.

  The US was trapped in a war of attrition from which there was no easy way out. It could establish a forward base at Khe Sanh near the partition line with the North and, at great cost, stop the liberation forces taking it. But it could not use the base to subdue the surrounding countryside, and eventually had to abandon it. It could maintain control of the towns, but it could not avoid being almost overrun by a sudden offensive by the liberation forces at Tet, the Vietnamese new year, early in 1968. It could not stop the escalating cost of the Vietnam War increasing its total military outlay by 30 per cent and causing US big business to protest. Finally, it could not prevent the war causing huge fissures to open in US society as young people rebelled against the horror of war
and being conscripted to fight.

  China: from the Great Leap Forward to the market

  China’s official image in the 1950s and early 1960s was of a land of smiling peasants and overjoyed workers, joint leader of the Communist world with the USSR, steadily moving towards a socialism of peace and plenty. It was an image carried in thousands of left-wing papers across the world.

  The US had its own rival image of China. It was of the biggest Red Menace of them all, a land of organised hate, a society in which hundreds of millions toiled mindlessly at the command of those at the top, even closer to the nightmare world of George Orwell’s 1984 than Russia. This image played a powerful role in US propaganda in support of the war in Vietnam. The US claimed that China was intent upon expanding its influence south and destroying freedom. If it succeeded in Vietnam the other countries of south east Asia would be next, falling like ‘dominoes’ until nowhere in the ‘free world’ was safe.

  Neither image accorded with the realities of life for the fifth or more of the world’s people who lived in China. US propaganda ignored the growing schism between Russia and China from at least the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s Russia had cut off aid and withdrawn thousands of advisers from China, and the two countries were denouncing each other’s policies at international meetings.

  Official Chinese propaganda glossed over the class divisions in the country and the extreme hardship in which most of its people lived. On taking control of China’s great cities in 1949 the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army had followed a policy of uniting all classes, including a section of capitalists, behind a programme aimed at economic reconstruction. In the early 1950s this gave way to a programme of industrialisation, loosely modelled on that pursued by Stalin in Russia and likewise aimed at accomplishing what capitalism had done in the West. Many industries had been state-owned under the Kuomintang regime or been confiscated from their former Japanese owners. The state now took over most of the rest, but paid their old owners fixed dividends (so there were still millionaires in ‘Red’ China). The apparatus of state control was staffed, in the main, by members of the educated middle classes, with most of the officials of the Kuomintang period left in place.There was land reform in regions dominated by landlords, but the better-off peasants were left untouched. The condition of the mass of workers remained much as before.

  These measures produced considerable economic growth – 12 per cent a year according to official figures for the years 1954–57. But this did not get anywhere near the official aim of catching up with the advanced industrial countries, and a section of the Chinese leadership around Mao Zedong began to fear that unless desperate steps were taken China would subside into being one more stagnating Third World country. In 1958, against the opposition of other leaders such as the president Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, they launched a ‘Great Leap Forward’ aimed at ultra-rapid industrialisation.

  Heavy industry was to be made to grow much faster than before by every district setting out to make its own iron and steel. Millions of new industrial workers were to be fed by removing individual plots from the peasants and forcing people into huge ‘People’s Communes’. In 1958 and 1959 it seemed the ‘leap’ was being made successfully. The official industrial growth rate was almost 30 per cent a year, and across the world enthusiasts for Chinese Communism hailed the ‘communes’ as the dawn of a new era. In 1960 reality struck home. China did not have the technical equipment to make the communes viable, and merely herding the peasants together could not overcome centuries-old traditions which set one family against another. Grain output dropped catastrophically and many millions died in famines. The new locally based industries were of a low technical level, extremely inefficient and damaged the overall economy by using up resources. The Great Leap Forward turned into a disaster for which the mass of people paid a terrible price. Willpower alone could not overcome centuries of stagnation and the de-industrialisation caused by imperialism.

  The leadership reacted by shunting Mao away from the levers of power and returning to a more measured approach towards industrialisation. But this policy was hardly a great success. Industrial output was lower in 1965 than in 1960. While the labour force grew by 15 million a year, the number of new jobs grew by only half a million, and the 23 million college graduates found it hard to find meaningful employment. 291

  As the problems accumulated, the group in the leadership around Mao Zedong once more felt that only urgent action could break the impasse. This time they believed they had found an agency to carry it through – the vast numbers of young people whose hopes were frustrated. In 1966 Mao and a coterie of supporters, including his wife Jiang Qing and defence minister Lin Biao, proclaimed the ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.

  China, they said, was being held back by the ‘culture’ of those running the structures of the party and the country. These people had become soft and lazy. Such tendencies had already led Russia ‘down the capitalist road’ of de-Stalinisation, and they could drag China back to its old ‘Confucian’ ways. It was the task of youth to stop this by mass criticism of those obstructing Mao’s policies. The Mao group shut down all education institutions for six months and encouraged 11 million college and high school students to carry the criticism from one region to another on free rail transport.

  The ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was in no sense proletarian and in no sense a revolution. The workers were expected to keep working while the students staged mass rallies and travelled the country. Indeed, part of the message of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was that workers should abandon ‘capitalistic’ worries like bonus rates and health and safety issues, since these were ‘economistic’, and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was sufficient motivation for anyone. At the same time the students were instructed not to interfere with the functioning of the military and police apparatus. This was a ‘revolution’ intended to avoid turning the state upside down!

  The student ‘Red Guards’ were encouraged to unleash their frustrations not at institutions, but against individuals who were deemed to have shown insufficient revolutionary zeal. At the top this meant targeting those who had disagreed with Mao at the time of the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others were forced from office. At the local level it meant scapegoating low-level figures of minimal authority who were thought somehow to embody ‘old ways’ – schoolteachers, writers, journalists, clerks or actors. The atmosphere of irrational persecution is conveyed vividly in the memoirs of former ‘Red Guard’ Jung Chang, in Wild Swans , in scenes in the film Farewell, My Concubine about an Beijing opera performer and victim of the Cultural Revolution, and in the novel about a group of intellectuals, Stones of the Wall , by Dai Houying.

  But the Cultural Revolution was not just an irrational outburst. The frustrations which Mao exploited were real enough. And, because of this, Mao could not keep control of the movement he had initiated. Rival ‘Red Guard’ and ‘Red Rebel’ groups emerged in many towns and many institutions. Some were manipulated by local state and party apparatuses. But others began to attract young workers, to raise questions affecting the lives of the mass of people and, in Shanghai, to get involved in major strikes.

  Mao now tried to stop the movement he had initiated only months before, and called upon Lin Biao’s army to restore order in each locality. It was a move which prompted some of the students to turn against the whole social system. A group in Hunan denounced ‘the rule of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie’. Others made criticisms which laid the ground for the ‘democracy wall’ movement of the 1970s. 292 Decisive action by the army brought the ‘Red Guard’ movement to an end, aided by the faith the mass of students still had in Mao himself. Those who had begun to express their feelings through the movement, in however distorted a way, now paid a hard price. Millions were forcibly removed from the cities to undertake backbreaking work in remote rural areas – one estimate suggests one in ten of Shanghai’s population were sent out of the city. 293

  However, th
e end of mass participation in the Cultural Revolution was not the end of the turmoil in China. In 1970 Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, suddenly fled the country for Russia amid talk of a failed coup, only for his aircraft to crash close to the Soviet border. The early part of the 1970s saw central power concentrated in the hands of Zhou Enlai, who brought back the previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping as his designated heir. Mao’s wife and three collaborators (the ‘Gang of Four’) briefly regained control in 1974, purging Deng again and reverting to the language of the Cultural Revolution. Huge demonstrations to commemorate the death of Zhou Enlai showed how little support they had, and they were overthrown and imprisoned after Mao died in 1976.

  Much of the left around the world had enthused at the Cultural Revolution. In many countries opponents of the US war in Vietnam carried portraits of Mao Zedong as well as the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. The trite sayings in the Little Red Book of ‘Mao’s thoughts’ were presented as a guide to socialist activity. Yet in 1972, as more US bombers than ever before hit targets in Vietnam, Mao greeted US President Nixon in Beijing, and by 1977, under Deng, China was beginning to embrace the market more furiously than Russia under Stalin’s successors.

  The Western media saw such twists and turns as a result of wild irrationality. By the late 1970s many of those on the left who had identified with Maoism in the 1960s agreed, and turned their backs on socialism. In France a whole school of ex-Maoist ‘New Philosophers’ emerged, who taught that revolution automatically leads to tyranny and that the revolutionary left is as bad as the fascist right. Yet there is a simple, rational explanation for the apparently irrational course of Chinese history over a quarter of a century. China simply did not have the internal resources to pursue the Stalinist path of forced industrialisation successfully, however much its rulers starved the peasants and squeezed the workers. But there were no other easy options after a century of imperialist plundering. Unable to find rational solutions, the country’s rulers were tempted by irrational ones.