Political Economy of the Great Leap Forward

Permanent Revolution and State Feudal Communes

By Satya J. Gabriel

A bird flies above
A wooden man-made figure
Of a bird flying.

The Great Leap Forward was an extraordinarily creative intervention in Chinese economic development. It is one of those "moments" in Chinese history that is testament to Mao Zedong's willingness to experiment, as well as his political savvy in seizing control of the apparatuses of government out of the hands of his intellectual and political adversaries within the Communist Party of China (CPC). Given that more conservative leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, described Mao's approach as "adventurism" and were, in general, not predisposed to experimentation (preferring, instead, to copy Stalinist industrialization, including the adoption of similar production technology and social arrangements as were found in the "western" capitalist economies --- what the leftists called "pulling the cart without watching the road") it is no mean feat that the Great Leap Forward could have been approved and adopted as policy. None of this is to be taken as indication of the Great Leap Forward's success, quite the contrary. The policy seems to have been an unmitigated disaster, generating a "crisis" in Chinese society that would ultimately be resolved in ways unfavourable to Mao's political, economic, and cultural vision of a future China. However, this doesn't change the fact that the policy was grounded in a logical theory of economic development (albeit not an orthodox version of Marxian theory --- Mao's theoretical arguments for the Great Leap Forward were, in fact, contrary to more conventional versions of Marxian theory, particularly the Stalinist interpretation of Marxian theory) and represented an unambiguous social invention --- an invention that was tested on a grand scale. Thus, when the invention proved faulty, the failure was similarly on a grand scale.

The failure of the Great Leap Forward was, no doubt, humiliating for Mao and the Left. But just as Mao had used the failure of the five-year plans as a weapon to beat the party conservatives into submission, the Right now used the Great Leap Forward to push back the Left and regain prominence within the Party. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and other more conservative members of the Party moved into positions of greater authority and influence and the Great Leap Forward --- which now appeared more like a Great Fall Downward --- was terminated.

Despite the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the later failure of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (henceforth referred to simply as the Cultural Revolution), the Maoist narrative of "permanent revolution," as embodied in the ideas of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, did not fail. It would be correct to say that the particular politics and economics of these two social movements has been largely discredited by mainstream social science and the current political orthodoxy in China, but not the ontological foundation for them: the Maoist narrative of the ongoing struggle within the social formation to destroy traditional (conservative) institutions, ways of thinking (consciousness), and social processes, such that a radically new set of institutions, ways of thinking, and social processes can be advanced remains a potent intellectual force in China.

Edited excerpt from http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/economics/china-essays/4.html