will fail, because it must work for the masses and it can only solve our
problems with the support of the masses.*®

Prior to 1956 the Chinese carried on a typically bureaucratic
form of management, one-man management. The Eighth
Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1956 formally
abolished this type of leadership and instituted instead collective
leadership by party committees — ‘collective leadership with in-
dividual responsibility’. The party was given the prerogative of
policy-making and the management of enterprises was placed
directly under party committees in the enterprises. This made
‘politics take command’; but not for long. With the end of the
Great Leap Forward in 1961, China reverberated to one-man
management again with the party committees concentrating on
‘ideological’ matters. This was called the ‘independent operational
authority’. 44

This of course was at a time when ideological leadership
generally was slackening. Elitism was growing daily, children of
top bureaucrats — children who were specifically being trained to
take over the management of institutions. In short, this was part
of the mess that was to call for ‘The Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution' that swept China from 1966, eliminating all those
who followed ‘the capitalist road’ together with the institutions
that helped such tendencies. With the Cultural Revolution there
was more intensive workers’ participation in industries; the direc-
ting body in an industry or institution became the ‘revolutionary
committee’ which consists of workers’ delegates, the officials, and
the army in place of the party whose structure was wrecked in the
course of the revolution.

It is obvious, therefore, that the participation of workers in the
socialist societies still leaves much to be desired. The historical
conditions in which the first socialist revolution occurred, the low
level of the productive forces in some of the socialist countries,
various specific characteristics of the political systems in some of
these countries — all these have contributed to the difficulties in
instituting workers’ control of organisations. For socialists,
therefore, this is a field for more enquiry, and such enquiry is in
fact very urgent since essentially it is to show the manner in which
the class struggle has to be waged and developed in the post-
capitalist phase.

199