Mandate

This volume, along with the later volume WAGING PEACE, comprise President Dwight Eisenhower's Presidential memoirs. It does appear to be written by committee much more than his CRUSADE IN EUROPE, which describes his military activities during World War II and is rightly a classic. Yet is offers an invaluable perspective of this very misunderstood time in American history from the vantage point of the Oval Office. Rather than the bland or conformist image many of us have, this was actually a very eventful period, covering the Korean War, the heating up of the Cold War, the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy and the landmark school segregation decisions of the United States Supremwe Court.

Melby was a worker in the American Embassy in China during the three year Chinese Civil War. He gives his perspective along with interesting stories about who lost China. Who lost China?
Well, the Generalissimo and the Kuomintang lost China. Marshall and the U.S. Ambassador Dr. Stuart tried to get the Nationalists and Communists to form a coalition government, but instead both sides were hell bent on trying to beat the other by military means. One senses a disgust by Melby for the corrupt Nationalist
government and a certain trust in the Communists. However history will prove him wrong because of the subsequent millions of deaths caused by Mao and his henchmen. The Kuomintang were certainly corrupt and stupid, but history will record them as less brutal than the Communists.
This is a hard book to read. The reader has to have a certain knowledge of Chinese events and persons in order to understand this narrative. However one will understand why no Americans lost China, it was the Nationalists who defeated themselves. Chiang Kai Shek does not come off as a trustworthy person, and he ultimately deserves the responsibility for losing his country to the Communists.

There is no doubt that, according to even the loosest definitions of socialism in Marx's writings, the so-called "Communist" countries of the USSR (and its satellites), China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Yugoslavia would never qualify as socialist.

The working classes in these countries had no control over the running of society and over how the resources of these countries were to be used. Rather, as in market capitalist nations, the working classes of these countries were forced to sell their labour power to a ruling class which allocated resources to means of production rather than consumer goods. There was no attempt to do the critical job Marx required of socialists: to overthrow the ruling classes of the industrialised nations to divert resources from capital accumulation to mass consumption. The bureaucracies of the USSR and its satellites, China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Yugoslavia all accumulated vast wealth and privileges, and thus were state capitalist ruling classes.

However, very little of this is made explicit by Harris in "The Mandate Of Heaven". He never uses a very strong Marxist analysis to understand the decisions made by the Chinese ruling class during such periods as the Great Leap Forward and the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Instead, we see a very vague study of Chinese history over many centuries in an effort to see Mao as the successor to the many dynasties into which pre-1911 Chinese history was divided. Whilst Harris is certainly right that the decisions were never made by mass workers' organisations - indeed China has never had mass workers' organisations - he never mentions this fact in a clear way. The contrast with Tony Cliff's easily read "State Capitalism In Russia" is amazing.

Whilst there is some focus on those aspects of Chinese society that led many in the 1960s to see Mao's state capitalist police state as a model for socialism (communes, the so-called Great proletarian Cultural Revolution) none of "The Mandate Of Heaven" is likely to convince a sceptic of the reality that China has never been socialist. Rather, it will confuse people as to the nature of Mao's police state.

Basically, a very poor read. Read some Tony Cliff or International Socialist Review instead.