masses.
to take.
The popular struggle will most probably first erupt among the millions of intellectual youth despatched into the countryside. Their demands are likely to centre on issues such as reforms in the standard of living', "demands for democracy, and opposition to bureaucratic arbitrariness and privilege'.
Hoping to exploit popular dissatisTacton in meir own tacuonar interests, it is quite likely that the rival groupings within the Communist Party leadership will make gestures of sympathy and support for the aspirations of the . masses, encouraging and calling for the granting of those demands nost to their looking.
For example, the 'Maoists' will probably put the emphasis on "equality and opposition to bureaucratic privilege', while the 'non-Maoists' will encourage the calls for. democracy and socialist legality and 'opposition to bureaucratic dictatorship'. They may even go so far as to bring sections of the masses into the streets in pursuit of unese demanas. In last week's Red Weekly SHAN SHUANG, veteran revolutionary living outside China, wrote that Mao's death 'could well create an expectancy of change in the psychology of the Chinese The effect of this will be to increase popular dissatisfaction and heighten struggle'. Here he explains the forms this is likely of ideological tempering and revolutionary struggle, and is unlikely to become the personal property of any one ambitious individual. Taiwan's dream of winning a mainland general to their side is out-dated wishful thinking.
La the popular crucial question.
In the historic sense the crucial question concerns the prospects for the forces of Trotskyism and the Fourth International in China, and accepting the likely train of events the prospects can only be favourable. The urgent need for an internationalist strategic line and the demand for proletarian democracy are objectively posed by events. It is therefore very likely that long-suppressed ideas of Trotskyism will re-emerge in China, and that genuine leftists will play an active role in future struggles.
In order to meet this historical need, they must first of all make their voice heard among the broad worker and peasant masses. They must concretely expose the reactionary theory of socialism in one country' and the voluntarist and adventurist schemas of the Maoist faction, oppose its essentially ultra-rightist policy of 'all round dietatorship', and criticise its alliance with reactionary foreign powers. At the same time, they should fight to transform the half-hearted campaigns against privilege and corruption into a genuine revolutionary movement against the bureaucracy as a whole.
As for the 'non-Maoist' camp in the CCP leadership, the forces of a resur gent Chinese Trotskyist movement would expose its passive adaptation to objective difficulties, oppose its rightist policy of deliberately furthering the growth of a privileged stratum, and criticise its tendency towards slavish submission either to US imperialism or to the Soviet Union.